SoulBeast Pew-Pew is out of hand

Gain Quickness, press button, kill most players from a ridiculous range often from a wall. With 3500 toughness and 18k health, you might survive. Even dodging it leaves a player one 5k auto shot away from death. It is the least skilled way to get easy kills. Even if something closes the distance, invuln, Swoop twice, enter gate. Condi attacks, laughable.

Bunker Scrapper is a close second. Watching a Scrapper soak up 3+ players wailing on it with great stealth, condi immunity and two rocket jumps is laughably broken in small scale. Worse it requires near zero skill to play. It can easily be played by my beagle and she routinely stops to lick her privates.

Let the "L2P" posts commence.

You are talking about roaming I think? Or perhaps the SB you notice now are just from the many that like the no downstate event? Finally they can be somewhat useful against a zerg but who would mind that?

You have it right man, 2.9k armor and 20k health I just got dropped by a slb while on a mount.

I was dead before my body hit the ground, 0 counterplay other than don't go within 2k of a structure.

I've seen groups using them to pinsnipe too, that's especially fun to play against!

Calm down, it's only a few more days of them being slightly useful in/against squads, then they're back to their regularly scheduled worthlessness.

Yea, it's pretty lame. Been trying it out these two weeks. Though most of my kills are from people that are trying to run away, or think they can pass me on their mount. It's another story if they actually try to fight back.

Well, the big issue is Sic 'Em and everybody knows it.

The larger issue with that is that the rest of the specs and traits are in complete disarray with no appearant direction from the developers.

At this point, I would probably do something like this to them:

1. Remove Sic 'EM
2. Make their Signets Beastmastery- and thus Pet oriented, the passive/active mechanics suits that better. Some Soulbeast overlap.
3. Make the Shouts personal/group buff oriented, giving it some overlap with the Stances. Poke at Stances uptime balance, it's ridiculous.
4. Make glyphs more offensive-support oriented again to overlap with the Spirits to restore the Druids role and undo all recent nonsense.
5. This effectively also allows for both Druids and Soulbeasts to utilize weapons decently even if nothing will be as good as Sic 'EM or current stacks.
6. If that causes issues with PvE/raids, skill split, skill split and skill split. Druid had a decent budding role in 2016, Soulbeast can have a shout/stance role.
7. A damage-support role is not without reservations in a power-burst meta but I think it can be balanced out better with the usual suspects adressed.
8. A Beast could work with a more dedicated role somewhere in between Guardians and Warriors (incl. Reapers, Scrappers and Mesmers), boons, no heals.

Let me add stealth to their list of annoyances.

protection spam as well.

everything hits like a truck it's how anet balances their game. come on now.

we need everyone dying faster to lighten the hamster servers loads. cmon ppl its a team effort!

With 3500 toughness, rapid fire won't even crack 2K damage, let alone the auto attack. I used to play a Soulbeast but not much anymore. I often get pew-pew'd by them but never die to them, and I'm basically full marauders.

I have to wonder though.. how exactly does one die to a Soulbeast thats sacking you from range? If you just stand there then yes I imagine you'd die pretty quick. If you move towards them.. that's the worst possible thing for them to deal with. If you run away from them, you're out of range.. so what's the problem?

I don't even get the comments about the pin sniping.. see the first sentence. Assuming they're using unblockable which likely they are, a pin will be running at least semi-tanky; calling a 2K hit pin sniping is a bit far fetched. Especially with the amount of barrier and healing thrown at them which is way out of proportion.

What I have noticed though with this event.. waaaaaaaay more rangers have come out and hiding, and with that, their misconception on how the class operates. I've killed more rangers now than ever, because their predictability is what does them in.

If you're dying to soulbeast (if one makes the topic this week during the event), you've inevitably jumped on a class you are not familiar with, gone glass, and hoped to cash in with some cheesy gank tactics. If that's your goal, then yes, Soulbeasts will wreck you right quick, even the ones who don't have a clue what they're doing.

@hunkamania.7561 said:everything hits like a truck it's how anet balances their game. come on now.

Gotta have something that bypasses the mounts power creep.

Fight fire with fire, or powercreep with powercreep as they say.

Power creep wars 2

@DeadlySynz.3471 said:With 3500 toughness, rapid fire won't even crack 2K damage, let alone the auto attack. I used to play a Soulbeast but not much anymore. I often get pew-pew'd by them but never die to them, and I'm basically full marauders.The multipliers from Sic Em, the Quickness from pet swap, instant vuln stacking, Scholar, long range and all the other multipliers. Add on Hunt and the thing is unblockable as well as dropping a Fury. The attack is basically an easy one shot on anything that is in range and unable to reflect/evade the volley. If you have been playing this week I am amazed you haven't been cracked by the build. FC in T2 is running them in droves.

I have to wonder though.. how exactly does one die to a Soulbeast thats sacking you from range? If you just stand there then yes I imagine you'd die pretty quick. If you move towards them.. that's the worst possible thing for them to deal with. If you run away from them, you're out of range.. so what's the problem?I don't think you realize how fast a person drops from a stacked Rapid Fire volley. You have 1 maybe 1.5 seconds before your mount and you keel over dead from 1500 range. If you do manage to close, knockback. Dodge that and they double fly away into water or a door. Worst case they dump a stealth and they are gone.

