I really dislike Untamed

[Silvoshipnos.2089]

I really dislike the untamed and I kinda think it should be reworked. I've been playing it a bunch and I can't seem to make it click. Maybe it's just me but here's what I have to say about it.

Untamed just feels like a more cumbersome soulbeast. The whole mechanic with swapping the snot back and forth so you can use the pet skills hiding behind it is annoying, so is the fact that none of the new skills count as "beast" abilities for the purposes of the traits. The fact that the unleashed and non unleashed hammer skills get out of sink with fervent force doesn't help either. It just makes it unpredictable and hard to use.

It also seems to be build out of re-used assets. The spores just makes everything look horrible because it's using the snot texture on the already existing celestial seeds from druid. The bubble fart cloud and the skill effect of "Strength of the Pack 2.0" are actually the same, just a green semi-transparent ball, it's just that the elite is smaller and it adds the vines from "Nature's Binding" on top of the ball.

It's cool that is very WvW oriented with the ability to strip boons, block projectiles and lock down enemies. However, the unleashed pet skills only work if the pet is alive (unlike some of the mechanist skills which will trigger around the mechanist when the mech isn't around) which can make them hard to use in large scale scenarios and it feels very hampered when the pet dies. 

I kinda feel that it would be better if it removed the pets. The corrupting power of the Echovald makes them run away, whatever you want, there's a trade of. Make it so it has the leashed and unleashed states, make it so the swap counts as a pet swap. Make it so the skills are available in the leashed state, that one of them counts as a beast skill and the ambushes in the unleashed.

I don't know maybe that would make it feel less clunky, it already feels like a soulbeast but worse, the in game lore character says they are similar, streamline the process.

 

[AlexndrTheGreat.8310]

I haven’t played much of Untamed since it’s been released, but yea I don’t like it either and never enjoyed it since it’s been announced.

In PvE, it feels like it has way too many mechanics to deal with (the new untamed mode on top of weapon swapping and pet swapping) makes it feel like there’s so much you need to keep track of, in addition to the ambush skills and now needing to use your pet abilities manually. People frequently consider Ele and Engi to be the most engaging and have the most complicated rotation / set of buttons, but I personally feel Untamed may be worse than them. Just so much to have to keep track of.

In WvW it’s still the obvious stuff: the Ranger itself has some great new tools (boon rip, CC, AoE cleave at least in melee range), but the mechanic of having a pet makes it DoA in zergs (really the main place Ranger as a whole struggles immensely outside of not having a quickness/alacrity support role). 

Ive always described it as Ranger+ because it just adds stuff to the base class, without necessarily fixing anything or doing anything fundamentally different. You get 40% power damage increase (25% Vow of Untamed, 15% Ferocious Symbiosis) and it’s *still* considered a meme because Power Ranger simply does not work in instanced PvE.

I personally think that they should have removed pet swap again for this elite (similar to Soulbeast) to reduce the amount of mechanics to track and *really* pushed into the Unleashed mechanic. The buffs from VotU only apply to the Ranger itself. Causing your pet to become unleashed should have caused your pet to become a genuine threat to enemies and contributed to your dps instead of now what is essentially a glorified utility skill with a health bar. At the very least this would make the elite distinctly different from the base class and counteract the history of nerfs Anet has done to Ranger pets without requiring them to completely rebalance the base class to fix those problems in the elite specs going forward.

Edited March 18, 2022 by AlexndrTheGreat.8310

[Switish.9417]

Yup. Its actually put me off my Ranger main but Im struggling to find a replacement.

Really wanted rifle or pistols, instead we got a clunky hammer and cheap (animation) version of 2.0 Soul Beast. I don’t want to 'fuse' with my pet yet again.... And any spec, bar arguably Scrapper, is incredibly slow and lacklustre when it comes to using a hammer.

Now dont get me wrong, I really think it has potential in PvP - and hopefully WvW, since Ive been dying for a spec that would make people not point and laugh whenever you take Ranger into WvW, but its a niche. However, that niche is moot when feels like every other class does whatever Untamed offers a million better over and more stylishly. 

