Guild Chat - Episode 112

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.

The 112th episode of Guild Chat aired on October 22, 2021.

Transcription[edit]

Note: The text below was auto-transcribed and not reviewed. It could be that text appears for the wrong speaker.

Voice Over: Look around us. Your children would be trapped in the past if not for me. Their worlds are carved from the jade that I gave purpose. I promised them a future. A century of progress cannot end this way. I'll find a way to save us all.

Rubi Bayer: Hi, tyria. Happy Friday and welcome to Guild chat. I'm your host Ruby and today we're going to be going over the three new elite specializations for end of Dragons that we showed you earlier this week. We talked about the spectre, the untamed, and the mechanist, so we're going to do a deep dive into those today. UM.

Rubi: For those of you who just want the overview, the skills, the design, the lore, we're going to start with those. If you want the Super deep dive, if you want all the details, if you want to get your theory crafting started, stay tuned after we finish up with the overview of all three calls going to go back over them and do the deep dive. Look at all of the things and give you. All those details that you want so hang around afterwards, but we're going to start with the overview for all three of those and Rangers. Yes, we are going to talk about the. Range of pets, so that question is going to good and. Let's start with our dev guests. Thank you both for coming back again, Indigo.

Indigo Linde: Hi. Absolutely. I'm indigo. I am a narrative designer and writer on end of Dragons I helped with the elite specializations and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Rubi: But that's why I'm here today. Awesome and Cal.

Cal Cohen: Hi. Happy to be back. Come Cal game designer and work on P movie World and also did a lot of work. For Elite specs on Ender Dragons, so having you back here again, drinking some water on camera and I guess we go overly, especially if people actually want to see that.

Rubi: Yeah. Talk about those too.

Cal: I don't think so.

Indigo: Yeah, maybe.

Rubi: OK. Well, just for for like a little extra, can you spend some extra time, we'll talk about the elite specs as? Well, as the water drink I.

Cal: Mean I guess I guess so.

Rubi: Thank you everybody. Thank Cal for his sacrifice. Yeah, greatly appreciate it. Alright, let's get started with the specter. We'll jump right in. Indigo, why don't you give us the background on the specter?

Indigo: Yeah, absolutely. So the spectre is really fun because it's kind of like some of the other classes, this expansion, it's a, it's a total break away from the thief in that it's the first Thief support elite specialization. And now what they do is they harness shadows and they steal the shadows of their enemies and then use that to empower their allies and heal. Their allies and how this kind of started was when Carl was first building. This fact, he was inspired by a Guild Wars one factions character that some of you might be familiar with the henchman. And Pankau was an assassin, so kind of like the OG thief. I was a assassin, man. When I played factions myself.

Rubi: For you.

Indigo: I was they're so cool. Commercial. They're very cool. I know the Ritualists are probably all, like, cursing my name right now. But panic. Who should you have brought him with you to help save the Emperor and defeat, Shiro. What? We kind of did to expand on that lore was who was otherwise. If, like a A, the the assassin brutal fighter, what he kind of decided in that moment was he kind of had a revelation and he wanted to help support his ally. So what he did is he spent years after the year, the, the, the time span and factions learning to master this kind of shadow shroud to heal. His allies and he he didn't do the best job. He tried his very best. My, my day-to-day. But he the the product was sort of the shadow monstrosity that the specters that we now know in modern Canva used today to support their allies with ally targetable skills. And before I pass it to Cal we we there was a a tweet that you mentioned earlier this those the specters use a scepter which is kind of.

Rubi: Oh my gosh.

Indigo: A tongue twister and really cruel actually. Carl, that was.

Rubi: That was one. Of my favorite tweets, so whichever of you won, whichever of you made the terrible pun on Twitter about, you have heard of ELF on a shelf. What about Spectre with the scepter? Thank you. I I was mad about. How hard I laughed at that so.

Indigo: I I shake my head at you, whoever you are would approve it with approval, I guess.

Rubi: Because honestly, I love ridiculous puns, so I'm down. Thank you for that. You made your day.

Voice Over: Me too.

Indigo: Wake up shadows chapters. I will pass. It to Col.

Rubi: Take a quick look back at the Spector featurette and just give a give a refresh of what we showed earlier this week. Yeah.

Voice Over: All thieves know. The advantages of hiding in the shadows, but spectors know how. To wield them. They are masters of shadow magic, using their scepters to direct dark forces and debilitating enemies. In Shadow Shroud, Spectors can tether themselves to allies, granting them a protective shadow barrier.

Rubi: Right. So that is your Spector. Let's take a look at these skills with Kel.

Cal: Alright, thank you. So like as we've been mentioned before, we're going to start off the show with kind of like a more high level overview. Look at a lot of you know the skills and traits but not ramble on too much. We'll spare most of the chat from my excessive rambling and we'll come back to that later in the show. So Spector, we have a support thief. Scepter. Wells. Shadow shroud. That's it. There we go. Let's move. On to the OK. OK, give us.

Rubi: All right. No, that's not much.

Cal: A little bit more detail. That's that's fair. Yeah. So supportive. It's very it's kind of our first foray into how does the thief to support skills. And so one of the things, one of the places where it started. OK. Is with Ally targeting because we have obviously Thief character thief is much more of this. You know, assassinate, bursty or Romer type character where you're very focused on kind of eliminating a single target. So with Spectra became more of, well, what if we focus on supporting a single target and really kind of creating this more of like, you know, kind of like protect the king, it's going to be great for like World view world protect the commander have a bunch of specters all buffing up the commander. Giving them barrier and giving them healing and all that stuff. And so obviously we have Shadow Shroud which we'll talk about real quick First things first initiative, pool reduction down to 9 baseline, a lot of people speculated with that based off the UI changes that came in. Last patch or the patch before that I don't remember anymore. But yeah, virtuous initiative pool because we are giving access to shadow shroud, you know, five extra skills. A lot of powerful skills there, so a little bit of a trade off there. And so we're also replacing steel with siphon. And so instead of having that mobility aspect, we're going to have just a. Kind of a. Range ranged ability and this is our first look at ally targeting so you can see here on the skill fact different effect if I affect if I am attacking an enemy or targeting. And we're going to see more of this on the Scepter as well. That's going to create kind of these modal skills that enable the specter to either go and create this support character or you can just be more of this aggressor and we're going to see a lot of condi damage coming out from both Scepter and the. Shadow shroud. Kit. So siphon use it on enemy, apply some boons. We have some steel trades clip as well, so obviously the hearts all the steel. Right. Gives me some shadow force back and that's what happens to target enemy target an ally. This is going to give some barrier. This also applies, right? Well, even. And we'll talk about it a little bit more once. We get into the traits. So to build up Shadow Force you can either use it obviously siphon on the enemy every time you spend an initiative that's going to give you some amount of shadow force as well. Obviously I'm a cheater, I just have infinite amounts. Most players aren't gonna be able to do that. Hopefully not. No players. Will be able. To do that, but.

Rubi: Yeah, it's like.

