Showing Posts For Ackzar.9156:
I will start off by saying that I was initially super hyped about testing the Soulbeast this weekend, and I’ve had a lot of fun playing Soulbeast in both PvP and WvW.
But I do have some concerns/criticisms. I think my biggest disappointment was the animations. My mom taught me I should only ever check my neighbors plate to see if they have enough to eat, but not to compare with my own plate. Sorry mama, but this is a video game, not a dinner table. When I look at the animations the Soulbeast got, and compare to say the Firebrand, and Holosmith, it makes me sad. I understand ArenaNet had 1.5 years to develop the elite specs, and I’m fairly sure a lot of that time went into engine/programming work for the Soulbeast to make the melding work. Still. When you look at all the effort ArenaNet put into their postergirl class, the elementalist, just look at the weaver, 40 new spells, new spell icons, new flashy animations, and it’s an absolutely gorgeous specialization. Then there’s the Soulbeast, which got a swirling green tuurd aura… Good job ArenaNet!
They divided pets into two main categories, Family and Archetype . Why not make it so that the the aura would take form after the family and color based on archetype ? ArenaNet said that silhouettes are important. When a green turrd is running at me, I have no idea what archetype, nor what family his pet merge is. Having some claws, fangs, horns, tail, fur, or just something else than the green kitten aura would be amazing. But I guess the Soulbeast isn’t worth the investment compared to other more popular classes.
Now I know I sound like a salty, whiny lil kitten, I know. But now, for some actual feedback tho. Soulbeast is fun to play, hands down. The merging, and pet abilities, and archetype abilities feels good. I found myself using birds and pigs as my pets for the first time in years (or maybe the first time ever). Stances are good, I think they’re in a good spot (dolyak stance is bugged, as I’m sure you’re already aware of). Dagger is a cool weapon, but it feels clunky. When I saw the d/d Soulbeast I thought it looked really cool, and I thought of the daggers as claws or fangs that the Soulbeast would use. So I thought it would either be swift striking attacks, or a bit more harsh, tearing attacks. As of now, the dagger feels like neither. The auto attack chain feels slow, too slow. And even with vipers or berserker gear, it doesn’t really pack a punch condi or damage wise. Camping short bow auto attack is a lot better as it’s fast, generates bleed stacks fast (so you can actually feel the damage only from the auto attack compared to the dagger), and it’s ranged, so it actually connects with it’s target.
The dagger 2 spell feels like a clunky auto attack. It literally does the same thing as your auto attack; bleed, poison, and it’s slow. I don’t really notice the difference between auto attacking, and using dagger 2. Make it pack a punch. Let the auto attack be fast swift strikes, and the dagger two be this powerful “tearing-your-opponents-to-shreds”-attack. Dagger 3 feels super clunky with the long precast and aftercast. I’m pretty sure I can travel faster by running with swiftness, than actually use my Dagger 3 for mobility. And the afte cast also makes it clunky to combo. For example dagger 3, into a dagger 4 could be really cool, but the aftercast just makes it feel really clunky.
Last thing I want to talk about, are the grandmaster traits. When I think of grandmaster traits, I think they should be something build defining. I think the Reaper Grandmaster traits did and EXCELLENT job of doing this. Faster auto attack in shroud (power/shroud focus), bleed on chill (condi/chill focus), and health on boon application (boon/healing focus). And these grandmaster traits truly affected your whole build. It defined what purpose you’re build were going for. When I look at the Soulbeast grandmaster traits, I think ‘meh, doesn’t really all that much of a difference what I go’. They’re not necessarily bad (although I do think all of them should be slightly buffed), but they don’t feel build defining or particularly meaningful…
Alright, end of salty whiny post. I will admit I had a ton of fun this demo weekend, and at the end of the day, I think you are doing a great job with the game ArenaNet, Guild Wars 2 is the best game I’ve ever played, hands down, you got my attention for at least another expansion. It’s only because we love this game we get all worked up over the game and it’s changes. Cheers guys
Please advise regarding Soulbeast
I plan to return to the game after recent PoF reveal. I left the game like 1 year ago, and now Im wondering if I should invest gold in changing my ascended stats to viper (wanted to give condi a try) or perhaps wait until PoF hits and some vialble builds show up?
