Yes, and that’s the context of any discussion of dps benchmarks.
No cares about pvp sustain or roaming capability.
Literally none of that is relevant to any part of the discussion and is just an attempt to change the narrative toward scenarios where the Ranger is good to make it seem like the OP is wrong and you’re right.
Do you not realize that unblockable attacks ignore reflects? You can do 13s of unblockable attacks with massive damage and have 6s of all power damage negated with two solid condition removal skills every 40s or less, or split it 9/9 which is insane compared to what most other classes can do.
>Massive damage
Watching barrage crit for 600 damage on the backline is quite spectacular I must admit.
I guess it’s just some gigantic conspiracy of irrational Ranger hate that prevents any serious guild from running longbow rangers in their squads.
You’re either someone LARP’ing as a WvW’er or in colossal denial fueled by the few times you did 10k to a zerk necro with rapidfire.
You can’t compare petless core ranger to SB with a selfish build. Rangers are taken as it is for their party-wide damage augmentation which is massive such that it makes up for their lower-than-thief-level damage.
Ya on druid, and that’s only when playing a healer role or condi spec.
Plain frost spotter is not enough to justify power ranger anymore. People will just insist you go cranger instead and do ~30% more damage.
Keep in mind that’s done with PvP equipment, in PvE with ascended weapons/armor etc it’s gonna be a fair bit higher.
Obviously we’ll have to wait until we can actually try it on the raid golem, but it looks a LOT better than any power option we have right now. Maybe it’s gonna be a viable choice, maybe it won’t, but I wouldn’t throw power soulbeast into the trash can already.
you can see he realy on sic em and honstly i cant belive arenet ill leave sic em as is is 40 % dmg boost idont think so
Ya, anyone who thinks 40% sic em is sticking around is fooling themselves. It’s even less likely than the 10k gazelle burst.
I wish i could use my ranger in wvw, i mean technically i can no one stops me lol but lets be honest, its in a bad state. Soulbeast wont do much to make rangers viable in wvw, sad. Well anet never cared for rangers, never will. My Advice to anyone that have a ranger and wvw, reroll honestly. Must suck to hear commanders and guild yelling at you for bringing a ranger, seriously you are just a wasted slot in the raid.
Soulbeast might be just barely useful but it will depend very heavily on whether buffed maul and sic em stick around as well as how strong they keep scourge and spellbreaker.
Sharing dolyak stance is useful and buffed maul actually hits for a lot in a zerg but playing frontline and sharing boons on a 30s cooldown wasn’t very effective during the beta when necros and warriors were completely stripping all boons.
I could barely get off a handful of worldly impacts just from how quickly your stab evaporates.
The warrior bubble also blocks projectiles which will make longbow even less practical.
Though condis shouldn’t be stronger than power overall, you’re underselling power here. Power damage still has no ramp up time, so it is better at killing anything less than a champion.
You mean those mobs that evaporate instantly against even a mediocre group?
So you want to be able to tank and nuke and hit through blocks at the same time?
There’s barely any real investment away from durability compared to most professions when taking these options. This is especially going to be true with Soulbeast which will have 500+ more baseline armor/vit and can spec into another invuln effect as well to compensate.
A: Wanting to be able to not be completely shutdown by perpetual walls of reflection and feedback bubbles is not the same thing as “always unblockable”.
B: Go look at what kind of damage a frontline ele can crank out while being tanked up in minstrals. Hell, go see what a Rev can do in full zerk spamming CoR which isn’t a projectile.
Literally the only thing that will earn Soulbeast a slot is stab share and even that probably won’t be worth much with Scourge and Spellbreaker obliterating boons left and right.
I don’t want to be able to blow up people with no way for them to deal with it but I also don’t want ALL our ranged to be projectiles when classes that put out massively more damage than we do aren’t held back by this mechanic.
It’s why our damage is bottom tier in a zerg (probably only above mesmer) and nothing is going to change until the issue is addressed.
The main problem with Longbow will always be the immense amount of cheap projectile blocks and reflects in the game.
Any good guild will roll with at least 30% guardians and even just 3-4 of them using wall of reflection is enough to make the weapon nearly worthless in the actual fight.
