Dagger animations are awful

They are so incredibly bland and uninspired. Virtually all of them resemble a typical dagger autoattack, particularly the second skill is just a thief's autoattack swipe.

Then we have most of the soul beast skills that don't even have proper animations. A bite is for some reason a palm strike when you could have used a spirit animal's bite animation. So many of these pet skills while merged are practically invisible.

If it weren't for the dagger buffs, most of the soulbeast traitline outside oppressive superiority is terrible in PvE. The stances are the main visual gain of the spec, and we can't even use them in PvE because they are so dreadfully weak or downright redundant with other classes' superior boon stacking mechanics.

I can't believe our elite is a flat out inferior version of Kalla's Soulcleave, except it doesn't apply to the group without sacrificing a grandmaster trait at 50% effectiveness (4 pitiful seconds for the elite every 60 seconds), lasts only 8 seconds every 1 minute, and doesn't even heal.

It's kind of incredible how some classes like the guardian can get useful, globally applicable utilities that are desirable in every game mode with pretty animations and equally competitive damage output, while soulbeast is basically the core condi ranger but with a dagger and a crappy traitline.

I agree. Soulbeast is pretty disappointing.

The Best Mode skills really should have spirit animal animations accompany them. Like jaws snapping and paws swiping.

dont like soulbeast either

At least for the core game they had the ambition to give the ranger melee abilities some love.Maul your target like a bear,Roll around around your target and strike it like a serpentDart after your target like a Shark... must not crack a silly tentacle reference for spear 5 ...

and the elite spec that brings the ranger so close to their pet to actually merge with it - well we couldn't be bothered to give the dagger or any of the actual attacks a proper animal-esque animation.(except for bird swoop ... which is a carbon copy of the greatsword swoop - just a massively weaker and horribly bugged version ... but with a birdy on top of it :p )