I read Soulbeast has the best potential of being condi dmg dealer but power builds should be possible too (though a bit lackluster?). Not even sure if I should get my hands on ascended daggers (have enough magnetide shards) or wait because daggers seem rather weak from looking at streams/youtube videos..
Ah and I plan on doing mostly solo content like world explore, maybe fractals and dungs at some point, if it matters :V I just wonder how bad will power build be in comparison to condi (and how is it now?)I know not much is known at this point, but maybe you could advise me what to do. I suppose I dont mind sitting on my butt for another month..
(currently, I have gear with Soldier stats because when raids first hit in no one in my guild was willing to tank or heal, so I did both at the same time. And I did really good, but right now, after returning, I dont think I will ever use this build so.. :v)
I would definitely wait for the expansion to launch, and see how the meta changes, before investing in ascended gear.
for open world, you can pretty much do whatever you feel like. For fractals, you might want to stick with something a bit more meta (the meta is mostly based on what the most effective and efficient builds are. Generally, power builds – burst, and condi build – sustained damage. Currently people are speculating whether hybrid builds will be a thing based off of some new stats we saw during the reveal. So if I were you, I’d wait with getting gear, until we know which way the meta is going.
- Source(1:15)
Notice he press F5 enter “beast mode” and it’s 10 sec CD. Which means in and out play style. Also how the weapons skills bar changes(you can see the icons being changed).
I could be wrong, but could it be similar to how the druid get different versions of it’s glyphs when it enters into CA. With soulbeast, we get different versions of our stances based on whether we are in beast mode or not? just a thought
I would imagine we will have to get some of the bonuses? But at the same time, I can’t really imagine a super buffed Ranger on steroids running around wreaking havoc all over the place… Tbh, I don’t know really. If we get NONE of the traits involving our pet, it would be pretty bad, considering how many traits involve our pet. On the other hand, if we get ALL the bonuses our pet receives, that would be reeeeally strong…
I see a lot of people in the forums complaining that the Soulbeast will be “petless” (we don’t know yet if the profession mechanic is permanent, or if it has a cooldown), but hey, guess what. Both druid and core ranger have pets. Permanently. If you don’t like the soulbeast, no one is forcing you to play it. Play a healing druid, or a condi ranger. Both are really good, AND they have pets. I think this elite specialization is exactly what part of the ranger community have been wanting for years. Not to mention ranger mains are privileged enough to still have viable options outside of Soulbeast (both healer druid, and condi ranger are strong atm). Unlike other classes (looking at you necro/reaper), didn’t really have much option but to play the elite spec, because other options were just awful in comparison.
Part of the ranger player base got super excited about the elite spec “druid” thinking we were getting animal transformations, just to get our dreams shattered by getting a healing spec. We’ve waited for years for something like this, but usually got the short end of the stick. But not this time. This time it was our turn to get our dream elite spec. Luckily the rest of ranger player base still have viable options if they don’t want to play Soulbeast, and they can use their pets if they want to.
From what I could see and hear in the different videoes, we will use our F5 to merge with our pets (I don’t know if you can perma merge, or if it’s “merge with your pet for 15 seconds” or has some other form of cooldown). But the videoes said that when you merge with your pet, you get their “unique ability” (F2) and the abilty of their archetype (felines, wyverns, spiders, etc.). From AuroraPeachy’s video you could barely see the action panel at the bottom of the screen, but it shows and image of the pet you are merged with, and three squares (probably the icons for the merged abilties). I couldn’t really gather much intel about the stances, but I’m guessing it might be something along the lines of “Dolyak stance: Take 40% reduced damage for 15 seconds”, “Wolf stance: deal 20% more damage for the next 10 seconds”. I don’t know. Mainhand dagger seems okay, getting two leaps at least. What I’m really wondering is what we will pair our MH dagger with. DD/ X? Will it be a condi spec or a power spec? DD/shortbow? DD/Longbow? DD/AT? DT/Shortbow might be really strong for a condi spec? What I’m most excited about is all the build craft possibilities we got now that we can get our pet skills on demand. Do we go for fury pounce of the tiger? Do we go for bleeds through our Lynx? Will we be a new tank class by taking our bear? Will the beast line trait taunt, taunt our enemies to us now (because we are merged with our pet), if so, would merging with a bird for taunt and weakness spam be an interesting tank idea? there’s just so many possibilities!!