I can’t even spike down Ele’s in the middle of a fight because nearly all of them run magnetic aura.
Longbow is basically only good for mopping up when you’ve already won the fight and the enemy is routed or picking people who strayed from the herd which isn’t often if you’re fighting a good group.
The only way for the bow to become as good as it was for the 2-3 weeks after they buffed rapid fire is for us to get cheap/perpetual “arrows can’t be reflected” which I doubt is even possible.
I have a feeling that the game treats all blocks the same and reflects are just blocks with an added effect. I can’t see anet going in and rewiring a major chunk of the game code just to make longbow work in zergs when they haven’t cared that Rangers suck in WvW for 5 years now.
You can currently build into 13 straight seconds of unblockable attacks every 40s…
You can but you give up way too much survival/utility for what might end up being blown on a fake push.
I’m not wasting a slot on hunt signet nor bringing clarion bond over stone form.
I’d say no because it’s dumb and immersion breaking but then I remember that Anet has abandoned consistency for $$$ and we’re 6 months to a year away from the tiny cars they got in Terra.
Imagine putting in hundreds of man hours to craft an exquisite mount with great detail and lifelike animations only to have it be obscured by the guaranteed SAB rainbow cloud skin for the skimmer.
The main problem with Longbow will always be the immense amount of cheap projectile blocks and reflects in the game.
Any good guild will roll with at least 30% guardians and even just 3-4 of them using wall of reflection is enough to make the weapon nearly worthless in the actual fight.
I can’t even spike down Ele’s in the middle of a fight because nearly all of them run magnetic aura.
Longbow is basically only good for mopping up when you’ve already won the fight and the enemy is routed or picking people who strayed from the herd which isn’t often if you’re fighting a good group.
The only way for the bow to become as good as it was for the 2-3 weeks after they buffed rapid fire is for us to get cheap/perpetual “arrows can’t be reflected” which I doubt is even possible.
I have a feeling that the game treats all blocks the same and reflects are just blocks with an added effect. I can’t see anet going in and rewiring a major chunk of the game code just to make longbow work in zergs when they haven’t cared that Rangers suck in WvW for 5 years now.
Cheetah for the shadowstep if it work with Beastly Warden
I really, really hope Anet sees the issue with this pet and how BW currently works, it really needs to activate where it lands.
Yeah, Definitively,
if this happen when casting the ability before the shadowstep, this trait will be useless and this will be such a wasted opportunity.
The trait is coded to activate at skill activation which means it will always work this way.
The cheatah will only ever taunt enemies if they are already in range when it’s shadowstep activates.
IE, using the F2 at 1200 range will probably not taunt anything.
If you are in beastmode, though, it activates after the cast time of the skill, so they can change it to be different times.
Potentially but I have a feeling it’s an all or nothing deal. IE, beastmode skills are a separate type of skill and have different coding from the pet F2’s.
For example, using pet F2’s doesn’t trigger live fast for anyone despite clearly being listed as “beast skills”. I’m not sure if this is intended or not but they clearly used two different sets of code for each.
Cheetah for the shadowstep if it work with Beastly Warden
I really, really hope Anet sees the issue with this pet and how BW currently works, it really needs to activate where it lands.
Yeah, Definitively,
if this happen when casting the ability before the shadowstep, this trait will be useless and this will be such a wasted opportunity.
The trait is coded to activate at skill activation which means it will always work this way.
The cheatah will only ever taunt enemies if they are already in range when it’s shadowstep activates.
IE, using the F2 at 1200 range will probably not taunt anything.
If everyone is offering conditions all at once, why should it not be bursty? If you and your team’s fault for running glass builds, not having an Ele to swap to, etc.
Anet made it our responsibility to swap classes before a game starts.
This “just bring a counter” argument is how we snowballed into the current mess of condi burst vs rolling cleanses we have now.
Rather than taking a stand, anet just keeps pilling on to each side of the scales hoping kitten will balance out eventually.
It’s gotten so bad they had to invent a whole new boon just to give immunity to conditions. They never should have let things get to the point where Resistance was ever needed.
They should just change it to your next attack crits or something. It would still be very niche but at least it would have good synergy with the greatsword.
You’re basically giving someone an “I win” button and someone else a “Cancel I win” button, and it’s just a question of who has more. Horrid design choice.