At this point Im just kinda tired of maining SB in Open World and Im really hoping for a re-work or some fine tuning on our newest spec. The same could be said with all the ESpecs of EoD though.

Also, the green goo aesthetic, ugh.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Switish.9417

[wolfyrik.2017]

11 hours ago, Silvoshipnos.2089 said:

I really dislike the untamed and I kinda think it should be reworked. I've been playing it a bunch and I can't seem to make it click. Maybe it's just me but here's what I have to say about it.

Untamed just feels like a more cumbersome soulbeast. The whole mechanic with swapping the snot back and forth so you can use the pet skills hiding behind it is annoying, so is the fact that none of the new skills count as "beast" abilities for the purposes of the traits. The fact that the unleashed and non unleashed hammer skills get out of sink with fervent force doesn't help either. It just makes it unpredictable and hard to use.

It also seems to be build out of re-used assets. The spores just makes everything look horrible because it's using the snot texture on the already existing celestial seeds from druid. The bubble fart cloud and the skill effect of "Strength of the Pack 2.0" are actually the same, just a green semi-transparent ball, it's just that the elite is smaller and it adds the vines from "Nature's Binding" on top of the ball.

It's cool that is very WvW oriented with the ability to strip boons, block projectiles and lock down enemies. However, the unleashed pet skills only work if the pet is alive (unlike some of the mechanist skills which will trigger around the mechanist when the mech isn't around) which can make them hard to use in large scale scenarios and it feels very hampered when the pet dies. 

I kinda feel that it would be better if it removed the pets. The corrupting power of the Echovald makes them run away, whatever you want, there's a trade of. Make it so it has the leashed and unleashed states, make it so the swap counts as a pet swap. Make it so the skills are available in the leashed state, that one of them counts as a beast skill and the ambushes in the unleashed.

I don't know maybe that would make it feel less clunky, it already feels like a soulbeast but worse, the in game lore character says they are similar, streamline the process.

 

THIS!  I espcially like the part about scaring off pets. Since we already have the same 3 generic skills, just make them operate like the Mechanist Jaed Golem's depth charge skill. The pet is somewhere out there in the wilderness and you get just enough control of it to make it come back in for an attack before it buggers off again. Turn the Mechanists glaring weakness into a spec defining feature for Untamed.

Too much work tho, it won't happen. This kittenshow is what we have now.

[Mell.4873]

12 hours ago, Silvoshipnos.2089 said:

I really dislike the untamed and I kinda think it should be reworked. I've been playing it a bunch and I can't seem to make it click. Maybe it's just me but here's what I have to say about it.

Untamed just feels like a more cumbersome soulbeast. The whole mechanic with swapping the snot back and forth so you can use the pet skills hiding behind it is annoying, so is the fact that none of the new skills count as "beast" abilities for the purposes of the traits. The fact that the unleashed and non unleashed hammer skills get out of sink with fervent force doesn't help either. It just makes it unpredictable and hard to use.

It also seems to be build out of re-used assets. The spores just makes everything look horrible because it's using the snot texture on the already existing celestial seeds from druid. The bubble fart cloud and the skill effect of "Strength of the Pack 2.0" are actually the same, just a green semi-transparent ball, it's just that the elite is smaller and it adds the vines from "Nature's Binding" on top of the ball.

It's cool that is very WvW oriented with the ability to strip boons, block projectiles and lock down enemies. However, the unleashed pet skills only work if the pet is alive (unlike some of the mechanist skills which will trigger around the mechanist when the mech isn't around) which can make them hard to use in large scale scenarios and it feels very hampered when the pet dies. 

I kinda feel that it would be better if it removed the pets. The corrupting power of the Echovald makes them run away, whatever you want, there's a trade of. Make it so it has the leashed and unleashed states, make it so the swap counts as a pet swap. Make it so the skills are available in the leashed state, that one of them counts as a beast skill and the ambushes in the unleashed.

