Hi Systems Team, another bunch of fancey soulbeast ideas to the mix.

So as Systems team wants to balance the pewpew damage from afar with all the modifiers Soulbeast brings, i'll throw them here and anybodyt feel free to bash it, like it or comment about it.

My personal impression is Soulbeast had a couple of recent reworks before it was shipped, leaving the class broken with all those bugs and traitline which doesn't help the general theme of the class. I got the idea somehow the class was originaly designed as a power glass cannon but then at some point was changed to be a condi melee glass proffesion.I base this on the following:

• Traits empower direct damage.
• Wordly Impact was originaly a leap which moved the Soulbeast as a crazy jump as it was shown in one of the trailers. That's why it's still to this day categorized as a leap and not a blast.
• Dagger is a condi weapons with no utility and very short range in it's leap.

So my idea is to make soulbeast just that a melee dps class with some off-support ( as a seconday option) capabilities getting sustain from condition applications and offensive capabilities from easy access to poison as a measure to fight bulkier classes with more defense mechanims than the ranger.
General effects:

• All damage multipliers applied to the soulbeast while being in beastmode from traits and skills are only effective for targets in a radius of 600 units. This is to fix the pewpew from affar as a pay-off for having more potential damage and also incentivize the Soulbeast to not camp the pet to get advantage of the traits in ranged combat . The effects affected by this are as following:

  Predator's Onslaught, Moment of Clarity (Maul version too) , Farsighted, Remorseless, Sick'em, Furious Strength, Twice as Vicious

Traits:

• Rework the trait Fresh Reinforcement. That single trait is the cause of the boonbeast, before nerfing core skills and destroy core ranger and druid in the process better to fix that one. I would make that a moderate heal and removes movement imparing conditions when entering beastmode, as sustain option for a melee combat againts other more tankier proffesions.
• Unstoppable Union: This trait could provide the ranger with 1 unblockable attack in an internal ICD when gaining quickness or fury.
• Live Fast: to provide the boons at the time of the cast and not after, so the long winded F3 skills can be used more constintenly and with less preparations (as it reduces the cast time).
• Essence of Speed: Share that effect with up to 5 allies around the ranger in a similar fashion as other traits like spotter. Additiionaly provides short burst of superspeed when gaining quickness. ICD and all else stays, so it could be one use stack which pulses every 5 seconds. Visual aid of the effect it's also a needed QoL as it tells the soulbeast when the trait will be effective (for example you just gain resistance and have the effect available, you may want to extend that).
• Predator's Cunning: provide the heal for any damaging condition (bleed, torment, confusion, poison, burning) the soulbeast applies. This skill is to make the soulbeast able to compete with other bulkier classes in melee combat.
• Leader of pack: apply full duration to allies. remove the stacking effect of the stances. The radius is too short to make actual use of the staking effect. .
• Eternal bond: Provide some aditional short invulnerability as evading so the soulbeast is not downed instanly again and to get advantage of other traits in the core profession.
• Oppressive Superiority: Change the effect so the soulbeast apply poison to targets under the 50% hp no ICD. This play nice with the heals from the other trait, and actually makes honor to it's name applying presure to the target.

Dagger:

• AA coeficients brought to the level of the sword. Remove bleeding from the attacks, the idea is to apply pressure with the poison and vuln applications, as means to stay in combat and be able to fight in melee with the likes of rev, warrior or thief. The dagger goes to apply poison, vuln, posion and poison/vuln for the forth attack.
• Dagger#2 should rip one boon by slash. Removed the bleeding.
• Dagger#3 to increase range to 600 and apply 1/2 s. evade as means to close gap against high mobility builds like elementalist, reventant or GS warrior.

Changes to core trait:

• Ambidexterity: instead providing condition damage this trait will provide expertise. 150 points with no dagger or torch( +10%) , 300 with the weapons wielded (+20%). This is to improve the extremely short condition durations for the core ranger and also boost the use for the dagger in competitive.

FootnoteAlso being able to swap pets while staying in beastmode would help a lot with traits like Clarion Bond, Spirited Arrival and Zephyr's Speed. They only need to respect the CDs which are already in place for all beastmode skills (if you use Defy Pain from the Bear it doesn't matter how many times you enter beatsmode, you'll have to wait the full 40s CD) and pet swap and you still have your 10s CD for beastmode.

So yeah i'll drop this here to see if it helps and somebody read it for a chance of lack as i see the only changes coming to the ranger are Longbow nerf and changes to the sword (but why the sword when we have a much bigger fish to fry...)

I wish they'd remove the pet and merge CD so u could skillfully change pets and merge and un merge at will in a fluid manner. This would add complexity and add more skillful rotations to soulbeast. The CD's on those two things only serve to dumb down the spec. Having to merge, un merge, swap pet then re merge mid fight serves as enough of a mechanic or drawback mid fight to balance out the lack of CD's. Imo of course.

I don’t mind if the dagger keep its lower coefficients if the condi it applied was a lot burstier, like vun, then bleed/vun, then bleed/vun/poison, then bleed, vun, poison x2 stacks or twice the duration.