This. Only ever this.
How can you call it an “I win” button if there is a “Cancel I win” button?
You can build around invulnerability, evasion, endurance regeneration and high armor to mitigate power too you know.
But which do you do? Well, you make sacrifices to come up with a well rounded build, or you focus on one particular area. But then each build will have it’s own counter.
It’s called play and counterplay.
You’re going to be bringing ton’s of condition cleanses no matter what you fight. PvP’ing without WS is beyond silly.
No cleanses?
VS Condi Build = Get immobed, die in 4 seconds to tics.
VS Power Build = Get immobed, die in 2 seconds to spike damage.
The only unique hard counter to conditions (on ranger anyway) is to stack vitality over toughness and that has very little benefit while leaving you incredibly vulnerable to power damage.
Kind of surprised no one else caught the other tid-bit Irenio mentioned in the Guild Chat stream about why Anet won’t allow Ranger to have control over all of the pet skills by default: “Because it would be way too powerful.”
>Full control of both the player and an independent AI, requiring either 12 fingers or a gaming mouse to use correctly would be too powerful.
The damage increase from Sic’em is one of the best things about Soulbeast, why would you want to remove it? Theres already enough condi utilities, this is our only power one. I agree about making it work like the Warrior shout though.
Because Rangers are so used to having terrible damage for so long, that when it reaches "Almost competent’ levels, they get scared of it.
Marks/Beast/Soul with GS, Black and Brown bears. With proper traits and utilities, you’ve got around 2 large condi removals, 3 stun breaks, 2 sources stab, 5 invulns. Soulbeast is frontline material.
let me say this another way,
You managed to find one mediocre set of traits in one very specific form of gameplay.
I am happy for you.
The rest of the Ranger community in pve and pvp are scratching our heads.
While I hope all the issues are fixed, even if they were, the spec is truly uninspiring.
I think people just need to experiment more.
I was pretty underwhelmed by dagger and the whole condi aspect from Soulbeast (untraited shortbow immediately outperformed), but that makes it a prime target for some improvements if necessary. Pet merging is super-nice in most cases, but it does hurt to lose some traits entirely. Souldbeast will probably make its way into PvP before any meta-relevant PvE.
Honestly, it’s still pretty meh in a zerg.
Sb with self buffing Maul would have been a great thing for the ranger back when HoT came out but after seeing what Scourge and Spellbreaker can do in a zerg, it’s going to be another 2 years of “please get off the Ranger and bring a useful class”.
Our team buffing is negligible at best when Spellbreakers are obliterating boons all over the place and we still lack strong long range AoE damage and CC.
SB was better than bringing base ranger or druid, but it’s still too weak to ever see a place in a serious team comp.
We would need to see serious buffs like Dolyak having it’s cooldown chopped to 20s and leader of the pack giving full buff duration along with either a larger radius or the ability to affect 10 allies at a time.
I don’t really see either of those things happening.
The damage increase from Sic’em is one of the best things about Soulbeast, why would you want to remove it? Theres already enough condi utilities, this is our only power one. I agree about making it work like the Warrior shout though.
Not saying i want to remove it, i’m saying, as many of the veterans here, there will be a 99,99% chance of an smack nerf of the 40% damage buff before even PoF is released. Same as the AOO trick with the maul.
And before they destroy another shout i’d like them to give something back and make the shout still useful.
Then the elite spec is basically dead and no amount of soft nerfing will prevent that. Might as well just get used to using Druid for another 2+ years in all game modes.
Begging Anet to go easy on Maul/Sic Em won’t change anything.
Does your beastmode aura visually change when you merge with another pet? Is it red, blue, whatever?
No.
The devs thought that visual representation of what pet you merged with does not matter. And now there are suddenly people that tell us that we can’t have a petswap in beastmode because people need to know what pet you’ve equipped, which they didn’t knew before either.
Ah, right, got you now. Agree completely. 100%.
In fact they talked about it taking a lot of development time to get it looking right, which makes me think they don’t intend on it being a tell, just to look good.
If Soulbeast can swap pets while in Beastmode I want to be able to enter Photon Forge with Holosmith without the visual tells.
