I’ve given all the elite specs a shakedown in PvP now, and I have to say…Soulbeast takes the worst credit of the expansion in my opinion.
Not because the gameplay is bad, not because the skills are bad—I’ve already seen many suggestions of excellent builds from other players. But because implementation itself is awful, I mean it looks like someone spent five seconds implementing it compared to the other subclasses, particularly the animations.
What I expected: Ranger transforming into pet, using all the pet skills and then transforming back to use Ranger skills and so forth.
What I got: ??? Some kind of aura on me? I glow? I have skills from the pet, but only a few and the main one is missing? I uh, punch things and its called “Bite”. Okay. So the mechanics are fine but it feels like I’m in some bad B movie.
And I wonder if the mechanics are really that fine too. The use of the existing pet skills could’ve been handled so much better than they were.
Please take more time to polish.. whatever this is. Compared to stuff like the Holosmith and Renegade, the aesthetics and flow are poor. At this point I’m not sure what it was supposed to be, but I can guarantee you something got lost in translation from design concept to coding.
Yeah, that’s what I thought first too when I heard “soulbeast”. A ranger that transforms in a beast. Would’ve been so much fun. But they decided that they want it the other way around. And now we have the core ranger with a green glow and 3 extra skills when he gets rid of his pet.
Problem with the soulbeast is that they made a huge effort to adjust all the different pet skills (40+) for all the different races and genders (5races), instead of adjusting the existing weapon skills for 2-3 unique beast models. Would’ve been probably the same amount of work and would’ve been much more unique and interesting.
But that’s of course just not what we have now and the main problems of the soulbeast are imo:
-useless dagger that has an endless auto attack chain and that deals not nearly enough dmg, also the dagger has almost no synergy with other existing weapons and is also a weapon that gets you into meele combat without giving you any real advantage over a SB for example that does still far more dmg
-useless and really boring stances (at least in normal PvE content)
-clunky pet swapping
-many many useless beast skills (there are great ones too of course)
-an underwhelming visual representation of the skills and of the entire core elite spec mechanic, the “beastmode”, which is imo still a glorified pet stowing option that is not even that great because you know exactly you’re supposed to leave it but when you do, you feel punished by the long cd
(edited by Adenin.5973)
Seems to be a recurring pattern with the Ranger, doesn’t it? What hasn’t been a disappointment when it comes to the Ranger profession? Almost every time Anet releases something for the Ranger it is ‘underwhelming’.
(edited by Eidolonemesis.5640)
This reply about a pet mechanic has nothing to do with this thread.
The only thing that bothered me about it is there were missing skills from the pets that would really be well to do for rangers but we had like generic overall skills which really didn’t do much for us.
Like the pull skill or the skill that causes vuln and bleeding
I agree completely. Very very sad. Seems left for last and got the least….all around me was fantastic animations……I got a green swirl with no power. No a lot of things. Like looking in a candy store, but you can’t have any.
I have to agree. Switching active pets and beast mode is VERY clunky, the controls just don’t feel right, and the impact of them is very weak. At minimum I hope they get rid of the “vine swirl” aura and give it something more “animal” than “vegetable.” I like a few of the beast moves, but most are SUPER underwhelming.
The issue with soulbeast is that going into beastmode is a net negative for the ranger unless they are are usuing one of the F abilities. The bonuses you get do not counter the dps lose of losing the pet and the utilities don’t make up the difference either. So it is best to never go into beastmode until you need to use one of the 3 F abilities.
“aesthetics and flow are poor”
couldnt agree more.
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