Any thoughts on the Rune of Water for PvP builds?`I tried swapping it out for my Rune of Hoelbrak, and so far my results are looking pretty good. The heal you get from your healing turret is getting a good bump, especially if you go into inventions traits, and get the energi amplifier (when you use F1, R, R, F1). Other than that, your might uptime is still pretty decent, and the other boons you get from elixirs are pretty good too?
(For those wondering, this is the build I used to test. It’s not the best, I know. But it does the job:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASlUUhqrYBWwzLQ7FLTGl4zcABQ42lMhF9cX37NA-TJBFABA8AAK4CAIeZgk2fAA )
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASlUUhatYBWwzLQ7FL3FFdqH7ze4EGQZGYDGhBAA-TJRFABA8AACvMABXAAW2fAA
In this Scrapper build I’ve tried to focus on having easy rotations, some survivalbility
and a bit of sustain.
It’s worth to note that I actually use the new paladin amulet, but it hasn’t been added to Build Editor yet. Also, Stabilization Core hasn’t been updated to have the 10% damage modifier to hammer.
The use of the build is to solo roam, and defend capture points, and try to 1v1 opponents. You use the mortar for long range barrage of capture points, also for some aoe fields.
Flamethrower in combination with the Juggernat+mass momentum will give you about 10 stacks of might, so you equip it before you enter a fight. You can use the knockback of the flametrhower to push people off of capture points (Might, stability and knockback is the main purposes for the FT). Most of the time you will be camping hammer, spamming the auto attack and using electro-whirl whenever it is up.
In a 1v1 scenario you can really lock down your oppenent by Thunderclap -> Rocket Charge -> Slick shoes.
Some downsides of the build is that it has moderate-low damage output, few ways to deal with conditions (elixir c isn’t the best out there), Although Hoelbrak runes and adaptive armor mitigates some of the condition damage, it’s usally far from enough. You only have 1 stun break, and it’s on 25 sec cd. You also lack condition preassure.
Altough the build may be a bit lacking. It does it’s job pretty okay. You get enough damage to kill squishy classes. You are tanky enough to take a couple of beats, and you can heal up with healing turret + stim packs. It’s not that hard to use, as it doesn’t require a lot of combos, and it it’s not too many spells to keep track of.
I find it both sad and funny that while only a short while ago the “zerker meta” was the most evil thing in GW2 right now this whole “class imbalance” has risen to take its place somewhat.
The same people that thought the “zerker meta” was exclusionist and terrible now find themselves in a spot where exclusion is harder, the criteria stricter and all of this happened as a result of people crying out for ‘more diveristy’ blindly failing to see that you’ll never have a more diversity rich environment than the one in which any class and any gear combo could complete (dungeons).
Welcome to HoT. Enjoy your stay – here’s your complimentary engineer.
This. For a long time now, some people have been saying, “Be careful what you ask for, ANet might give it to you.”
Raids are likely going to please people who: (a) want harder content than dungeons offer; and/or (b) want to play the dedicated tank or healer, with all that hard content entails. This includes: having the correct gear for your role; having the correct profession for your role; and having the correct build for your role. Raids will not be the panacea for anyone whose beef was “gear diversity” or “I want PuG groups to want my build no matter what it is.”
Excactly, raids is not the place where you can play your turret Engi, or use your own little builds. Raids are, by what Anet says, the most challenging (PvE) content in GW2. This will be a place where you will need top notch dps, the best healing there is to find and someone who can sustain tank a boss, not to mention you will need reliable teamwork and cooperation skills. When people know how to farm the raids in maybe a year, maybe you can play a bit more casual. But as of now, we will use the strongest classes to fulfill certain role to try to beat the raid.
Well, to be fair, we only saw the first boss encounter of the first raid wing. Maybe there will be a good spot for the condi engi in the first raid wing, but wait, Anet is going to release two more wings. Things can happen, stuff might change.