Cal: Most hopefully I thought about a little bit more. Yeah. So anyway, so when I siphon on an ally, this is also going to be kind of like a marking mechanism where I've now marked this golem as my kind of priority. My priority support target, so when I enter shadow Shroud we're going to see that this tether gets created. Now I am tethered to this goal and I'm tethered to my ally and every time all of the the way that all these skills are going to work is that as I'm hitting enemies will come back. To these. Skill effects real quick as well as I'm hitting these enemies, doing some stuff, hitting some enemies. We're going to see. We're getting some barrier in there, getting some healing, getting some might applications. Basically, as IO thief go aggressive in Shadow Shroud, I am also supporting my allies, so that's kind of the way that thief is the support character. We still want to keep it as this very aggressive play style, but as you as you damage enemies as you attack enemies you're going to be empowering your tether. That line. If you want to, you can also switch the tethered target while you're in shroud, as long as siphon is on cooldown or yeah, as long as siphon is available. So just going to pop out and pop back in real quick, give myself some more shadow force and then we can go over the skills. So first up we have the auto TAC hotshot. This is just going to be damaging torment. This is giving my tethered target bite and also healing them. You can see our targets truck. So pretty significant healing if I'm hitting multiple targets. Moving into grasping shadows is another you know primarily ranged attack damage, torment, cripple. It's going to do Condi cleanse for my my tethered target and. Also heals as. Well, so again, attacking allies, attacking enemies while I support my allies. Moving into Don's repose is going to be able to visit mobility back. We lost access to steel, but now we have a nice little dash here. This also gives you barrier per targets truck and also gives you a tethered target barrier per perennial truck. And it also fears enemies, so pretty powerful skill dash. In get the fear off, get some healing to your ally, and that's going to set up eternal night as. Here's kind of. The big damage payoff of the shroud kit. This got this one more powerful damage ability to see chill weakness poison in there as well is also going to heal you and your tethered target per enemy struck again. Finally, we have mind shock is going to be a delayed trigger, a pretty long kind of set up into a nice little stunt there, and that is going to give you stability. It's going to give your tethered ally additional healing. So a lot of AOE here, a lot of a little bit of mobility, some good crowd control and a lot of again single target Allied support. Moving into the scepter, we're going to see again these kind of modal skills. So as I target my enemy or target my ally. So I used to go with being enemies, you know, but not. Really that just. Not not important, so you can see our. Attack is barrier. Or by an enemy auto attack. Does torment pretty straightforward? Next up, we have shadow saps. This is going. To be is going to give myself night when I'm hitting on me a little bit of self Buffalo so weakening and dealing some damage or I can give my ally might and. Also give them. You know a bit more barrier. So we have a lot of potential to just kind of use auto tech, use skill two and we'll see as we get into skill three more of this single target, this is going to be. I was spending a lot of initiative to keep this up. To kind of support that prior. Moving into the dual skills, so we have to we have pistol offhand and we have dagger off hand start with dagger off hand, Twilight combo again targeting enemy is going to be a kind of pretty straightforward damaging ability. A lot of conditions in there kind of a cool effect where you throw projectile you throw in the projectile and they kind of combine into a single projectile. And hit. The enemy or again hitting the ally, is going to do some barrier. To do some healing and swiftness in there as well. Over on the pistol side, we're going to have a combo scale here, starting with the measured shot. This is either going to blink away from your target or toward your target depending on so I blink away from any blink toward allies that's going to flip over into endless tonight. So it starts off with a. Little mode and that's going to combo into like this nice slow and torment damaging beam attack. Alternatively, using on your on your ally, you can blink toward them and then get the beam which does a nice amount of very large amount of quickness in addition to barrier in the region. So really powerful tool skills is a pretty big investment 6 initiative overall with the baseline 9 pool, most people probably going to take triggered freight line to get a little bit more endurance there a little bit more initiative there, apologies. And then we also, I guess we also have a stealth attack because we're thief. So if you stealth up and you get access to Shadow Squal. It's going to be kind of this rapid fire flurry attack. So we see some poison in there targeting it underneath and again targeting an ally. We're going to get a nice amount of healing. Notably that when you use a stealth tack on an ally, you're going to get revealed. This is kind of an important note to make sure that you couldn't just infinitely use this. It's kind of the same mechanic hitting, and we're really hitting an ally. We'll also reveal you. And finally, we have the wells. So this the wells give a little bit more access to AOE. The cool thing about the Keef wells is that they're all shadow steps, so you'll teleport location, teleport tool location, and then drop the well effect at that local. You know, we gave a lot of mobility to a lot of classes for this for this expansion we saw will Bender get a lot of mobility, a lot of dashes, blades for and got a blink spoilers both untamed and mechanists also now have shadow steps just framing some context here so you know Thief felt really bad. Everyone else getting mobility, so we just gave all the mobility, all of these, all of these wells are now teleports. So the actual well effects, nothing too crazy. Honestly, well bloom, obviously, you know it's going to be a heel. It's also going to cripple cripple enemies.

Voice Over: You get home already.

Cal: Well, the bounty you see a lot of boons on this skill fact. It is one per pulse. It is just going to prioritize giving you books that you don't already have. And if you do already have every book on you, it's going to give you might. Full of tears. Nothing too crazy is going to be poured in, getting nice AOE damage. While silence. We have a little bit of a. Daze here. Got some days on that day's pulse. Also, it's going to anytime it interrupts an enemy it is going to apply condition. And finally, we're going to have kind of the condition half of the damage. Well, we have a well that gives. You unique conditions that you don't already have, and if you already have every. Condition. It'll just give you torment. Finally, we have the elite skill Shadow Fall. This is going to be a teleport in, and it's going to create this kind of a wee pole. It's kind of similar to gravity wall, but it's going to be like more of the pole pole pole. So really big kind of playmaking opportunity to really engage, get that big CAC set yourself up. Set up your allies. Do a quick run through for the traits starting off. Some people reminding me that we should probably hover the minor trait because it does have useful text even if doesn't actually really do anything. So there it is. There's your tooltip. Moving into dark century, this is the Rottweiler that we saw throughout the barrier applications. Anytime you give an ally barrier, you're going to give them rattler venom, which is torment on hit. And it's also going to be kind of, here's the healing bonus really identifies this as a support character. Increase your healing. Next up, we have Tanaka's ambition. There's going to be a little bit more barrier plays well with wall of venom and also just barrier is a good support thing to have. So whenever you use a stealth attack, you hit an enemy with a stealth attack, you will get barrier for yourself anytime you stealth yourself. Or an or an ally. You will then give them barrier. Now just kind of speed run through these since we'll come back and talk to them. We'll talk about them a little bit later in the show. Second opinion here, some healing power bonus healing power for receptor and a little bit more for condition damage per condition damage stats. So playing doctor, potentially a really good stat combination here. Next up, we have shallow grave. This is kind of the escape death mechanic that we've seen on a few traits in the past where this is going to be for your tethered ally. If you're in Shadow Shroud and your ally would die instead, you will consume all your shadow force and heal them instead. This will also kind of have that unholy sanctuary mechanic where if you would die with enough shadow force. It will enter shroud instead. And finally, we have consumed shadows, which is just going to be an as when you leave shroud consume the rest of your shadow force and AOE heal and we'll show off the kind of. Highest potential of this trait a little bit later in the show, cause potentially a very large yield. On the master tier slot, we're going to see a lot of ways to get Shadow Force. So Larson Stormont, here's your aggro, trade, torment, damage and shroud gain whenever you apply torment. Amplified siphoning here in the center is going to improve siphon, so either more shadow force when hitting an enemy, or increased barrier when supporting an ally. And finally, we have traversing dusk. Here's the well trade. It's also just going to be heal on Shadow step, gain some shadow force on shadow step and also wells now give alacrity on the initial pulse. It's a little bit of AOE alacrity in there for this specialization. Master slot. Sorry with strengths of shadows, this is again going to be kind of the more aggressive option. A little bit of damage reduction in there as well, but here's some expertise. Here's some Rob Volvent bonuses so a little bit more damage potential there. Next up, we have hungering darkness. This is going to be a more of a single target supporting thing. Where you're going to pull conditions from your outlet, from your tethered target, and also cleanse condition from yourself. So pretty powerful effect there that's going to heal your ally per condition clean. And finally, we have access to shade. Steph, this one's going to be kind of a mix. It's going to give you a little bit more personal variety when you siphon an enemy. And also it's going to allow you to revive. Revive enemies with siphon instead of just applying barrier and healing, and the final note here is that if you shadow step while you have barrier, it will consume your barrier and give that an AOE radius to allies. So kind of that AOE support again kind of across the bottom we see a lot of AOE port. So that's kind of the Super speed run version of the Spectre. Obviously we have a bit more to talk about, go into a few more details later in the show, but for now we're going. To hop over and talk about the untamed next.