I don't know maybe that would make it feel less clunky, it already feels like a soulbeast but worse, the in game lore character says they are similar, streamline the process.

 

The green animation i bit weird but what can they do, ranger is green themed (like necro). i mean i guess they could make it yellow or orange but i don't think that would be any better.

In terms of removing the pet, i mean Soulbeast has already done that since you almost have no reason to unmerge. I think they did a good job with what they were tasked with, they just need to balance and fix it up. Boosting the power and condition damage would be nice, with a trade off trait.

[Silvoshipnos.2089]

3 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

The green animation i bit weird but what can they do, ranger is green themed (like necro). i mean i guess they could make it yellow or orange but i don't think that would be any better.

In terms of removing the pet, i mean Soulbeast has already done that since you almost have no reason to unmerge. I think they did a good job with what they were tasked with, they just need to balance and fix it up. Boosting the power and condition damage would be nice, with a trade off trait.

I'm not complaining about the colour green, I'm complaining about the assets being used. The primal energy thing looks bad, it looks like we are coated in snot, the spores are an already existing asset with a bad texture on it, they didn't have to choose to reuse that for the spores, they didn't have to use spores it could have been any other thing, leaves, vines, jade coming of the ground, anything, the chose to re-use the celestial seed with a bad coat of paint. An the Forest fortification could have been anything else, strength of the pack gives a red aura that looks like you are on fire, one wolf pack gives a green one which looks like you have a green light shining around you with the wolf howling on you when you cast it, they decided to use the same green sphere from the enveloping haze, make it smaller, and add the nature's binding vines on top of it.

Also, you may have no reason to unmerge in PvE, but you really do in PvP and WvW. It is very useful.

You say they did a good job, but it's like you already assume they had to do something like the untamed. You treat all this conversation as it was a preordained design they had to reach but they had all the freedom in the world to design a new spec, with new assets and new functionality.  I think the untamed is a fundamentally flawed and unimaginative concept, grasping at previous work without really doing anything particularly good or interesting. Trying to hold on to the pet without knowing what to do with it, re-hashing the beasmode into an effect shared with the pet while mimicking the dual mode of glyphs into the hammer and the cantrips. They may have reached the best iteration of this, but they could have designed anything else.

[Silvoshipnos.2089]

5 hours ago, Switish.9417 said:

Yup. Its actually put me off my Ranger main but Im struggling to find a replacement.

Really wanted rifle or pistols, instead we got a clunky hammer and cheap (animation) version of 2.0 Soul Beast. I don’t want to 'fuse' with my pet yet again.... And any spec, bar arguably Scrapper, is incredibly slow and lacklustre when it comes to using a hammer.

Now dont get me wrong, I really think it has potential in PvP - and hopefully WvW, since Ive been dying for a spec that would make people not point and laugh whenever you take Ranger into WvW, but its a niche. However, that niche is moot when feels like every other class does whatever Untamed offers a million better over and more stylishly. 

At this point Im just kinda tired of maining SB in Open World and Im really hoping for a re-work or some fine tuning on our newest spec. The same could be said with all the ESpecs of EoD though.

Also, the green goo aesthetic, ugh.

I  just think that they don't have any good idea of how to modify the pet mechanic. Druid straight up ingores it and soulbeast removes it. What is Untamed doing? using it? improving it? The extra "control" doesn't feel that useful, most of the times you'll end up ignoring any of the pet skills that isn't cc and carry on. I find myself unleashing the pet for the bubble and unleashing myself for the ambushes, but all the other skills are like meh. I'd like to have a reason to use the pet teleport and the boonrip in wvw, but that's a suicide mission and I lose my pet, and all the other skills now require that I actively thing of them, some of them have ridiculously short cooldowns for anyone to repeatedly casting while doing anything else, that's why I think it would be better to just remove the pet. It kinda feels like an appendix or a vestigial organ

[Crackmonster.2790]

They should make unleashed a pet cooldown with a duration, not a swap.

