Curse

stingite · Aug 01, 2005, 08:16 PM // 20:16

yup, it's a beastmastery build for the random 4x4 PvP arenas:

Sun Tamer (R/E)

Charm Animal
Call of Protection
Symbiotic Bond
Fireball
Meteor Shower
Ferocious Strike (elite)
Troll's Uguent
Rez Signet

Beastmastery 15 (1 mask, 2 major rune)
Fire Magic 11
Wilderness Survival 8 or 7 (can't remember off the top of my head)
Expertise 1 (dump any extra into here)
Marksmanship 1

Max hitpoints staff with both 20% faster fire skills modifiers and +max energy from PvP staff.

What this build gives you is a max damage defensive pet that is also your energy battery for 2 fire-based elementalist skills, one of which (as you all know) causes intense knockdown to those who aren't paying attention or glue themselves to one position. This build also gives you self-regen and a rez for your teammates. In random battles, you can’t count on having a healer in your group.

While the timer to begin is ticking I fire off my pet buffs. Call of Protection and Symbiotic bond. Those two buffs are long lasting and are going to keep my pet alive the whole battle . . . in fact it will be practically unfarmable for faction. I med to full before the fight even begins. There’s no need for me to load comfort animal at all. Pets are usually ignored anyway, but if people begin attacking my pet, they’ll soon discover it will take a good while to hack at that brick wall . . . and will usually glue them in place for my ultimate attacks. It's good advice to kill the beastmaster before the beast in pvp for sure unless the pet is completely gimp.

While running this build, my initial attack usually was a meteor shower, which began aoe knockdown interrupts (3 of them in a row if they aren’t smart and move away after the initial blast) and drained a good portion of my ranger-y mana. Sometimes, however, I would wait to use the skill and drop it on the monk while they tried to rez. The next attack is Ferocious Strike. Ferocious strike gives me +10 mana and adds extra damage to the target . . . and is basically a skill to spam every 5 seconds. By the time Ferocious strike hits I have enough mana for my aoe fireball, which I launch immediately. keep troll's up the whole time if possible: self-regen from trolls begins immediately as I wait for fireball and meteor shower to recharge, which take a while to do . . . the staff I use helps a bit with that. Fluffy continues the slow, continuous hit point drain and hard to kill distraction. And, once again, I’m spamming Ferocious strike. I can usually get in 3 fireballs or so before meteor shower recharges.

And after that, it’s basically wash, rinse, repeat. Mix it up and have fun with it of course.

If my pet does somehow die, I always have a couple elementalist skills left on my bar to not make me completely useless. As a side benefit, in the “kill as many as you can within a certain time limit” battles, the pet is rez’d free of charge for you anyway and does not count against your team.

• Lack of expertise? Ferocious Strike is that good.
• What about exhaustion from Meteor Shower? Ferocious strike is my mana battery, so it is negatable to an extent.
• Healing? Troll’s isn’t that good for healing and mostly it negates poisoning, bleeding, etc. It does give you something at least for self healing.

So far for random 4x4, it’s a solid semi-self-sufficient build. For personal success I took the build to 14 wins with a great group, entering the team arenas, what I found there is that meteor shower and pet damage rocked for killing the enemy's priest. hehe. Although meteor shower is a "bad" pvp skill when considering it's avoidable for the cost, it does seem to cause a lot of panic and confusion and actually makes one spot of the map a good place to hide for a little while if necessary. You may or may not have much luck outside of the random 4x4 with this build

I also tried this build re-emphasizing water magic, earth magic, and air magic with skills of the same caliber and cost. I couldn't get the water magic or air magic builds to have much success, but the Earthquake+Aftershock of earth magic did relatively well . . . you did have to get up in the action and because of that had a good chance to be slaughtered while casting the combo. None of them seemed to work as nicely as the Fire magic build.

As an opponent, lower the effectiveness of this build by dotting the pet heavily to kill it or as stated earlier, kill the beastmaster first. If you're uncomfortable with not bringing the pet heal/rez, then swap out one of the defensive buffs. For me, when I didn't have both defensive spells on my pet, my pet would in fact die and I would have to rez and deal with an interrupted skill and skill bar refresh . . . only once or twice in my 2,000 faction gain (weeee for superior vigor!) was I left "petless" while running the defensive pet build.

Also to note, if there's just no hope, and you're going to die while your teamates fight on, find a spot either (a)near the action or (b)near enemy spirits (like frozen soil). Your pet will continue to fight people near your corpse and will also kill any nearby enemy spirits within their radius.

This build is also good for PvE farming solo without henchmen. I swap out Rez Signet for Otyugh's Cry and the brick wall is even more apparent. I've put my pet up against 5 level 22 grawl in Whitman's Folly and they can't dent my pet while I sit from a distance dropping meteor shower and fireball. Fortunately the caster grawl don't cast many poison dots. It does take a lot of creative kiting to get them to all stick on my pet.