Voice Over: Ancient forces of nature dwell with an equivalent, and the untamed have learned to channel them through the bond they. Share with their pets. The earth shaking hammer blows. Keep enemies dazed and off balance while their pets attacks are bolstered by raw primal energy. The power of nature flows back and forth between the untamed and their animal companion, empowering their killing blows.

Rubi: All right. I appreciate so much that, Cal said. We are going to hop over to the Bunny Thumper, and I didn't know if that was on purpose. But I appreciate it, Kelsey.

Cal: Not planned. Subconscious. There it is good.

Rubi: All right, so the untamed is the new Ranger elite specialization for end of Dragons. And we'll let indigo give us an intro and talk about what's behind this.

Indigo: Yeah, absolutely. So the the untamed, otherwise known as the Bunny Thumper is we're just not going to. Stop saying. Is that we cannot say it. Is the new Ranger a Leech back and they they wield a hammer. They're a frontliner. They're really brutal and vicious, and they they basically share this sort of corruptive, primal energy that they pass back and forth between themselves and their pet. So it's a very bonded shared experience that you, you switch back and forth. Really ideal timing to just have the most devs. Getting attacks and what this kind of derives from is this is our last fact that really gave us an opportunity to dive into ancient camp and lore and some of you guys might be familiar with the name Argas, who was the the spiritual reincarnation of equivalent forest. He was basically the the Warren of Warren wardens and when Shiro. The gotcha came back and kind of inflicted the affliction. I've realized it's a very funny way. To word that on on. It's not wrong, it's correct, but it's it's. That was silly, but when that when the affliction was rolling through Cantha Ergos was a victim to that and became mad and corrupted and corrosive, and he disappeared for a while and was long thought dead but then reappeared and took over an amber mine. And basically. All of the. Flora and wildlife in the area became mad and was dying. And twisted and all of the wardens in the area are also hostile and they they had once worked together with the kurzick or the. 6 to protect the back of old Forest. But now they were now attacking their once friends and basically the untamed were individuals that learn to harness this power and wield it to conquer their enemies, basically. So this what happens when they wield it, if they're, they become unleashed. And they get really growly and primal and that that energy is passed back. 4th and before I pass it to Cal though, we do have an opportunity to tell you about the pets and the the 1st and we have 4 new pets coming and the first of them are Guild Wars ones. Fan will be really excited to know is the Phoenix. The phoenix is. I mean look at that guy. Look at that. Good boy. He's.

Rubi: Love it. A very good boy.

Indigo: He's a very good boy. The Phoenix is beautiful. One of my very favorites. We also have the white tiger a wallow and my very personal favorite, a baby siege turtle. Yes. Oh my. God, I can't take it. But before I gush too. Much I will pass it over to. Cal to talk about the Bunny bumper.

Rubi: Untamed. Whatever. We're just going to have to roll it.

Cal: Funny, something quick note about the pets. The pets won't be in for beta. There will be in for launch, but we do want to kind of reveal since talking about the Ranger release, but we want to talk about what pets will be coming. So Bunny Thumper, obviously it's kind of like an in joke. Anyone who played dollars one like I played roller one a lot. A lot of people in the studio played goes one a lot so. And we think Hammer Ranger, just a natural understanding. The first thing to think about is money. Thumper. For anyone who wasn't super familiar with that will also give the speed run overview of the Buddy Thumper, which was kind of this. Ranger warrior hybrid because back here is 1 you can actually do a profession. So Rangers would secondary class warrior in order to get access to Hammer, Bash and some other, you know crushing build, crushing build name. I'm just going to get completely trash bug over one fence, but I'm pretty sure that's right, crushing blow. But you go in. Get those hammer skills to set up both kind of create this more aggressive very. Kind of damaged CC focused, aggressive character that played really well off the pet because a lot of the pet skills care about, you know, like hitting a knockdown target. So you would invest into the warrior class to get access to these knockdowns and create kind of that. Ranger warrior hybrid. It got nicknamed the Bunny Thumper because backing Gillers won, the Ranger had a really funny animation when you ran around with the hammer equipped, and it kind of did a little hop so nicknamed Bunny Thumper. We thought about obviously it comes to mind when we. When we could talk about Hammer Ranger at any point in time, Bunny Thumper, maybe not the most official name, so we kind of couldn't name the elite spec Bunny Thumper as much as we talked about it. Yeah, we did get a nice little reference in here with skill 5, which is called dump. Very nice fun name name there, but the general idea of the untamed.

Indigo: It was on the table.

Cal: Is we're trying to create this more. We do want to get some of these same. Kind of feelings from, like, money Thumper. Having that really good pet interaction that gameplay is like combing with your pet. Was something we really want to get with the untamed, making sure that we still have that aggressive kind of identity in there, but we also wanted to create this kind of bruiser character make give Ranger the opportunity to have more of this frontline bruiser character while also keeping some aggressive nature. And that's what kind of created the unleash mechanic which is kind of the stance swap between. Offense and defense. So right now I'm actually in the unleashed state for the Ranger and the first thing we'll call out here is that while you are unleashed, your pet is kind of in its base form. But we're down here. You can see that we've kind of exposed all of the pet skills as actual, you know, key bindable actions for the Ranger them. So all the tail swipe enjoyers in chat you are now availed. You are now allowed to cast tail swipe whenever you so choose instead of relying on your Drake to kind of use it correctly. And this is really going to allow you to kind of set up combos between yourself and the Ranger.

Rubi: I just want to point out there's a lot of tail swipe. Fans in chat right now.

Cal: I I can imagine. Shout out to all the people who like those I love, Taylor Swift.

Rubi: It's happening.