You see how that could be a problem? It’s a good thing you guys don’t have any actual say in balance beyond slinging your shxt at walls and calling it art.
Implying there will ever be more than 3-4 pets that EVERYONE uses in pvp.
There also is a tell. There’s an icon that states what BM type you have active that is there explicitly for your opponent.
If that’s not enough for you then maybe you’re not as good at pvp as you think you are.
Both of their condition off hands deal less damage than our torch. Mainhand alone doesn’t make a weapon set.
You do realize that torch is only good because PvE AI mobs just sit in it the whole fight letting you keep bonfire up in near perpetuity thanks to quick draw right? It doesn’t actually work that way in pvp.
So our spec is crap, has anyone played other specs like the guaridian one or non ele/warrior ones to compare to? Obviously there is balance to be done.
I haven’t but word on the street is Scourge is ridiculously good and apparently both Deadeye and Holosmith are putting out raid boss damage levels without even trying.
Spellbreaker is going to be a complete game changer in WvW.
Not sure about Mesmer or Elementalist since they always act like their stuff sucks even when it’s amazing.
Rev seems like the only class that got shafted harder than we did.
I’m insanely bored by this spec and won’t even play the rest of the preview.
Hypothesis: Because elite specs are meant to change the playstyle, they turn off players who chose the original profession UNLESS they are purely upgrades like tempest or reaper were, which didn’t change the class at all but merely upgraded them.
Because SB and druid are distinctly different, they are also incredibly unpopular amongst ranger mains.
I think the biggest problem is the whole class archetype seems to be pigeonholed into this “sustain dodge troll” design and it just gets tiresome to play that year after year.
Druid and Soulbeast might superficially feel ‘different’ but they both perform at their best when played defensively as sustain just like the ranger always has. Our best builds always seem to be some kind of bunker/sustain build (spirit bunker, regen build, mender’s druid, ect)
Other classes often genuinely feel like their elite specs give a new way to play the class while ours always seem like a new way to do the exact same things.
Sb just feels like base ranger with access to a few more pet skills.
It’s still an improvement, but most of my hype is gone and I really don’t have much hope for Anet to buff up it’s short comings but I absolutely expect a lot of it’s damage output via gazelle and sic em to be nerfed.
I honestly can’t even see myself slotting Soulbeast in the expansions overworld areas which is really sad.
Played it in WvW tonight and I gotta say, while Moa and Dolyak stance sound great on paper, Soulbeast is really something that would have only been good 2 years ago when HoT dropped.
Bringing some stab and resistance is absolutely nothing to the massive amount of area control that Scourge and Spellbreaker bring.
Also, Bear Stance is pretty crappy compared to a traited Trolls when it comes to both healing and removing conditions.
It absolutely needs either greater spike healing or a shorter cooldown. 25s for less than 5k health is pretty bad when your stab evaporates from all the scourge corruptions and warrior bubbles ripping boons.
you can get a lot damage and survive out of it. It’s hard to use but it’s not bad
Ya, that “lot of damage” isn’t going to last. Anet isn’t going to leave in the 10k gazelle charges just like they didn’t leave Smokescale and Bristleback alone.
Super disappointed with the bird pet gap close. I don’t know if it’s a bug, but it only travels like 450 instead of the listed 1200. Given the length of the precast and aftercast animations, I don’t think this ability is ever worthwhile to use because running is just as effective. At the very least, it needs 900 range and animation times cut in half to make the birds worth taking over other options.
Ya, bird swoop is garbage. It’s also not a functional leap like Monarch Flight so you get stuck on any objects along your path. There’s no little hop like GS Swoop, you just sort of slide along the ground.
I tried to use it to leap off the cliffs in Alpine Borderlands spawn and you fall strait down when you reach the edge. It doesn’t generate any momentum at all.
Soulbeast is a solo pve and wvw duel build. Nothing special. Daggers are underwhelming.
Ya the dagger is trash but beastmode actually made greatsword a lot better.
The attack of opportunity effect procs on skill activation and then resolves when the skill actually hits a target so being in beastmode is a 50% damage buff to maul on top of any stat boost you get.
I can’t see the full +40% sic em staying but hopefully boosted maul sticks around.