When you unleash:

• Both you and your pet unleash for a duration
• Your hammer skills are flipped
• You get an unleashed ambush
• Your pet  enrages
  • Brought to 50% health if below, even revived to that amount if dead
  • Pet gains stability and maybe protection
  • The pet needs to be a threat when enraged
    • It keeps two utility skills of current unleash
    • The other two are a much more powerful autoattack and 1 improved cooldown, both based on the base pet family
• While unleashed you have access to your traits that benefit you while unleashed
• There should be a way to reduce the cooldown on unleash through traits, say duration is 8s and cooldown 20 from the start

This would make it 200 timess more good to use because not trying to micromanage swap everything all the time. It would change the feeling to that pet is a threat while unleashed and the automatic revive would mean you can rely on your pet and keep bringing it back to keep fighting in wvw. With this change you will suddenly be playing a ranger specc that gives much more purpose to the pet, a real melee bruiser if you want it or a ranged with a powerful pet.

And for gods sake change the visual unleashed its beyond ugly. Geez. I dont want you to just hide it after a few seconds, naw, i want you to actually make it look cool. And consider other colors than puke ty in most games the fitting color of beast enrages is red.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Crackmonster.2790

[anduriell.6280]

A little bit late to ask for reworks. Anet already has your expansion money. 
not that it would have done anything but still

[Gotejjeken.1267]

They need to:

• Give pets a breakbar in 'unleashed' state
• Allow setting any of the pet skills to auto-cast (including all of them to act like default)
• Put damage back on hammer cc's in competitive, or just get rid of the entire 'flip' mechanic and change it to work like greatsword does

Edited March 18, 2022 by Gotejjeken.1267

[Silvoshipnos.2089]

2 hours ago, anduriell.6280 said:

A little bit late to ask for reworks. Anet already has your expansion money. 
not that it would have done anything but still

Yeah, I guess that Anet has never reworked anything ever except for their entire trait systems, the aquisition of skills, the way illusions work for mesmers, the chrono shatters, the scrapper gyros or berserker. This company is quite disappointing in terms  or going back to systems, just a cashgrab yup yup yup

[Mell.4873]

10 hours ago, Silvoshipnos.2089 said:

I'm not complaining about the colour green, I'm complaining about the assets being used. The primal energy thing looks bad, it looks like we are coated in snot, the spores are an already existing asset with a bad texture on it, they didn't have to choose to reuse that for the spores, they didn't have to use spores it could have been any other thing, leaves, vines, jade coming of the ground, anything, the chose to re-use the celestial seed with a bad coat of paint. An the Forest fortification could have been anything else, strength of the pack gives a red aura that looks like you are on fire, one wolf pack gives a green one which looks like you have a green light shining around you with the wolf howling on you when you cast it, they decided to use the same green sphere from the enveloping haze, make it smaller, and add the nature's binding vines on top of it.

Also, you may have no reason to unmerge in PvE, but you really do in PvP and WvW. It is very useful.

You say they did a good job, but it's like you already assume they had to do something like the untamed. You treat all this conversation as it was a preordained design they had to reach but they had all the freedom in the world to design a new spec, with new assets and new functionality.  I think the untamed is a fundamentally flawed and unimaginative concept, grasping at previous work without really doing anything particularly good or interesting. Trying to hold on to the pet without knowing what to do with it, re-hashing the beasmode into an effect shared with the pet while mimicking the dual mode of glyphs into the hammer and the cantrips. They may have reached the best iteration of this, but they could have designed anything else.

All I can say is I am enjoying it, the combo's that you can do have been pushed to the limit with many interlocking traits and utilities to think about. 

I mean if you want to lower your cooldowns with Fervent Force, let's say for pvp you have load yourself up with stuns and make sure you land them. Then that leads down the rabbit hole of what weapons have the best stuns or what utility to bring to support the weapon. 

Edited March 18, 2022 by Mell.4873

[Infusion.7149]

It's not a WVW spec IMO. At least so long as unleash ranger state doesn't allow you to stow pet and the pet doesn't stealth when you stealth.