Cal: Yeah. So obviously like more direct control means you don't have to worry about like interrupting your pet when it's going to be something dumb. You can just always know that I'm going to create, I'm going to set up a combo because maybe I do a knock down and. Then my pets always going to be able to capitalize on that really. I mean, I think it just feels a lot better to have more direct control over that. So it's something we want to do for this. So the next thing we see is that when you kind of when you unleash your pet, we see a couple of things flipped over. We saw some of the hammer skills flip over, which we'll get to real quick. But first we'll talk about these. Kind of new. Pet skills. There's three new pet skills. These are kind of. I mean, they're kind of the pet actually. Does the attack here, but they are more Ranger abilities that are cast around the pet location. So kind of like scourge. Is where the pet is. The conduit for this this attack. And so the first thing we'll see on venomous outburst is we actually also gave a shadow step to Ranger pets, because why not? And we were already giving shadow steps to pretty much everyone, so venomous outburst. It starts with a shadow step in, and then there's a quick poison AOE. And the cool thing about all these kind of unleashed pet skills is that they also get a bonus. Again, CC targets, so if you hit your enemy with thumb knock down, there's a little there's some vulnerability on there as. Next up, blending vines. This is going to be an AOE boon rip and then again if you hit a crowd control target, this is going to also then slow your target. And finally, we have in developing haze, which is this nice projectile heat bubble, little poison field in there. So you can get a nice a little bit of area weakness if you want to and if that hits the C target it's going to chill. So this Rep cool down a little bit as well. So Next up we will talk about the hammer. So as we see with the unleash kind of unleash stamp swap, this offense defense toggle that. We kind of trying to do we see that two through 5, all flip over and the one skill doesn't change because just a pretty generic hammer auto attack, damage, damage, damage doesn't need to do anything too crazy here. But the flavor of these hammer skills is that they're actually the same skill, but a different kind of output of the same skill. So if we start off here with wild swing when I'm not in the unleashed state, we'll do an A little bit of damage and cripple. Then I hop over to unleashed. The cool down is shared. That's pretty important. We didn't want to just double the amount of skills on hammer, so you will have to pick and choose your kind of choose your spots, but the unleashed version of wild Swing does not do any cripple. It does a lot more damage and also will increase damage against crowd control targets. So then moving on to overbearing smash, so the whole idea again kind of that defense versus offense a lot more CC and disruption on the baseline version of the scale and then a lot more damage coming out from the unleashed version skills. So we'll just run through these real quick overbearing smash is kind of this two-part attack where you do a very quick initial base keep potentially interrupt in there. And follow up with this leak. For a little bit of longer days to then set up any CC combos that you're looking for. You get to savage, Shockwave, this is a kind of three-part expanding small, larger largest Shockwave skill that's going to do a different condition in mode on the on the smallest radius than weakness and vulnerability as it gets a little bit wider. And as mentioned before, scale 5 is just going to be. Thump. Very streamlined, fun little skill name here for just the PBO. Knock down skill and that's going to set up obviously the the CC bonuses and all of the pet abilities here. And then also on the unleashed side, we already saw wild swing gets some bonus value unleashed. Savage Shockwave is also going to get. Damage bonus against disabled foes. This is also going to get increased damage per condition on your target, so we saw a lot of condition application from both the pet skills and some. Of the. Some of the hammer skills on the base side, so unleashed Savage Shockwave, potentially the largest damage potentially dealing scale for this. Overburning smash a little bit different. We're not have any days in here. The quick attack here is still going to be potentially a nice reactive blind, so you can kind of blind an incoming attack and then that will follow up with a more powerful attack that is going to remove boons from your targets. And finally, we have unleashed thump. There's going to be a lot more damage and still kind of trying to be that setup skill even though it's not a C so it's going to give you might have. Per target truck so Cassidy could get a bunch of might and go through kind of use the rest of your abilities and deal a lot of potential damage there. We'll talk. We'll talk a little bit about a little bit more about like what the general. Ideas behind this kind of like shared cooldown and the offensive and stuff a little bit? Later, but for now we'll just stick with the the high level kind of skills demo that we've we've shown off and move. Into the cantrips here. So first up, we have perilous gift. This is going to be the heal skill and the I guess the common themes we're going to see in the cantrips we're going to see some defensive stuff we're going to see a little bit of mobility, but a lot of defense and a lot of crowd control kind of give the tools needed to this. Character to be that frontline aggressive. Bruiser or kind of more aggressive damage dealer, so starting off the perilous gift this is going to be kind of that ignored death mechanic that we've seen in a few places in the past. So for a few seconds you will not be able to go below 1 HP and as you saw, once that buff expired, it drained health from your pet and healed you some amount. So you're going to want to make sure to kind of make sure your pet is healthy. The counterplay there is going to be. Hitting the. Pet and because of that, this is going to prevent you from swapping pets. Well, it's active, so you can't just swap it the last minute and get kind of your full health pet for full value. Next up, we're going to see exploding spores, so this is kind of a cool ability where it's going to be a kind of a ring of these spores that are just kind of a we roll and that's like a cripple now. It used to do volume, but that was we had involved in some of the other skills. So not as cripple. And so we see here if all of these floors hit the same target, that target will also get knocked down. So a little bit of a bonus for lining this up really nicely or potentially chaining it off of another CC, you'll get a nice little knock down there. Otherwise, it's just more of that AOE damage and a little bit of cripple. Next up, we have mutate conditions. There's going to be a big Condi cleanse removes all conditions from yourself, but it's also going to give you vulnerability per condition. Cleanse and so potentially a lot of bullying, but it will be that kind of massive condo cleanse that you really want to see as this kind of frontline melee character. Next up, we have the shadow step that we kind of spoiled previously. Unnatural traversal. It's going to be a blink in a little bit of a vulnerability. That's pretty much it. If you hit anything, you're going to get 50% cooldown refunds as you're going to incentivize going in as opposed to using it to. Get out of fights. And last up, we'll have a little bit more CC here with natures binding. This is going to be a kind of PDA we attack that creates these cages. Similar mechanic that we've seen on Dragon Hunter Longbow where it is this kind of area denial cage that you can't just walk through unless you happen to have something like stable. And finally, we're going to have the elite skill, forest fortification, forest fortification, and this is the big defensive round of the kit. We see resolution, resistance, stability, damage reduction. And the kind of cool thing about this skill is that anytime you hit an enemy while it's active, it's going to refund to pull down a little bit. So really going to incentivize getting those, getting into those larger fights and it's going to be potentially lower cool down high defense value skill. Moving into the traits, we'll just run through these real quick starting off across the top, we're going to see a lot of actually start with the minors. That's wave start, natural fortitude, game vitality, Frontliner bruiser makes sense grandmaster trait of the untamed. This is going to be kind of the character defining unleash the. Defining mechanic of how unleashed functions of while you your range are unleashed, your outgoing damage will be increased, but you also take more damage while your pet is unleashed, you will deal less damage, but you also take less damage. So again that offense defense toggle. And along the top, we'll see some traits that give you value for controlling enemy. Here we see condition application depending on target. Here's going to depending on unleashed state rather sorry. Here we see Moon application. Depending on your unleashed state and the Grand Master trade is going to be cooldown reduction every time you crowd control in a target. Across the middle, we're going to see some kind of more general value traits cleansing unleashed. This is going to be cleanse. Conditions when you swap just another solid source of condition removal, bolstering unleash. Here's some more boons when you unleash, so it's going to again going into defense I get protection going into offense. I get my makes sense. And finally, restorative strikes. This is going to be potentially a powerful sustained trade. Heal yourself as a percentage of your outgoing damage, so the more you hit people, the more you get healed and you can again as enemies kind of dodge evade. It's going to reduce the value of that trait, so some good counterplay there as well. And then finally, we're going to have a couple of pet related things across the bottom starting off with blinding outburst. This is going to augment the venomous outburst that we saw earlier. That's going to make it apply blind in addition to other effects. And then next step is corrupting vines is going to change rending vines into a boon, corrupt as opposed to a boon Rep these guys. Boom. So you can't really tell but a. Little bit more. Value there because it also be condition application. On top of the removal. And finally, the Grandmaster damage trade here. Ferocious symbiosis. This is going to be kind of this pet and Ranger interplay, as while each other are hitting enemies, you're going to be giving each other stacks of this this buff, which is damage and movement speed. So potentially some very. Fast movement, I guess, and obviously damages what people care about here. It's kind of a minor callback to rampages, one different mechanic, but it was a was the elite spill elite skill of the game was one buddy pumper, which was that increase attack speed, which in this case we converted damage and also move speed. So there's the speed run of the untamed. We'll come back to it again and talk a little bit more later in the show, but we're going to move on to the mechanist next.

Voice Over: No one makes friends like a mechanist. With the power and beauty of jade tech. They never fight alone. They summon A customized J tech battle to fight alongside in combat, calling the shots with powerful mech command skills and Mace attacks. Whether it's melee, ranged, or group support, adapt to any situation like choosing the traits that best suit your situation, this engineer Mac. Is truly the all-purpose multi tool. Of any Guild Wars 2 squad.

Rubi: All right. Welcome back, engineer mates. You were so patient. Yours was the last release. We hope it was worth the wait. We're not going to make you make you wait any longer to hear all the details and.

Indigo: To go take it away? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the mechanist is pretty self-explanatory. I mean, we've seen the video, it's cool as heck. It's really neat. And one of the reasons I especially love this.

Cal: Losing weight.

Indigo: US, is it it kind of embodies the heart of modern cantha, and I actually will keep this blurb pretty short and sweet to keep some secrets in our pockets still. But the the mechanist. Basically, our lore behind this is that the engineer has crafted and built their very own jade tech battle mech. Which is just. The coolest thing it functions very similarly to a Ranger pet and that they aid you in battle. You get to name it yourself. There's a I'll pass it to call in just a moment. You you can customize like the skills that you have it. So it's it. It feels very your own and kind of the the emotional bond between you and your your. Mac is going to be a lot similar to like timing and coffee. I is how I like to look at it. So really sweet, wholesome. But it's just the coolest thing and it and it really does like well, a lot of our classes dive into the history of cantha. This one really looks forward.

Voice Over: So good.

Indigo: To, I mean look. Cantha been up to for the last about 200 years. I don't know.

Rubi: And so much to find out.

Indigo: We have a lot to find out, but without further ado, just because we'll keep those secrets in our pocket, I will pass it to Cal to kind of talk about all the fun things. That we can do with the Mac Cal.

