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Soulbeast aesthetic and design underwhelming (IMO).


squiggit.2357

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tl;dr Soulbeast is visually unimpressive and a lot of its skill/trait/mechanic design is kind of bland, irrespective of balance.

I like the spec. It's fun. Condi soulbeast feels good in PvE and power soulbeast has some deliciously fun burst combos. I just wish the spec felt and looked better while doing it. Not a balance thread.

Dagger animations are just thief skills with green ribbons tied to them. Kinda boring. Shame too because 'Soulbeast' would have been a great opportunity to expand on the spirit animal aesthetic on skills like GS2 and 3.

Dagger mechanics are... okay. Double Arc is basically just moar auto attacks which is kind of boring though and Dagger 3 feels like it's missing something. Especialy since in a setting where you don't need to provide your own quickness (i.e. Raids) it turns into a dead button. Weapons like Sword arguably have too much utility on them, but Dagger feels like it overcompensates the other way by not really having any. Needs a daze or a stun somewhere IMHO.

Traits Both minors are "+X% damage when you do Y". Super boring. Rest of the traits aren't that exciting either. Predator's Cunning stands out as cool though because it's another +X damage talent, but dressed up in a way to make it feel better than that. Otherwise there are very few traits that really add new or intersting things to the spec.

Also I really hate Second Skin.

Side note: Not a big deal for people who stockpiled hero points but Soulbeast unlocks Leader of the Pack as its first GM trait... before it actually unlocks any stances. Kinda lame.

Stance animations are actually cool. Best looking stuff in the spec.

Stance mechaincs on the other hand... Actually some of the stances are pretty good, but following the recurring theme of Soulbeast a lof of them just feel kind of disinteresting. Functional, but with no pizzaz or excitement to them. Like I don't know how anyone is supposed to get excited by Griffon Stance. It's so boring. Vulture Stance is just sharpening stone but with poison against low health enemies and feels kind of dead-ish in group content because of how prevalent mightspam is.

And I know it's unfair to compare abilities 1:1 across classes and I know the latter chews up resources like crazy to use but One Wolf Pack feels super lame next to Soulcleave's Summit. Probably also a little bitter knowing that the skill was pulled out of the Warrior's recycle bin. Oh also the interval timer means it's easy to lose DPS with the skill if you aren't very precise timing it but I doubt many people are going to get that deep into the sklil

Beast Mode aesthetics. Why is the particle effect for beast mode a green vine curling around the PC? Doesn't seem super on point given the spec's animal theme. Am I Mordremoth?

Skills are once against lots of stuff we've already seen, only they don't even get the green trails like Dagger does. I appreciate that putting even a mild amount of customization into 29 different animations is a steep order (of course, Weaver has 50 skills that all have significanty more aesthetic polish...), but there's still a decided lack of flash here.

Mechanically speaking I wish Beast Mode provided more of a meaningful shift in gameplay in the way Sand Shades or Dual Attunement do. I'm not a huge fan of the fact that developer intention is for the player to generally ignore beast mode except for the skills and have found overall that Soulbeast feels a lot closer to the core class than any of the other elites with the possible exception of Spellbreaker. I guess for some people that's a good thing though.

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Sadly I agree with most of what you said. I loved core ranger before HoT and was upset that they wanted to introduce raids and shove a full heal spec down my throat. With the announcement of PoF I was excited to see what ranger would get as a non support spec and this is what we have.

-Terrible animations. Dagger is a joke and beast mode F1 F2 skills are mostly unarmed punches like we're some martial artist.

-Uninteresting stances, NONE of them add any new or interesting mechanics. They're all passive effects that don't add any crucial thinking or usage, or mobility outside of stunbreaks. I actually like the idea of the elite stance, it could use some number tweaks but it suffers from only benefiting power builds which is odd since SB was shipped with a condi dagger.

-All of our SB traits are passive effects that also don't add any new mechanics.

-Boring SB F1 F2 skills. The only decent ones are the knockdowns and pets from HoT + PoF. Most F1 skills that aren't a knockdown are rarely used anyways. No differences, when I merge with an owl I expect my skills to apply chill, when I merge with raven I expect my skills to blind, you didn't add variety.

When I compare all these things to mirage it shows you didn't give SB the TLC it needed. The fact that you can play mirage and use a majority of the skills and traits interchangeably with power and condi specs shows good design choices, whereas SB doesn't know what it wants to be.

Overall this is my least favorite spec expansion, they can number tweak it all they want but my issues go beyond that. One thing that worried me during the reveal was when they talked about how hard it was to achieve the soulbeast F5 animation. They sounded more interested telling us how hard it was to provide the animation for F5 rather than what the spec actually did. Instead of punishing myself for trying to enjoy the theme of a ranger in an MMO I'll move onto something that was clearly designed better like Mirage. Or Scourge. Or literally anything other than Renegade or SB.

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yeah and new soulbeast skills are just copy pasted skills roo , change white to green and profit

look at holo or weaver , and now look at soulbeast its a shame how some proffs get treated in this game.

@Mistra.4087 said:The fact that you can play mirage and use a majority of the skills and traits interchangeably with power and condi specs shows good design choices, whereas SB doesn't know what it wants to be.

this x 1000 . the elite is all over the place , and the new weapon is way better than on beta but still need some ironing

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I like Soulbeast overall, the beastmode and stances are fun, but the dagger animations are what really kill me, imo they should feel more savage, since Anet described the Soulbeast using a dagger to simulate claws/fangs, I was just kinda expecting the animations to match that.

And the reason Soulbeast is kinda all over the place is because it needs to be, the theme of the spec is to be merging and unmerging with your pet to gain bonuses blah blah blah, and because the pets have multiple different abilities/roles the Soulbeast needs to be capable of utilizing those different roles as well or else some of the pets may as well not be options to merge with because Soulbeast wouldn't support them.

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