It's more of a PVP teamfight spec. It has all the making of the core WS ranger in the untamed line, with damage to healing and vitality built in.

In PVE you are more likely to use hammer to cleave down trash mobs, but even so they would need to give hammer 5 target cleave at all times rather than on the last hit.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Infusion.7149

[Hallow.7368]

If I'm going to be honest I really like the animations and the pet unleashed abilities. My problem is that the traits outside of the GM ones are just like.. worthless? Not REALLY but they don't stand out or really do much. The above average self sustain was really the only thing going for it.

It's also just weird because despite the button bloat from unleashed hammer being essentially a second weapon bar the cool downs are shared AND you have to manage all your pets skills they'd normally just autocast without them even doing increased damage. I think they've got a solid concept, but the execution was poor and sorely lacking QoL. To make it worse even if you manage to make it through all the clunkiness and learn a rotation for the class you get rewarded with dumpster level dps at peak performance. Meanwhile a rev can just auto attack with shrio and jalis toggles and match your peak.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

58 minutes ago, Mell.4873 said:

All I can say is I am enjoying it, the combo's that you can do have been pushed to the limit with many interlocking traits and utilities to think about. 

I mean if you want to lower your cooldowns with Fervent Force, let's say for pvp you have load yourself up with stuns and make sure you land them. Then that leads down the rabbit hole of what weapons have the best stuns or what utility to bring to support the weapon. 

 

Yes, but even with Fervent Force, howe useful is it actually? We already had quickdraw and that just requires swapping.  For FF you need a CC to proc it--but when is that actually viable?

Take longbow, every ranger seems to use PBS into rapid fire, but that doesn't help the rapid fire CD.  You'd have to use barrage first or hunter shot then try to use PBS to get the CD reduction--might as well just run quickdraw.

GS is even worse since we already have this feature built in on hilt bash, as it reduces Maul CD.  This may reduce it more but it's kind of a waste.

Shortbow may benefit the most from this, but its damage is abysmal.  So you could try to load up with two poison volleys using the #5 as a CD reducer, but this is still something you can do with quickdraw without blowing an extra skill.

Now, add on all the stats you are losing from not running something like Soulbeast.  You then see fervent force as a kitten version of quickdraw with a LOT less damage potential, and having a 'trade off' of your pet dying to boot.  Then the problems with untamed start really showing up.  

 

[Mell.4873]

1 hour ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

 

Yes, but even with Fervent Force, howe useful is it actually? We already had quickdraw and that just requires swapping.  For FF you need a CC to proc it--but when is that actually viable?

Take longbow, every ranger seems to use PBS into rapid fire, but that doesn't help the rapid fire CD.  You'd have to use barrage first or hunter shot then try to use PBS to get the CD reduction--might as well just run quickdraw.

GS is even worse since we already have this feature built in on hilt bash, as it reduces Maul CD.  This may reduce it more but it's kind of a waste.

Shortbow may benefit the most from this, but its damage is abysmal.  So you could try to load up with two poison volleys using the #5 as a CD reducer, but this is still something you can do with quickdraw without blowing an extra skill.

Now, add on all the stats you are losing from not running something like Soulbeast.  You then see fervent force as a kitten version of quickdraw with a LOT less damage potential, and having a 'trade off' of your pet dying to boot.  Then the problems with untamed start really showing up.  

 

Yeah i do agree it does need some tweaking but i mostly use it in pvp with shortbow and spike trap.

Edited March 19, 2022 by Mell.4873

[anduriell.6280]

On 3/18/2022 at 9:12 PM, Silvoshipnos.2089 said:

Yeah, I guess that Anet has never reworked anything ever except for their entire trait systems, the aquisition of skills, the way illusions work for mesmers, the chrono shatters, the scrapper gyros or berserker. This company is quite disappointing in terms  or going back to systems, just a cashgrab yup yup yup

Remind me this in one year

[Silvoshipnos.2089]

4 hours ago, anduriell.6280 said:

Remind me this in one year

Should I remind you when they release the changes to spirits and banners or that doesn't count?