Rubi: Will keep no.

Cal: Secrets. No, you know, maybe I'll keep a couple of secrets. I've got to keep my advanced technology on the down low so I can win in ranked, because otherwise I can't.

Rubi: Ohh no.

Cal: Good call. Let me just cleaning up some UI elements here real quick. I remembered before, but not this. Time all right. Mechanist, I was wondering why it was just a, you know, close up in my face, which no one really wants to see. So luckily we got that figured out and we're here with the mechanic. So some notable differences from Ranger Pets. Obviously it's it's kind of in that same vein where you have like this kind of companion. That's going to have some damage. Going to have some skills going to run around with you and attack enemies. But it's not always active, so you see here starting off, I do not have the mech active. It's going to be available via crash down. Obviously the trade off for this character is there's no tool belt skills because we're going to have some other uses for. Those key buttons. So I use crashed. Down Mecca peers launched some launch some dudes. I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually do a launching competitive mode because we were really worried about. That, but it will still do a little bit. Damage and so First things first, see the neck is. I mean, obviously the neck is super cool. It kind of zooms. Where is. It going whatever he wants. And you know.

Rubi: He does in fact zoom around.

Cal: You know, Ranger players are used to this. Sometimes the pet AI kind of has a mind of its own, has some ideas so the Mac kind of has the same stuff.

Indigo: He's showing off.

Cal: Hold on.

Rubi: It's a good time to point out that we're still working on this game. It's not out for.

Cal: So kind of the unique thing here we see a similar layout to actually have the untamed have the skills set up where we have access to three different kind of command skills and these are defined by what actually by what traits you select. And we'll talk about this a little bit more. But you see as I'm switching out these traits, these skills are actually changing F1F2F. And these traits also have other effects and they will kind of be defining towards the play style that you're looking for with we're going to see some amount of Connie damage and see some more power damage or crowd control. We're also going to see a bit more of the support stuff as an option as well. So there's the opportunity to kind of define the mech and how you want, how you want it to play. In addition, it's going to have a couple of baseline skills. There's a jade Stephen, there's rocket punch also has a pretty. Standard auto attack chain. Nothing too crazy outside of that, we're going to see. We'll run through the kind of nine different mix skills that you can have access. To here real quick. So starting off with the top line of trades, which is a lot more condition damage focused, starting off with rolling smash so makes sense coming back. It's going to do bleeding and some damage in there as well. Next up we're going to have discharge array. This is going to be more of a pulsing effect around the neck that's going to be confusion, a little bit of slow, a little bit of damage. So again more of that. Condition damage style of thing, and finally we're going to have the jade mortar. This is a pretty long range skill. Nice little kind of ballistic projectile there. We see days burning some good damage. Also an explosion that's relevant. We'll talk about that a little bit more as we get into more. Trade stuff. So there's kind of the the Connie damage side of things move bottom bottom line. Low traits are going to be more power damage, a bit more crowd control as well. So instead of F1, we're going to have access to spark revolver and it's going to be a long range kind of channeled, almost like that kind of rapid fire style of attack in this case is going to be piercing some good damage. We saw vulnerability that's coming from the trait, which we'll talk about later. And then just, you know, solid long range damaging ability for the Mac. Next up we have core reactor shot. This nice, very deliberate. Well, well defined charge up into that nice energy ball that does a nice some CC in there. Good damage. That's also an explosion. And finally, we're going to have. Sky Circus is coming from the Grandmaster trade here, and this is going to be kind of a two-part attack where the next going to jump into the air, fire some projectiles, and it's also going to come crashing down. And I wasn't close enough to my enemies, but it will come crashing down and kind of launch. Launch all of the nearby enemies in the radius. So potentially you know multiple crowd control skills here, some good power damage as well, a solid option for the Mac. Then finally, along the middle here, we're going to see more of that kind of more support style of gameplay. Starting off with the F1 skill, F1 skills actually still going to be a bit more damage, but it is going to have weakness. Instead of we saw, you know, condition, damage or just more damage. Here we have explosive and knuckle. It's going to have this nice little dash in get some weakness in there and a nice damaging attack. Next up, we'll have crisis zone. This is going to be self cleanse for the mech because it doesn't really have too much content removal, so a little bit of confluence there, but also some very good boons applied in a radius. Here it is, region, plot and alacrity, of course, is one of the premier boons that you're going to be looking for. And finally coming out from the Grand Master, sober gonna have barrier burst and that's going to be more of like a channeled ability, some nice pulsing, pulsing barrier, a lot of might, a lot of fury A. Lot of bigger. And some more alacrity that's actually coming from another trait that we'll talk about as well. But there's kind of like the support kit of the Mac, and so you can kind of. Mix and match. These as you choose, depending on what you're looking for, maybe for your support back. You want a little bit more crowd control, so you go and take, you know, core reactor shot instead. Outside of that, it's very much like a Ranger pet. It does kind of. I mean it exists in the world. If it dies, it will go away. There's only one of them. There's no really pet. Swap, pet, swap mechanic, or anything. The cool down here is very long on death. So obviously these numbers are still things that we're going to be looking at and tuning to figure out kind of what the right, what the right for the mechanism. But we didn't want it to be always, always accessible like with Ranger Pets wanted to create kind of difference. How does the mech. What is the mech pet character look like as opposed to the Ranger instead of just making it, you know a Ranger or a better Ranger, we wanted to kind of have the difference there. So we'll talk. Obviously there's a lot more to talk about with the kind of the trade side once we get there, but we'll move into the the Mace skills. So the Mace, it's kind of this a little bit of a hybrid. There's a very small amount of support stuff going on here, but there's also some pretty good county damage. So you'll receive the auto attack, confusion, confusion and then some AOE barrier on the 3rd. Right there. Skill two, we have energizing slam. Here's a little bit of mobility. Jump in. Apply some volm. Deal some damage. Get some bigger solid skill. And finally you have Rocket FIST prototype. Here's a little bit of a range of projectile attack. Get some more burning in there. Get a very short stone and then also just some solid damage. Of course, always have always have to deal some damage with these skills. And finally, we'll talk about the utility skills. So most importantly, engineer finally has access to signets and is now an exclusive member of the five Signet club. Because only you know a handful of classes have access to both the heel, Signet and an elite signet while also having all signets. So now you can role play as your 5 Second Warrior, but now you're an engineer and it turns out you also have a cool Mac. So it's even cooler than five 2nd warrior. But we'll just run through these real quick. Obviously, segments have a passive and active component. Here's the deal segment. It's kind of like a heel segment heels, heel pulse and then active heels. This is obviously for both you and your neck important to kind of give a little bit of sustain for the neck. So it does just fall over with kind of no access to any amount of healing. And then. So again, nothing too crazy. It's healing signal. Next up we have barrier Signet. Here's some damage reduction on the passive. And this is also going to create a projectile height Dome. So there's a couple of these signals that interact with the mech. In this case, it creates the Dome on the Mac. If the mech is not active, it'll just create the Dome around myself. And you also see we're getting a little bit barrier. In there as. Well, Next up you have 4 Signet. Here's the thumb break. Always useful. This is also going to create kind of a knockback region around either yourself. Or your Mac. And I mean that's pretty much it. Nothing too crazy. Get some cripple in. There as well. Next up we have shift Signet. Here's the shadow step that again kind of spoiled a little bit. Both you and your Mac will teleport to the targeted area and that guys, sometimes the MEC is, you know, doing its own thing. It doesn't want to teleport, it wants to use this cool jets. And kind of. Fly over here instead, but a lot of the time.

Indigo: Yeah, yeah.