The first group to clear the beta raid (and I belive only two guilds managed to clear it) did use condi engi’s, but they also used Zerker gear on other classes. Anet said Raids would get rid of the zerker meta. The first group to clear the beta raid proved them both right and wrong. Zerker is still very viable, and condi classes will be really popular.
So just because someone cleared the first raid encounter with zerker and condi engi’s, does not mean it will be too strong, it means the ones who were playing had really good cooperation and individual skills, and managed to pull it off.
What if one boss has a mechanic that turns all conditions into massive regenration? I wouldn’t want 4 sinister engi’s in my squad if that was the case… So yeah, lets just wait and see what happens, okay?
So overall I did not enjoy playing the Druid, although most of the reasons are subjective. I will still try to look for the postive sides of the druid.
The idea to make the Druid a part of the meta by making it a heavy healer is an interesting idea. Unfortunatly I expect lower lvl players to be abused. “We need X player to play a heal bot and make us stay alive. If we die, it’s the druids fault for not healing us..” Same goes for raids an inexperienced players.
I think adding a stronger healing aspect to the game is nice, and it makes for better class diversity. The Druid is a bit of an overkill imo. As it got so many different heals you don’t even know what to use, everything you do is basically a heal.
The astral force build up is too slow, it takes too lang time for you to get into astral avatar. In dugeons you will be able to heal your allies when the boss is at 25% at this point it’s not even needed anymore.
Personally I didn’t use astral form too much, as it is ONLY a healing oriented form. Why not give us a damage aspect too, so we are powerfull and scary when we enter the form, and people in pvp will have to play around “windows of opportunity” and try to play around the cd of it.
Glyphs feel to tied with the astral form. If the fights are not long enough for you to get into astral form, you aren’t utilizing them to their full potential, and you could might as well take some other utilities.
Staff was pretty much fine, need some more ways to build up astral force.
My main concern though is that Druid doesn’t really solve the rangers core issues, it just hides them behind a new flashy star form so people will forget about them. All our weapons are an awkward combination of aoe and sigle target damage, and most of them fail to be specificly good at either. The pet AI is still awful and REALLY needs an overhaul. Played with the Juvenile Fire Wyvern, and I was using Sic Em, had the Signet of the Hunt on passive and had applied swiftness. Yet it was unable to catch up to, and a attack a moving target.
If get the pet AI fixed, the life of the ranger would get so much better. We would finally come to love our pets, see them as allies, instead of asking Anet for perma stow…
My final words will be; You don’t build a house on broken foundation, fix rangers/pets first, then we will be able to truly appreciate the Druid.
Overall Scrapper was a fun specialization, and I enjoyed myself while playing it, which at the end of the day is the most important part imo.
The hammer and gyro’s felt clunky. Hammer has some cast time/ after cast that makes rotation overall weird. Gyro’s are slow and you have to stop to wait for them, but as you stop, they stop. So that doesn’t really feel good at all(especially with sneak gyro…). If the the cast time and after cast on the hammer skills are dealt with I think it’s in a good position. Damage wise I think it’s okay.
The biggest problem for me personally was that I never found a place for the hammer in my rotations. I’m so used to just camp on kits, and never use rifle. Suddenly having the option of a decent weapon to swap to felt so abnormal. Trying to use some elixirs and gyros to force myself to switch to hammer. This is of course a problem from my side. I haven’t gotten enough time to get used to the Scrapper and haven’t discovered my optimal rotations yet.
TL;DR Overall good job with scrapper, make the Hammer skills a bit more fluid, decrease cast time and after cast time
I hope I’m not the only one that thinks it’s kind of weird that the only way we can see our pets boons or conditions is to click on them? Being able to see when your pet has 25 stacks of might, to see if they got protection etc. does make a big difference. It’s especially hard if you’re in a fight, and you’re camping sword aa, and just want to check your pets boons, aaand off you go.
It would be really usefull, and it would allow better decision making, rather than just “Ah, F2 is off cd, let’s just use it” instead you see “oh, my pet only got three stacks of might, and no fury. Hmmm, let me apply some boons before I use any abilities”.
