Guild Wars 2

Woops. Wrong forum. Some mod delete this here pls.

Hey ranger community!

With the 1 elite spec beta weekend we had so far and about 3 weeks until release I thought it is the right time to give some feedback on the core concept of Soulbeast. Basically: What feels good? What would make more sense if done different?

I don’t want to go into detail about specific balance changes here that could be fixed b changing numbers.

So let’s start:

1. You can now swap pets in beast mode with shared cooldown when unmerged.

This one is pretty obvious and a much asked feature. The current implementation feels extremly clunky and ruins the flow of the spec. “But Dojo, Arenanet doesn’t want people to camp beast mode!” I aknowledge that but I think it should be achieved in a different way (as explained further below)

2. Your F1/2 are now ‘beast’ skills. Your F3 is no longer a ‘beast’ skill.

Obviously a buff since this will allow to proc accociated traits much more often. Some of the traits will need a second look at their internal cooldown due to that but I still think this is much more consistent and logical. Also it might actually encourage you to use some of the low cooldown F1 skills to specifically proc the traits. These skills alone often feel underwhelming at the moment.

3. Remove the ‘End beast mode’ button.

“What? How do we leave beast mode?” Easy, keep reading.

4. The F3 skill now unmerges you from your pet along with what it does right now.

This is my answer to stop people from camping beast mode. These skills are very strong, even if situational, and because of that feel perfect to make them kind of an ultimate spell that consumes all the energy unmerging you with your pet. Want to use these very powerful skills? Well then you have to unmerge for 10 seconds which actually allows you to use the normal pet F2 etc. This has flavor and makes sense from a gameplay perspective. Once you unmerged there is the usual timer of 10 seconds until you can merge again.

Some additional input:
There obviously could be alterations to this system like creating a trait that wont end beast mode on F3 use for people that actually want to camp beast mode (keep the end beast mode button) but this is Arenanets decision to make.
Another missed opportunity in my opinion is not having a trait that allows you to move to your pets position when entering beast mode. This would create some really interesting gameplay for ranger.