Hopefully a few will try this build out and enjoy it or bring some new insight to how beastmastery could work well in PvP, PvE, and on.

Thanks for reading and I hope you get a chance to try it out or add new insights.

Thanato · Aug 03, 2005, 05:19 PM // 17:19

well, i gave your build a try out, and it works rather well, to a point. although in the beginning i brought along comfort animal (it seems he always died when i brought it along), but once i took it out, everyone ignored my pet

.

i had tried a few variants of the build. I tried changing to eath magic and bringing along armor of earth and stone daggers, but the effects were less than stellar (but it was fun to take only 17 damage from an aftershock

).

next i tried fireball and meteor since i didnt have metoer shower unlocked yet. again i had some success with it, was slightly more spammable since the cool down was only 30 seconds so i'd be able to nab that monk running round as my pet tried to have him for lunch.

i took out symbiotic bond (since he was rarely targetted) and put in brutal strike, which seemed to work very well. at BM 14, you do an extra 38 damage in addition to your pets regular damage when the target is is at less than half health.

as for the weapon choice i started out with a +10 staff with 20/20. and switched to a wand/focus combo with 20% for faster recharge on wand and 15/30/-1 on focus when my energy was weening abit. you could easily use the wand/focus combo i mentioned the whole match since your pet will be netting you 10 energy from every ferocious strike ;D.

apart from what i mentioned above, your build works well enough, kudos for making a decently working Beast Master

. and you are right, the energy gained from ferocious strike is quite good

.

stingite · Aug 03, 2005, 07:32 PM // 19:32

Hey! Thanks for that. I appreciate the feedback and it sounds like you've had some luck experimenting with the build. Your suggestions are great! I'm developing ideas for working on a beastmastery build that works in a similar vein to this one only with a Mesmer secondary instead. I'll be sure to post what I come up with if it's worth it.

Thanato · Aug 03, 2005, 08:20 PM // 20:20

if you're gonna be using mesmer as secondary, might i suggest hex breaker? and since energy isnt a problem, perhaps shatter enchantment, or possibly shatter hex instead? i remember taking down a warrior with that when my monk was being chased lol

although hex breaker is a stance, without using symbiotic bond, this shouldnt be a problem.

Yukito Kunisaki · Aug 03, 2005, 09:45 PM // 21:45

Nice battle system ya got there. Meteor Storm does seem quite good for this build though I imagine Druid's Armor helps alot in energy management.

Only real weakness I notice would be energy stealing skills and negating the pet through hexes.

If your pet really is that hard to kill, then yeah, disabling it would put you at a large disadvantage. I'm also guessing interruption via Savage Shot/Slash and Disrupting Chop would render you helpless.

Still, with what you've got here, you'd be a pain to counter and very powerful if ignored.

Well done, my salute...

/salute

Thanato · Aug 04, 2005, 02:16 AM // 02:16

druids + a +10 energy staff, and a fire/wand combo with 15/30/-1 for when the energy gets thin, usually dont have much of a problem with energy.

well the thing is the pet is rarely ever noticed. The only times its died was due to PBAoE. apart from that he stayed alive all the way through.

well the energy gained from ferocious strike can be negated by a defensive stance and blindness; oddly enough i havent encountered that much if at all.

and what you say about being interrupted is quite true, but alas they havent even bothered me (and from the looks of it, not many warriors bring dis. chop along, at least in the random arenas, and the rangers dont bother me til my casters are down lol). i'm basically free to nuke whenever i can

Tuna · Aug 04, 2005, 03:53 AM // 03:53

If you're fighting anyone worth thier stuff (team arenas), meteor storm isn't going to do you any good. Meteor, imo, would be better in that slot.

Morganas · Aug 04, 2005, 04:55 AM // 04:55

After reading this I had to try it out, worked extremely well. Seemed to work slightly better with immolate instead of meteor, also replaced troll unguent with a second pet attack, scavenger strike, to take advantage of setting them on fire.

thanks for posting this!

Yukito Kunisaki · Aug 04, 2005, 06:46 AM // 06:46

Glad to see more beast master builds being refined.

Thanato · Aug 04, 2005, 07:30 AM // 07:30

well i used meteor for its knockdowny goodness

never hurts to stop a monk dead in their tracks as my team catches up and lets it rip. i se what you mean with immolate, although i think it would be better to replace fireball instead of meteor/meteor shower.

Bast · Aug 04, 2005, 10:59 AM // 10:59

Yeah, let's take a Ranger and make a really bad Elementalist out of it!

If you want fire nukes and a pet, why not go E/R?

Neo-LD · Aug 04, 2005, 11:34 AM // 11:34

Cus eles cant get 15 beast mastery. And eles have sucky armor.