Also, being able to see what conditions are on them can be usefull too. Maybe it’s not that weird your panther died so fast, when it has 30 stacks of bleed on it. I think adding a condition and boor bar above the pet management bar. I think this would allow rangers to better utilize their pets, and not just ignore them completly.
I can’t wait to get to test out the Ranger in HoT, with all the new pets, pets with condition damage, etc. As far as I could tell from the Druid reveal stream, the fire Wyvern’s F2 ability would make it evade attacks. That made me think pets could actually be usefull. If you add “Sick em” to your utilities, that gives your pet 40% damage increase for 10 seconds, if you are able to get of some stacks of might and stack some fury (Which shouldn’t be too hard with the new WHaO and fortifying bond), pet’s could actually deal a good bit of damage, and if you add an evade on top of this, it actually might be viable, since the pet won’t just instanly die from bosses, or AoE fields
I probably should check up on this before I post, but last time I checked reaper shroud aa numbers were based on exotic double handed weapon, no? Anet recently said they would base raids after ascended stats, making it kind of a bummer for reaper. So that would be some nice changes to see (unless they have already been made)
Its based of the rarity of your mainhand weapon last time i checked, similar to engi kits, it and it uses a hammer.
Kits scale damage based on the rarity of the player’s equipped weapon.
Ah, thank you for checking that up for me. I wasn’t entirely sure if they had changed it, I just remembered that it was a topic after the BWE2.
I probably should check up on this before I post, but last time I checked reaper shroud aa numbers were based on exotic double handed weapon, no? Anet recently said they would base raids after ascended stats, making it kind of a bummer for reaper. So that would be some nice changes to see (unless they have already been made)
Well, coming from a necromancer pov (and having played a good amount of engi), engineer was in an overall pretty good state before the specializations, and if you don’t compare it to the other specializations, it’s still in a good spot after seeing scrapper. So just becuase some of the other classes look alot more awesome than scrapper, that doesn’t mean engi/srapper isn’t any good.
Was it likely that engineer would completly drop all their kits for some new utilities? No. The kits are too good, and a large part of our utility and dps. Some opther new mediocre utilities probably wouldn’t have made the cut either, compared to our kits. We didn’t get a new profession mechaninc, which is good, the one we got is alredy pretty strong and we would loose out on damage and utility if they changed it. We got gyros, but we don’t have to use them, and we still got acess to all the kits we used before, which are way more powerful, and our go-to’s anyway. And now we can also use the hammer for those pesky close-quarter fights. Profit?
If we look at necro, it was in a pretty bad state before the specializations, after the Reaper came along, it looks a lot better. There were alot things that needed change, and we got that. Engineer didn’t have that much of a need for change, since it was already in a pretty good spot. And they still solved (to some extent) the core roblems the class had (bad defense, and bad in close combat). So at the end of the day I think Scrapper will be pretty fun to play and it won’t be outshined be the other elite specializations.
I’ve been actively playing this game for about a year now. I consider myself as a casual playe. I play this game to relax, have fun, make friends and just enjoy myself.
I would really like to be part of small (aprox 15-60 members) friendly community guild where people get to know each other, and we can just banter around, having fun playing together.
I like to play casual PvE with a main focus on dungeons (Haven’t really played much Fractals, but I want to do so one day), I also don’t mind spending a weekend goofing around in WvW or having some fun duels in PvP.
I currently play on the “Whiteside Ridge”-server, I do have a couple of irl friends I play with on this server, so staying here would be convinient, if not I am willing to change servers (as long as it’s within EU).
I speak moderate english (Am from skandinavia), but I like to hangout in TS3 and listen and talk to people while playing.
If you come from a Guild that sounds like some of the things I’ve listed above feel free to contact me, I would love to be in Guild like this.
You can mail me/whisper me, Ackzar.9156, also Ackzar is also ign
So today I ran Ascalonian Catacombs on my lvl 43 necromancer hoping to get that sweet, sweet exp. As we finished the the final boss we got the treassure ches (containing that neat 1.5 G), but we waited for solid 5 minutes and the dungeon reward with the exp never showed up, so we left the dungeon with tears and despair.
TL;DR I didn’t get my sweet, sweet exp from AC P3