[Redfeather.6401]

Not everyone likes their new elites across all the classes and it really sucks that non of the old elites got refresh. So in a way people feel like they got nothing new unless they play the way a combat dev mandates.

[Kichwas.7152]

On 3/17/2022 at 11:46 AM, Silvoshipnos.2089 said:

I kinda feel that it would be better if it removed the pets.

We already suffered that issue under Soulbeast.

 

I feel ranger has really suffered under the elites.

First it got a healer only spec. Then it got a spec where you lost your pet most of the time.
- Core themes of the Profession taken away both times.

Now we finally have a spec were we keep our core theme, and that's what you want removed, again?

 

Edited March 21, 2022 by Kichwas.7152

[Silvoshipnos.2089]

11 hours ago, Kichwas.7152 said:

Now we finally have a spec were we keep our core theme, and that's what you want removed, again?

 

First of all, you are wrong, druid keeps the pet, it just entirely ignores it and sometimes it splashes a heal if you have cultivated synergy. Soulbeast removes it while you decide to do so, unmerging with your pet can be used the same way the pet swap is used in core ranger to ensure that your pet uses their skills at the time of release. Canines will use the brutal charge for example. If you aren't using that part of the spec, that's on you.

 

Secondly, yes I want the pet to be gone and it's because I think it's poorly designed. It doesn't transform or modify the core mechanic, it just adds some buttons on it. I doesn't have any interaction with it. The three main elements of the core ranger mechanic are the pet, the pet swap and the beast skills. Untamed doesn't interact with any of it, the only thing it does is add the 3 skills on it and give you control of the pet skills.

 

I'd be ok if they found a way to remake the spec around the pets in a more interesting way, but it just doesn't seem that the studio has any good ideas for it, otherwise they would have implemented them.

[Kichwas.7152]

13 hours ago, Silvoshipnos.2089 said:

First of all, you are wrong, druid keeps the pet, it just entirely ignores it and sometimes it splashes a heal if you have cultivated synergy. Soulbeast removes it

 

Druid: Healer only spec.

Soulbeast: Put pet away spec.

Untamed: Finally a spec that uses the pet that is also still a ranger (not a "we need to shove a new healer class into the game and refuse to put Monk back in because the devs who don't even work here anymore stupidly said "GW will never have the Monk again", so lets force it on those guys in HoT rather than give them their own actual elite spec).

 

Where am I wrong?

 

If you hate pet classes... why are you on Ranger?

Whether or not they should improve the pet is a whole other topic... but get rid of it? We already did that with our ONLY other offensive elite spec: Soulbeat. Why do that AGAIN?

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Kichwas.7152

[anduriell.6280]

On 3/21/2022 at 12:03 AM, Silvoshipnos.2089 said:

Should I remind you when they release the changes to spirits and banners or that doesn't count?

Are spirits and banners part of the untamed specialization or are you just planning into notifying  me for every small change?

i would not have high hopes for the rework thou, if anything that Anet has proven once and again is their reworks are usually the worst approach you can ever take. I do not trust the devs to do a good decision when talking about the ranger.

as I said, remind me in one year.
We still got the worst Druid possible and Anet is doing the same with the soulbeast by applying not announced nerfs.

[Shiyo.3578]

This spec also blinds everyone around them by puking on their entire screen. I don't want this spec to be played.

  

10 hours ago, Kichwas.7152 said:

Where am I wrong?

Ranger already has a spec that can play power, condi, OR hybrid. It has a healer. It needed a buffer(no alac/quickness on druid), or a bruiser. It got a "worse harder to play soulbeast that blinds everyone and does 30% less dps".

Edited March 23, 2022 by Shiyo.3578

[Redfeather.6401]

1 hour ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

This spec also blinds everyone around them by puking on their entire screen. I don't want this spec to be played.

I think about that visual inconvenience to others whenever I use it. I hope it is only clientside or something.