Well look at the bright side, the berserker now outdoes both of them.

I play a mostly trailblazer scrapper and sure I'm tanky. But a pewpew soulbeast can still kill me in a single rapidfire if he sets it up right. However that takes a few seconds and allows me some time react. The berserker? BAM instakill. Yeah they can do that now. WvW is going to be fun the coming weeks.

Yeah it's a multiplier beast, and I come from playing revenant. But it's cooldowns for that kind of build are atrocious and is why I won't play it other than for the occasional idc times.

@Optimator.3589 said:Calm down, it's only a few more days of them being slightly useful in/against squads, then they're back to their regularly scheduled worthlessness.

No, their one shot shenanigans won't change at all. They've been obnoxious since release. They shouldn't have access to unblockable this easily, period.

All that needs to be done is to have the damage modifier from "Sic 'Em!" reduced either to 5% or 10%. Ranger in general has enough damage modifiers as is. It really does not need +40% on a single skill.

I assure you, coming from someone with years of Ranger experience, that without that skill the damage is significantly less. Don't neuter the spec just because people like to wall hug and meme with it. Focus on what's actually the problem.

Similar issue with Scrappers, it's primarily Bulwark Gyro that's the culprit. It provides an absurd amount of Barrier. As Jawgeous aptly put it, the "I win" button. Mind you, it doesn't exactly delete your character when they press it but, it's pretty well a full fight reset so I'd say the statement is valid.

I think in regards to Ranger, it struggles for a place in WvW and a sniper is where it fits. Because everything has so much damage mitigation in zergs, the only way it can have any impact is to pump out an equally ridiculous amount of damage. Unfortunately for anything that isn't a support spec or with their zerg getting that support, that means they'll blow up in 0.5 seconds. It's a hard thing to balance. If it's damage is reduced too much, Soulbeast becomes near meaningless to use and has no impact in large/medium scale combat anymore. If it's damage is left as is, it remains a braindead cheese spec that farms people who are equally as braindead.

I have no problem facing a SB. I have mained one at times and know what they do. I rarely if ever die to one. Usually the people who get one shot are those who don't pay attention or have always laughed at the ranger as being useless in WvW in general. They ignore the one-shot thieves(dead-eyes too), mirages, DH, and other one shot builds and complain about the class they think they should never die to. Now that the no-downstate week is upon them they want to whine about the almighty SB. Relax, the week will end and you can stop fearing the SB wrath. Only the good SBs will be the ones to be feared, just like EVERY OTHER CLASS that has a good build that destroys you quickly.

@"Heibi.4251" said:I have no problem facing a SB. I have mained one at times and know what they do. I rarely if ever die to one. Usually the people who get one shot are those who don't pay attention or have always laughed at the ranger as being useless in WvW in general. They ignore the one-shot thieves(dead-eyes too), mirages, DH, and other one shot builds and complain about the class they think they should never die to. Now that the no-downstate week is upon them they want to whine about the almighty SB. Relax, the week will end and you can stop fearing the SB wrath. Only the good SBs will be the ones to be feared, just like EVERY OTHER CLASS that has a good build that destroys you quickly.

"hurr hurr I am better than you so this problem isn't bad"

Haven't seen a single one shot thief in months. Mirages I can at least try to fight. DH is mostly about not running into their traps. All of these builds aren't 2k range spam, meaning I will 100% die or lose most of my health if I don't have my shield selected right then. It's low effort, that's literally the problem.

Well, and necros at the other side, we dodge twice, smile, wave and die. Should switch roles for a week, we should insta-kill others... sigh

Dead Eyes were a very serious problem before the recent stealth nerfs no doubt. Post nerfs they can be annoying and on rare occasions dangerous but they have to run glass to make it all work and even then they are mostly a plus one class. Ranger has none of those drawbacks and simply activates some basic skills and watches most players melt.

Typically they aren't so prevalent but this week makes them particularly problematic because they don't actually have to finish a player. I love no down state but it does highlight this particular build as being well outside even unbalanced meta builds.

Well that's the sole reason I brought a Ranger to WvW to begin with. I would be sad to lose my meme-toy. Then again I mostly play support roles in zergs lately so I guess I wouldn't be that distraught...

You guys are still complaining about that post mount? The mount has three dodges and the Ranger can't permastealth, so you have to be pretty unaware of your surroundings with the reaction time of your grandma, if you are always getting farmed by that. Even if you get dismounted, the initial attack consumes Opening Strike, which is the Ranger's stongest burst/surprise tool. This means you have to deal with the remaining duration of Sic em now. Every class has a bunch of invulns - use them, especially during this week. The only class that isn't best suited against those bursts would be necro, but it's one of the strongest/useful classes in WvW anyway. So having a few drawbacks does not hurt.

Soulbeast need a lil nerf +1.