I'm still trying to decide what melee dps class to make in this game since I was told that berserker is no longer a viable dps since returning to the game. I know beastlord is a purchased class and I'm willing to buy it IF the class is fun to play and a better overall/more desired class than an assassin. What are your thoughts on this?
I have all 3 Berserker is one of my fav - not sure why someone told you it is no longer viable but oh well. My main is currently a beastlord - we are almost unstoppable - we do massive amounts of damage, we can heal our selves, we have pet(s) that we can train that also do lots of damage, heals and buffs. One of our biggest draw backs is the crappy Beastlord bar - the abilities don't stick like they do on regular hot bars and it seems the devs have no clue how to fix it since it's been broken for what, 10 years? But still it's an incredible class to play Assassin is my least fav, not for any other reason other than it's just not what I like to play
Just to add my 2cp... a warning: the beastlord is nearly unstoppable and all, but do not attempt to powerlevel it or you're about to enter a world of pain. You have to level all 900 pets. Find them, capture them and level them through combat. ONE. BY. ONE. Fail to do so and you lose about 2/3 of your DPS and 1/2 your abilities. So... yeah, you get to change stance to heal in the middle of a fight, power feed the group like a coercer and go back to 1-shotting mobs like a boss, but not out of the box.
Do you at least get all of your pets at an early level or do you learn some that are already higher than lvl 1 later in the game?
And actually you say CAPTURE, so they are like a hunter in WoW in the sense that you have to tame them to have them & don't learn them as a spell as you level up?
you will need at least a month to get all your pets to GM. some say they can get a pet to gm in a hour or two but that has not been the case for me. But all the hard work will pay off as you will end up with a class with most potential..that said 80% of the BL's i meet don't know what they are doing.Most fun class to play if you don't like things too easy.
Sorry you might have not understood what I meant or I asked wrong. Do beastlords have to go around and capture a pet in order to have it or do you learn it as a spell while you are leveling up? Also when you do acquire a new pet, is it always level 1 or is it the level that you learned the spell (if that's how you get pets) or the level it was in the world when you capture/tame it?
Yes. You have to go around and capture them. There are 15 (i can be wrong) pets with their own abilities. U must level up them by using abilities on mobs when pet triggers it. This is the most pain. There is no other way to improve them. Next lvl of pet improves tier of same pet abilities (like expert, master, etc). At Grandmaster tier pet give YOU new ability. So when you lvl up all pets you can use 15 more abilities (BL have a VERY small amount of them). You can use only 6 of them in attack stance and 6 ANOTHER in defense (heal) stance. You cannot change abilities at fight, just use presets one. But you have 6 more spells on left BL panel (this spells like usually one but triggering by pet) And before fight you can manage them, cause for example, you have 1 slot for 1-target ability or the same slot for AOE ability, so you have to choose each fight, what would be good for you and raid. Also, BLs DPS depends on savagery, their stat, consumed for abilities, like power, and that is another pain. But if you CAN manage spells, savagery and thinking in raid, you DPS would be absolutely unreacheable. And at heal stance you're like a pro defiler, but without deadsave =)
Wait if I'm understanding you correctly Pioneer, a BL has 6 attack stance pets and 6 defensive stance pets out at one time during a fight?
Not at all =) BL have 5-10 usually abilities, like all other classes and a special ability bar. That bar divided into 2 parts: - left. 6 slot for abilities that BL gained with lvl. He can use them when pet triggered an event. - right. 6 slot with abilities that BL gained from GM pets. They are pretty strong. Almost all slots has 2-3 type of abilities: solo target, group and AOE. You can manage that to improve you HPS or DPS BEFORE fight. So, for example, GM insect pet can give you a solo target DPS ability and drake pet give you an AOE ability into the same slot. Depends of fight type you manage spell and use it, consuming savagery. Savagery can be up using left panel abilities. Attack or defense stance allows you to use DIFFERENT abilities. So in attack stance almost all of CA from both sides of panel do damage, and at defense there are: wards, heal for group and different types of boosts (cb, pot, weapon damage, etc). When you using right side abilities you take a huge boost for you (damage, heal, wards). It lasts for ~20 seconds and consuming a lot of savagery power and can be stack. So you have to quickly restore it with left side panel CA, cause the more savagery you have the bigger effect would comes. And so on and so on... And sorry for my english, it's not a native language for me )
Not to try and derail your post but lots of people find Swashbucklers the DPS equivalent of the Zerker. They have the least amount of positional attacks, are sort of meant to solo or molo(using a merc), and they are very good at aoe dps. Don't get me wrong the Beastlord is an amazing class to play with the option of healing, tanking or dpsing but getting them to their full potential requires a fair amount of time.