Anyways, I can see he build "working" in my mind. Im just a little skeptical that it can contribute as much as a standard ele or standard ranger could.

Enigmatics · Aug 04, 2005, 05:57 PM // 17:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bast

Yeah, let's take a Ranger and make a really bad Elementalist out of it!

If you want fire nukes and a pet, why not go E/R?

Elementalists don't have the mobility of Rangers; nor do they have Expertise to help lessen the burden of spamming pet attack skills. You seem to ridicule beast mastery builds in the first place, but know that Elementalist primaries are lousy with pets.

Thanato · Aug 04, 2005, 06:13 PM // 18:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bast

Yeah, let's take a Ranger and make a really bad Elementalist out of it!

If you want fire nukes and a pet, why not go E/R?

really bad elementalist? sure rangers may not have energy storage, and despite the lack of expertise in this build i'd take ranger over ele any day. the reason? 100 defense against ele damage, 70 against physical, not to mention the low priority on the "first guy to die" list in pvp. and if you say "bring armor of earth" to make up that difference, you'll be loosing one spot to where a nuke could of been.

Neo, this will never be compared to an air spiker. as for the "standard" ranger, what would that be? i dont believe there is only one type or ranger more common then the others. hell, in my team yesterday we had 3 rangers and a monk (one trapper, one sword melee ranger, and me) and we were able to go on a 13 win streak (not too bad with a "crappy" ele :P). [ego] i was single-handedly able to remove a necro from play by keeping him occupied so he wouldnt annoy my monk (dumped all his hexes on me, was reduced to 1 arrow of energy regen) and i was still able to nuke him efficiently [/ego]

also, the build does work quite well, i've been using it for the past few days now and can vouch for it. especially with a competent team, the build works very well.

Neo-LD · Aug 04, 2005, 06:34 PM // 18:34

By "standard" ranger, I meant a sniper. You know, penetrating shot, tigers fury, damage buffers, etc. All rangers start out as one, and there are twice as many of them than any other ranger.

Ferocious Strike has the ability to make up for the *only* 2 ele damage spells, so maybe its a bit better than I originally judged. Guess Ill just have to try it.

Will post back soon with results.

(btw, if the necro is casting all his crap on you and not the monk, its cus hes stupid, not cus the build is uber

)

Thanato · Aug 04, 2005, 06:59 PM // 18:59

well stupid or not, he was too busy running away to be of any effect to the battle, and if the other team's monk hadnt run off and healed him, he'd of been dead. although with the monk healing him, the rest of the team dropped fast and we ganked the monk soon after :3

Thanato · Aug 07, 2005, 05:24 PM // 17:24

just thought i'd post a variant of this build that 've been usign the past couple of days

i went Ranger/monk, swapped out meteor shower and fireball for bal's aura and symbol of wrath. works quite well on any class. since there really sint any real nuking, i consider this variant more suited to defend the monk/caster.

within 10 seconds a wamo can go down if he decides to stand there and wack the monk, while my pet and i attack and do ~44 damage perscond with both smiting skills i mentioned (plus regular attacks/pet skills). proved to be quite useful, especially against necros using that armor thats weak to holy :3

i had also tried swapping out troll unguent for bane signet, and symbol of wrath for holy strike, gave me quite a nice lil spike (bane sig = ~48 damage + 70 damage from holy strike) while bal's aura was going off. but the lack of any healing whatsoever made me rely on monks completely and if caught monkless in pvp. if i wasnt targetted first, then i can end up doing some nice damage, otherwise well i'll be taking a nap soon.

one other possibility i had is to use call of haste instead of call of protection, so if your target starts to run off while my wolf is smiting for me, he can keep right on him and make use of bal's aura. but the lack of defense made my pet go boom

.

had the chance to play with a competent corpse bomber in pvp last night, with 2 warriors wailing on me, if my pet and smites didnt kill them, the death nova/putrid explosion would finish them off. easily 10 of our kills were that way (in the 5 matches we won)

stingite · Aug 09, 2005, 01:00 AM // 01:00

Sorry I haven't kept up on this thread. I've been out a couple days having my appendix removed.

Love the ideas here. My ranger/mesmer beast build wasn't very effective . . . looked great on paper but lacked a lot on the battlefield. I may try again after unlocking more mesmer skills. BTW, Love the Ranger/Monk beast build. Good stuff.

Thanato · Aug 09, 2005, 02:16 AM // 02:16

yeh i tried a R/Me beast build as well, didnt work very well lol
although shatter hex did some nifty damage when there's hexers about :3

and i hope your apendix removal went well

Neo-LD · Aug 09, 2005, 12:21 PM // 12:21

Tried it, I think it works better with earth. Obsidian Flame (discipline yourself to only hit it once every ~30 seconds.) Stoning, and Wards for your monk. I had my buddy hammer warrior inflict weakness and it was a really lol situation