Cal: Will you know teleport with? And then finally, we have superconducting Signet. Here's condition damage buff and it's also going to be kind of this a weak condition field. Here's some weak. Here's some volume. Here's some confusion again around the neck if it's active, otherwise it's going. To be around yourself. And then finally we have overclock Signet. The passive here is that your other signet recharge is going to be reduced. So a little bit of value for pressing those. Alternatively you can activate it to command your mic to use the Jade Buster cannon, super Cool beam attack, get some burning in there. Obviously a lot of damage, just a nice. Actually got stuck in the animation. That's hilarious. Never seen that before. Cool, but yeah, you. Know Big Elite scale mega tech? Super cool. And also, if the neck is not active at walls, just some in your neck. You actually need to. Show that right now. So then coming. Back to the traits. Just going to run through these real quick obviously have like a secondary effect in addition to kind of defining what your Mex skills are. So starting across the top, we'll see that kind of condition damage build coming out where your Mac is going to apply bleeding on hit and well that's pretty much it. Yes, we probably start with the miners. I always forget every single time. It's always like maybe we. Start with a minor traits, probably a good idea. So one thing, one unique aspect that we're going to see on all these traits is that the mech inherits stats from the engineer or from the mechanist rather. So as I build, if I build the zerker gear, I'm going to give more power precision ferocity to my Mac. So that's kind of a cool disconnect from Ranger pets, where they're kind of always Ranger. Pets are always. Have their predefined stats. Where's the Mac you're going to say? OK, I'm building berserk or super aggressive. My Mac is also super aggressive, but if I build something like minstrel, super defensive, then my Max going to also be super defensive. So we see toughness of it being inherited by the minor traits here. These also define those kind of baseline skills that we saw. The Mac using. Then we talked about this one a little bit already bleeding on hit. The Next up is conductive alloys. This is going to be condition damage and expertise inherited by the MEC. Again, here's your condition bill for the Mac. And finally we have Jade Dynamo. This is kind of a two-part thing. This super powerful thread here because it's actually going to actually going to allow your Mac to inherit. From the explosives trait line, there's obviously a lot going on here, so we'll save that for the latter half of the show. But other than that, it is going to be just a kind of solid value trade next going to expose another tax. And if your Mac is not active, it will do a little supporting area area strike. And as we go across the middle, we're going to see again instead of the bleeding on hit, we're going to do a we might so. Again, more of. That blood support and then the frame in the center is going to be inheriting concentration and healing power. Again, support, support, support. Also getting alacrity whenever you apply barrier, so a lot more lucky potential there as well. And finally, the grandmaster slot here is going to have obviously give you barrier burst, but it's also going to have your Mac do a pulsing AOE barrier on kind of an interval that's also going to be alacrity if you have the channeling conduits. And finally, across the bottom, we're going to see more of that power, power damage and crowd control. So here we have volman hit and there's the power version of instead of bleeding instead of might we instead do gold enemies. And kind of the same vein we have here is the stat inheritance trait on the master tier, power and ferocity all inherited by your Mac in good quantities. And finally, we're going to have access to J Met Core J drive which is going to be kind of the Signet bonus trait here, which is Signet passes are better. They're also going to maintain that Signet passive while they're on cooldown. And this is also going to have a bonus effect where the mech will do stuff when it's not active on the field, so a lot more to talk about. We kind of super high level speed run as with everything we already did to kind of keep these a little bit more concise kind of spare. The majority of people from my excess rambling. Which we will now. Well, we'll we'll hop back to Ruby for a little bit of a wrap up here, and then we'll come back to plenty of excessive rambling for all of these elite. Specializations good?

Rubi: I just want to make sure we are very clear that the excessive rambling from Cal is very welcome. Never apologize for that because you're fantastic at it and chat loves it, so we're going to have more rambling in just a few minutes. This was your speed. Run through the overview of the specter for the thief. The untamed for the Ranger and the mechanist for the engineer. Those are the final three reveals for end of Dragons elite specializations for the classes. You can try them yourself starting next week, October 26th. On Tuesday is our next Elite specialization beta. Event it is open to all of you with a Guild Wars two account. All you have to do is log into the game after the event starts and you will find some beta character slots there waiting for you that goes on until Saturday the 30th of October, so you're going to have plenty of time to get in there and play around. Logging in for the beta gets you something else as well. Deux Racer gave us. Another DX racer Pro Racer gaming chair. Every day you log into the game during the beta event is an entry to win that chair, so good luck to all of you and end of Dragons comes out of February, February of 2022. And you can pre purchase now to get some cool events to get some cool items for your accounts. All right, we have more.

Cal: I was pulling up the stream on my. Phone probably heard that so.

Rubi: It was like I am one of the people who. Heard it so me. My own voice was off to my right and it was incredibly disorienting.

Cal: Very, very sorry. I'm going to get. I'm going to get some crap for that after the show, I'm sure.

Indigo: That's OK. It's like it's OK.

Rubi: You need to drink the water to make yourself. Feel better about it? Yes, so.

Cal: Good call.

Rubi: All right, we have another end of Dragons preview coming up for you November 12th. So put that one on your calendar. We're gonna give you a tour of echo vault, not a whole tour. We're not going to spoil everything. And before that, we have extra life. We are going to be streaming it for 24 hours here to benefit Children's Miracle Network Hospital on November 5th and 6th. So Cal is going to get super deep dive looking into all of the granular theory crafting on these in just a couple of minutes. So stick around and we will be right back. And we are back. I'm glad you guys enjoyed the end of Dragon's music that you were listening to during the break. I want to take a quick second to congratulate some winners of a contest that four fans by fans had for Guild Wars two merch recently. This was our fan forge Dragon. And the winners been announced, the grand prize winner Wish and the runners up. Gentle giant lahala. I hope I'm saying that right. And trist. Congratulations to all of you who won. Thanks to everybody who entered. And all of you can look at the merch that won in January of 2022 when it comes up, they are getting that made. And spun up. So let's get back into the elite specializations with Cal. Cal. Are you ready? We got a Mario.

Cal: I mean, hopefully it won't go like. Too long. Obviously, we want to talk about, so we want to go a little bit more in depth about some things we don't just want. To sit here and talk. I mean, maybe we do, but it'll it'll go just long enough.

Rubi: It's like a. Wizard it's not too long, it's not too short. Perfect.

Cal: Yeah, I mean, it probably will go way too long, but we'll be here for a little bit talk a. Little bit more. About stuff and you know extra lights coming up have some overnight shift, so if anyone wants to chill and talk about elite specs for four hours in the middle of the night, we could probably do that too. So well, you know, we don't need to talk about everything here. Let's do it.

Rubi: You have that extra night, you have that extra. Shift cool.

Cal: Yeah, yeah. I mean we we don't need to talk about extra life. We're totally just off the rails here. Stephanie's not in the room right now, so. We're just, like, completely off strip.

Rubi: He's been a prospecting. We're going to be in search. OK, talk about elite specs. Go.

Cal: Yeah, yeah, extra life is in the future. Let's talk about Elite specs. Yeah, Elite specs, elite specs, but yeah, so, you know, we'll talk about a few more things. We won't be here too much longer. You know, we have a few things that talk about on for each spec, but not it's not going to be a marathon or anything. It's just coming back to this vector. I mean, we kind of super high level described everything where it's like OK, it's support thief. What does that even mean? It's kind of like an interesting design design problem. It's like, OK, we want to do specter. We have the idea of Spectre support. The what does that actually look like? So we talked about, you know, single target is kind of what thief does already. So leaning in that single target for some of these key skills is kind of the cool idea. We still want to keep the aggressive option. But then having this kind of modal, these modal skills on Scepter is really cool because you can kind of balance between the two. You could throw some projectiles here and then once you get into like the triple chop portion of this, you can switch over here and still I mean that's not too exciting but. There's just some. It's really interesting to see, like, how players are going to take advantage of ally targeting. Because this is a brand new. And so it was kind of an interesting balance point when we're looking at the looking at the specter of, well, how do we balance the single target support against kind of all the AOE supports, we look something like Tempest, look things. Like Druid, where you have much more AOE potential for these heels and like the Buffs that are applied, or a specter, we're focusing on a single target. We really want to try to. I don't know if we quite got there for the betas, but really push the limit of OK if we're only supporting one target instead of five, we can really. Go crazy with some of these numbers and I mean, you see endless night here. This is what, 14 seconds of quickness with no boom duration. And this is this is actually secretly an AOE skill because it's a beam. So if you line it up, well, let's come over here and you know, you can hit multiple targets with this. Give a bunch of. Barrier give a bunch of quickness. Very powerful. So a lot of Rottweiler venom. So, I mean, we're we definitely see Ellis Knight as one of. The strongest skills on the kit as and again really pushing that single target with a little bit of that beam AOE as well. But the rest of the kids like, OK, look at shadow. SAP is a single target. It's going to give five. My 3 initiative cost. So pretty low initiative cost, decent amount of damage, decent amount of barrier, looks like the skill factually wrong here. Carl 539 barrier is not one thousand 1498 barrier so.