Now the game is only one DPS class and it beastlord, this is such a balance. about the fact that it is more difficult to other classes it's not true, so pumping will take a little more time and all
That is exactly how you do it. You start with an archetype pet and can only tame new ones at level 10. That's when the Pokémon fun begins. It's 16 pet "families" in the end: 11 normal, 4 exotic and 1 insect. There are a few pets you can only tame much later in game, like insect after completing a quest at level 40 and "exotic" (dire, enchanted, mystical and drake that looks NOTHING like a dragon) at level 80. If you do your homework you will have 16 pets to choose from, a truckload of new abilities, and more DPS potential than you know what to do with. Once you start training a pet you can tame a different one from the same family to change appearance if you want. Some BL like to tame pets from limited time events, like a Frostfell reindeer, or the patchcraft animals from Bristlebane day, just to show off.
OK so I read up on the EQ2 Wiki about the class but I'm still confused about something. Say I get a wolf as a my canine pet and I then find a hyena I like the look of better. Do I have to level THAT up as well or will it automatically become the same rank as my wolf? Or do I have to get rid of the wolf all together & then capture the hyena and start fresh with ranks?
You level up the pet type, not the specific model you tamed. So yes, if you had a wolf, leveled it up, then switched to a hyena the hyena would come pre-leveled.
Yes, I should have pointed that you don't need to level the new pet from the same family. It is just an appearance change.
The scout you choose depends on your play style and goals. Soloing, grouping, raiding? Do you want the complexity of managing a complex cast order (BL is most complex scout, sorcerer is most complex mage - hence why you see so many mediocre players in both of these)? If you intend to devote the time to get decently geared then most scouts are great soloers and will chew up old heroic content easily. Current heroic content is not really soloable early in an xpac. All of the scouts paired with a merc are good at any intended solo content even with bad gear. BL and assassin are close in raid parses. Depends heavily on gear and group setup, gear, and group coordination, as always.
I play a beastlord as my main and have been since they were introduced a few years ago. They're pretty awesome IF you spend the time to develop them and learn to play them right. If you aren't willing to spend the time you'll end up with a very mediocre toon. As others have said, I'd strongly recommend against powerleveling them or buying them at level 95. Assassins should be able to do as much dps as a beastlord if geared right and played right. Don't expect to do good dps with either if you don't know how to play them or have crappy gear. I consider beastlords a lot of fun to play -- the most fun class I've ever played -- but YMMV. You can only have one pet out (called a warder) at a time although you can switch warders in the middle of a fight. However, the usual reason for summoning a warder in the middle of a fight is because the old warder died. Thankfully that doesn't happen NEARLY as often as it did a few years ago. Beastlords are indeed flexible and powerful, but they're not everything. They can't feed hate to the tank like an assassin for example. The raid group I'm in would love to get a well played assassin for hate transfer. Beastlords also don't have much in the way of deaggros which has caused me to be die more than any other character in our raid force. It's true that beastlords can heal themselves and their group but, if they've been doing dps, that will require a stance change which usually zeros out savagery (unless you first used savagery freeze which has a long recast). When I need to heal myself in a fight I usually use a health potion and hope the healer will finish any healing before I die. If I'm doing something where I expect to need to heal myself a lot I use spiritual stance even though it really lowers my dps. Beastlords usually do their best damage if they're using hard hitting abilities which require striking from stealth or from behind. That may require a lot of maneuvering during the fight if the tank can't manage to get everything turned. Other scouts such as assassin have to do that too. I think there are about 19 warder types including the insect and exotics. They're classified in general types (insect, bovid, amphibian, reptile, etc.). They have to be tamed first, but it isn't too bad in most cases once you get the hang of it. Once you get a warder of a certain type to level 6 (grandmaster+1) you get a new ability. By the way, the beastlord epic 2.0 is awesome. Not a lot to look at (doesn't show when not in combat) but very nice. EQ2Wire has some nice articles on beastlords if you want to know more.
choose BL. The only reason BL and assassin are close in raid parse is that the assassin spent 3x the effort that the BL does. This is not even joking, you can reference to the other post about the epic pet and the dps posted. the choice is even simpler than picking mcdonald or burgerking
I'd have to agree. I was asked if I wanted to play a bl a year ago and have enjoyed it ever since. We have great potential for just about every aspect of playstyle. Like others have mentioned you can heal, power feed, dps, even tank! With the lack of tanks on my server and overall frustration with agro management anyway I changed my spec up and have been tanking heroics for my guildies in my dps gear. I'm confident with a set of mitigation armor I could probably effectively raid tank t1 maybe t2 mobs too. The class really is a Swiss Army knife. If you do pick the class take time to learn a good rotation. You can pick someone's aa trees to copy but I'd suggest after you play it for a while spend an hour or two and make a build that fits your play style. Oh and when you are ready to level up warders go to high keep contested and try and get into a group with people farming tithe. You will yourself also end up building deity points (make sure you spend em) and if you jump to heal stance and spam our green heal/damage advantages your warders will level up in no time in a good killing group. This class is one of the harder ones to play well but it really is a lot of fun.