According to the profession forums every single new elite is terrible and proof that Anet hates that profession. Yes, including the Deadeye.
I mean that’s just par for the course. People on these forums always think Anet is out to kill their class. Doesn’t matter how good the class currently is. It could be at the top of the meta and people would still complain.
According to Reddit, there’s some pretty ludicrous power burst with Soulbeast since one of your shouts just gives you 40% extra damage. There’s people mauling for 26k apparently. Yup, Soulbeast useless guys!
This is either a lie or you misread something. Maul cannot do 26k. It’s true that “Sic ’Em!” works on you (inb4 nerf) when you’re combined but even with “Sic Em!”, Maul does at most ~15k dmg or so which is not that impressive considering you only get 10sec of that sweet dmg boost. Right now it seems that a lot of pet traits and skills affect the player instead when you’re combined. Oh btw I was hitting for 30k+ on Thief Deadeye.
15k burst useable two times in quick succession is not impressive? You can use it three times during ‘Sic Em’.
What do you mean by “two times in quick succession”? You can use it 3x within that 10sec span but that’s it.
He’s presupposing the magical scenario where you actually pull off the fabled “maul – hilt bash – maul” combo successfully.
Even with the fix to hilt bash, it’s still hard to land unless the target’s already cc’d.
lol so are 90% of our skills. Are you slotting lighting reflexes or muddy terrain in pve? I doubt it.
Boon duration increase and spamable stab are fantastic group utility and not worth giving up for whatever piddly perma-buff you would rather have.
Lol, you would rather have 6s 66% increase with 30s cd than permanent 15-20% or something like that?
I wouldn’t call 6s stability on 30s cd exactly spamable (3s for your allies).
Also you only share stances at the moment you activate them and only in a 360 radius and only with 50% of the duration.
So your allies can get happy if they stand directly near you when you activate your dolyak stance once every 30 sec and then they get 3s stability.
Imo that’s bad. For open world pve completely useless and even for structured group content not that great.
So yes, I would absolutely prefer a indefinitely lasting stance. Or a stance that builds up stacks over time that then get automatically used under the right conditions, something like that. Maybe you could even activate the stance to use all the current stacks of your stance and get a nice extra buff or whatever.
Ya actually they are good because I actually play WvW. That mode where being next to allies is the norm and having precise and powerful support skills for pushes is invaluable.
If you don’t understand how good 6s of stab every 30s + immunity to soft cc is then there’s no point to arguing with you.
“Nerfed”? You mean they would be adjusted so they wouldn’t be completely op? That’s not nerfing. Yes anet would need to do that. Right now their pretty much useless in anything but some pvp situations.
lol so are 90% of our skills. Are you slotting lighting reflexes or muddy terrain in pve? I doubt it.
Boon duration increase and spamable stab are fantastic group utility and not worth giving up for whatever piddly perma-buff you would rather have.
Are the PoF pets available in wvw and if so how do you get them? They show in the pvp lobby but not wvw.
WvW uses the pve system for your pets which means you would have to go out and capture them to have them. I’m not sure why they didn’t give us them along with the base pets, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to access them in WvW right now.
PvP players get them just because all pets are available by default.
If anet could stop breaking our kittening skills (Dolyak stance now does nothing but break stun) it might be good in a WvW zerg but that seems to be it so far.
Half the skills we get when fusing are worthless and there’s basically no reason to even slot Soulbeast if you like to play power in PvE. Dagger does worse damage than sword and fusing with any pet is less damage than just leaving a cat out 100% of the time.
Sure, you can blow people up with Rock Gazelle in pvp but that
s not going to last so it’s not really a point in its favor.
Can someone explain to me the sudden fascination with swapping dagger 4 and sword 3? They’re already practically the same skill, why should they be swapped?
Personally myself I find the skill a more reliable dodge. You move in a very specific path and forward.
Sword 3 can do all kinds of weird kitten if the ground is uneven and isn’t as reliable for dodging through an aoe circle as dagger 4 is because you often end up in a spot you don’t want to be in either stuck on terrain or moving into another skill
Stalker’s Strike is also a longer evade on a 30% shorter cooldown.
It’s probably not a good idea moving forward anyway though since it would just make D/D worse to swap them.