Rubi: Did you just blame?

Cal: Carl. Yeah, this Carl's fault as always.

Rubi: Every show. Carl's just sitting. I'm like.

Cal: And it helped me we.

Rubi: What did I do, man?

Cal: Like to play around when?

Rubi: We love Carl.

Cal: Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously Carl's super cool. The specter is awesome. So whenever we have an opportunity to call out something super small, like the skill fact is wrong or the minor trait is named Specter, which probably isn't correct. You know, it's always fun to have a little fun color. Out there. But like like I said, getting back to this is about like. 1500 Barrier 5 might. That's a pretty strong feel, but it is against single. Targets and this is the lamp stack of water venom. Essentially we see a lot of follow venoms. In this character like. The auto tech and build up a lot. 1314 sacks. I mean, there's just singular torment again, but. It's still a pretty powerful kind of again supporting style of gameplay and we obviously have some AOE ways to grant barrier here as well. With this kind of stealth, so we. Go Shadow refuge, do some stealth here. This is only going to be this trade specifically. Isn't it important? Call out. This is only when you apply stealth to an ally who is not already stealth. Yeah, that's very important for Shadow refuge, but also important for like blasting smoke fields, stuff like that to make sure it doesn't blow out too. And then again, that sets up kind of the stealth attack. So the kind of interesting thing that we didn't talk about too much on the speed run side of this is that. This the spectre is actually potentially also a very. Tanky thief character because you have a shroud. This is mechanically similar to Necro Death Shroud where this absorbs incoming damage. This Gollum is going to use rapid fire on me. I am going to just, you know, take damage against my shroud total instead of my health. So obviously the primary goal of this character is to be this kind of supportive barrier, still aggressive character, but you can also just build this like, hey, I'm actually going to be pretty selfish and focus on shadow force generation and then going to shroud and be almost this bruiser thief, maybe it's potentially really with like sword or even just. More aggressive kits with like dagger, pistol and you just have significantly more health than thieves are used to having. Potentially some interesting builds that come out of that. And I think like that's always one thing to me that stands out as like what makes you respect really awesome is like we kind of have a design goal coming in with Spectra. It's support, OK. And we really focus on, OK, support the support thief. But then also we see that there are tools that exist here to kind of create this other place out of the prizery tanky thief. Is something that doesn't really exist, like Daredevil has a lot of evades, a lot of mobility, evasion, that type of. A little bruiser you obviously. You tend to go more glass cannon on that. That type of thing where this is just more of a ability to mitigate damage is another kind of unique thing that thief has access to with this specialization. Let's see what else I got some notes written down so I don't go too off the rails and end up in the middle of nowhere to definitely show off the healing potential of consume shadows. We super really glazed over this, but the way that this skill works is that how we mentioned earlier this trait rather is that anytime you exit shroud, it's actually going to eat all of your shadow. Force and instead do a heel in the radius around you. And so if I have maximum shadow force, I'm just double. I'm just going to double tap shroud. We're going to see kind of the maximum potential of the skill or this trait. Very convenient, but we saw that was like a 27 K heel and this is going to give a little bit. These golems have a giant giant health pool, so they get entirely healing, but the way it works with players is that you're over capping full heal. It will give them barrier instead. So obviously important note, this trade is unique for game mode, so you won't get the full 100% conversion from Shadow Force to healing. I think it's like 33% try to be a little conservative with that to make sure it wasn't too crazy. You are investing a lot to get into that, like if I. Do just double tap. That will tap my shroud. That's consuming all of my shadow force to just get. I mean, it's a giant heel, but it is removing the opportunity to go in and press those buttons and you know, support my tethered ally. So really strong trade with a lot of just interesting decision points of when do you actually want to exit to get the the heel? Let's see. Let's see some other stuff we didn't really talk about is that siphon is actually going to have a different cooldown depending on if you had an enemy or versus an ally. So again, trying to push the more supportive route is when I siphon an ally, also because it doesn't give any shadow force, it's going to have a much shorter cooldown as opposed to when I use. On the enemy target. Which probably I'd expect a lot of siphoned enemy just because you know Shadow Shroud is so useful and so valuable to get access to these skills you want to maximize your shadow force gain from siphon as well as kind of the other sources. But you do have the opportunity to just kind of chain siphon on on nearby allies and get that much shorter cooldown. And so, I mean, when I talked about earlier where this character was really trying to be a single target support, we were a little concerned about the value of that type of character in the game that is Guild Wars two because obviously like all the support classes in this game are. Largely we support classes and even if we really push push the value of some of these powerful single target abilities, it's still not going to be as relevant in like these in the modes where you are. You care a lot about those kind of a group supports looking at stuff like raids or World World Group support. I think in worldly world there's some interesting game play where you just have an army of specters all supporting the commander. And really maximize the value of that single target. But we did add some of those AOE support tools. Just you know, they're kind of snuck in here on the trades a little bit on the wells where you can still do these a little bit of ally support just because we need to keep the character viable for the game that exists. We can't just force. Kind of force the specter into the game and say, hey, single target support, have fun when that might not always be the, you know, it might not be the thing that you need in the circumstance we actually want to support character. So we see a lot of are we support us consumed shadows the well trade. Shade step is again more AOE barrier so we do have the opportunity to kind of trade into those more AOE support options in addition to being the single target support character, traversing desk is a really interesting one because it heals on shadow step. We also have a trade that does that up here in shadow arts so you can potentially kind of go into. This you get to kind of double dip on your shadow steps, right? And there's kind of a really interesting, interesting idea here. Well, I have no idea if this is actually a good idea, but obviously we have like the really low cooldown or low low initiative shadow step with Infiltrator strike on sword. And so if I am, if I have both of these, you know shadow step. Filtrates then I can do potentially a lot of healing, as you know, blinking, heal, heal, heal, heal, heal, heal. I'm not even cheating. Recharge right now and you can see like pretty decent. I mean, no one in the real world is is just going to spam, blink and blink out, blink and blink out. Blink blink out because that's not super realistic. But like, it is kind of a line that. Exists with sword, which is already one of these weapons that isn't super intuitive for this type of character to have. So that's potentially interesting. Obviously all the wells or shadow steps, so you might want just want to go into shadow Savior anyway, every time you blame going to be getting kind of those double products, obviously alacrity coming out as well, potentially a lot of interesting. Are we and just, you know, general support value there? You know. Trickery. People probably gonna play trickery because you want more initiative. That's kind of the thing that thieves are already used to reduce the initiative pool here with the specter. It's going to be almost even more important. It's also going to kind of maybe influence some of your utility choices. Maybe you think more about role for initiative. Maybe you think more about. You know, going into Shadow Arts, getting shadows rejuvenation to get those initiative gains maybe go into acro get some more initiative back because again, initiative is going to be funding your shadow force, which is going to be funding your shadow. Shadow is going to be funding or enabling a lot of your most powerful abilities. So some interesting build considerations for this character probably not going to go 5 wells, although you can and you can just kind of fly across the map. Point Point, point, point, point, point, point, point, point Point and so on. A lot of these wells are still pretty good skills. The hill obviously pretty solid, the boons this one is kind. Of interesting because. You need to kind of figure out or the more of the powerful boons are on the back half of the skill. Click this kind of in the middle like kind of in the middle, but you want to kind of already have the first blooms on this list, so that doesn't give you those books you don't want to get region from this you want to get quickness. So some interesting considerations in how you sequence abilities. So honestly, I'm pretty excited for this character to see how it plays, because already it's doing a lot of unique stuff. Shroud Thief support, thief, single Target ally targeted. There's just a lot of things that we haven't seen in the. Game yet? And so there's a lot of opportunity for cool stuff to happen as you guys have checked your hands on it, play it, figure out what kind of compositions you want to build around it. What roles you want to play with this character and really figure out kind of the optimal builds and strategies that you're going to be implementing. So pretty excited for this. It's definitely going to be. Awesome. And it'll be exciting to watch all of that. I'm. Just trying to. Cleanly wrap up and then fumbling through it because that's kind of the, you know, we talked a little bit about more stuff on this character. There's an infinite amount that we could ever talk about, but there's a better next week. You guys probably want to play. It and stop listening to me. But more realistically, we saw some other stuff to talk about, so we'll probably wrap it up for the specter here. Move on to untamed, and then we'll do mechanist and then we'll kind of wrap up and you know, we can always talk about this more and. More in the future as well. So I am going to. Yes, good call. You can now get a beautiful shot on my face as I cheat and change. Anyone know any good?

Rubi: It's like. Jokes. I can take a moment to remind people that the beta starts next Tuesday on the 26th. You don't have to do anything to play. It's open to everyone with an account. Just log in after the beta starts and you will find beta character slots on your account ready to go. You good?

Cal: Cool. OK. Yep.

Rubi: Pretty good. So much stuff you know.

Cal: A lot of pop ups. Yeah, we don't need. There's a bunch of. I magically created a bunch of items. It's not important, so they'll be scrolling past the right side, right side of the UI here for. A little while. All right. But coming back to the untamed. So again, we kind of briefly talked about the high level goals of to create this more like browserify frontline melee character because you look at what Ranger builds exist right now do it is more that support character. Soul Beast is a little bit more. I personally define sobies a lot more of that Assassini style game play. Obviously you do have some of the stances like dolack stance. You have stuff like bear stance, there's some good defensive options there as well. You can go with like defensive pets on the merge skills to create a little bit more of that. Web browser game play, but it's still also a lot of single target stuff. So historically we've seen a lot of range. Kind of relegated in PvP, we see a lot of ranges on side note, not the best in team fights because you don't have access to a lot of AOE stuff, so primarily sticking as those duelists or those single target level snipers you know everyone enjoys the these are full of Longbow Rangers just shredding you down. With rapid fire. So for this character, we really wanted to get that change of pace and create kind of that melee bruiser give some a wee potential, give some really good defensive tools to make sure that this frontline build could exist and be something like potentially a level frontline or a PDP team fighter or just something that runs around the open world and cleaves. Down large chunks of monsters at one time instead of being more of that single target character that we've seen in the. And so we already see a lot of that with kind of the unleashed pet skills here where they're all PB AOE attacks. So that just gives a little bit more AE value. These are all also kind of valuable things for a male laborer to have. We see, like, OK, here's poison that's going to allow you to. Poison venomous outburst specifically was designed as this very quick attack. You see, it's much faster. It's not even intended really to be particularly reactable, because the damage is much lower and it's supposed to be just like here's a poison application. Here's the blind if you trade it. Here's this kind of skill that I compress when I need it to happen in response to a heal. I poison you in response to a key attack I blind. This is kind of that key skill that sets, that sets that play up, and then something like lending vines, which is much more of this, just disruptive boom boom rip is something that you like to see when you're in worldly world when you're fighting against players that have a lot of protection, a lot of stability, all these books that are going to like prevent you from fulfilling your role. You want to see some boon rips over ending. As boom. Enveloping haze again. Maybe users are going to, you know, traditionally struggle with ranged attacks coming at them. So here's a projectile hate bubble that's going to allow you to potentially close the gap. This can also port this is attached to your pet. So as you cast it, then you can, you know, fire off, move your pet around with venomous outburst with that shadow step. Move that bubble around, potentially to block some key ranged attacks coming at you, as you either walk in. Obviously we have some mobility on the kit with like a natural traversal blank in, but this does give you a bit more potential to fight against those range attacks and mainly range. So then obviously outside of the AOE stuff we have kind of the offense defense toggle, which is the unleashed mechanic, and we talked about this a little bit earlier in the show where trying to capture some of the essence of Guild Wars, one Bunny Thumper, which was very much as aggressive, low defense kind of damage dealer CC care. Give us one, obviously a much different game. You always have a month to bail you out. Maybe have rituals to bail you out, so you can't just, you know, port one to one. Hey, here's Bunny Thumper in Guild Wars two. Although we did kind of joke. Hey, it's Bunny thumper. What if the hammer kit was literally just warrior hammer and all the skills were identical? Wouldn't be hilarious. It it would be hilarious, but it wouldn't really be good from the game play side of things. It would kind of it would be a huge let down. It was never a serious consideration, some just something we laughed about in meetings. It's like well, Bernie Temple was Ranger warriors. So the untamed actually just gets warrior hammer instead of getting a unique hammer. We kind of joked about that here with natural fortitude as well. This thing just being a vitality trait, but the the in joke was, well, what if this just gave you enough vitality and toughness such that you had warrior levels of stats to really define that kind of pseudo Ranger warrior hybrid? Probably not balance that would end up being a huge pile of stats on a minor trade, which is not. Particularly a good thing. So we just left it as. Oh, here's a funny note for the live stream. And we actually balance the characters that. Potentially a little bit less exciting, but you know, balance is important when we design. Elite specs as well. But still so coming back like that offense, defense stuff, we really want to have that super aggressive mode to go into kind of this the Bunny Thumper callback, but also was just kind of the way that users typically transition between like offense and defense. You look at something like elementals is a great example of this group see, like, Weaver, Corelli, all these traditional bruisers that you go into Earth. When you have a lot more defense and then you swap into fire too, and you have more offense, there's a very well defined point of like where this transition happen. Stuff looking at something like Warrior you have like SHIELD Bash that sets up for you to swap into swapping in great sword to get 100 blades again. The defining moment is the CC into the the swap into the big damage skill. So keeping that idea in mind was also kind of another driving factor behind having this unleash mechanic, which as we saw with the the traits here it kind of gives you outgoing damage adjustment depending on your stance and also flips over the hammer kit to kind of create this either very defensive, very disruptive bruiser kit with the. It's kind of a base we we call it just it's just the base version. I mean the there's no real actually defined name tongue in cheek version is called the least state because the alternative is unleashed. But that's not the that's not super exciting anything we have like the disruption, the defense, the crowd control here and then we swap into the Super aggressive. Burden into hammer. So depending on what you're trying to do, like obviously in PvP game modes and raids, you probably just want to focus on a lot of the unleashed side where you can have these powerful damage skills and you might just use all of them and not have to worry about the other side. Although the crowd control may come in handy for a break part at some point. You may just end up being, you know, a lot of. Aggression. A lot of damage. But alternatively, you might come to the state probably more and more of the world or PvP where you do actually want. There are cases where you want access to like the cripple or the days into the days into the the E mode, but the weakness, all these debilitating conditions, all the crowd control available here. Most likely, I think you're going to want to mix of the two where when you look at a skill like thump, which is going to be your knockdown, that's going to excuse me. That's just going to enable your crowd control bonuses on Unleashed Shockwave and unleash wild swing. It's going to take a quick, quick water back. I can feel feel the feel the need I see, like my own mute button, so I can just, you know.

Rubi: Mark's hand is a threat.

Cal: All right. Should be alright. By saying yeah. So some kind of sets yourself up to have this. You know, CC into, especially if you have like enhancing impact I mean so again this is like the Super off the rails version of the show where I'm just kind of thinking through stuff. I have some notes, but this is kind of my you know stream of consciousness. Enjoy. Enjoy the rambling, so sometimes we end up a little bit not. As well, organized as we should be, but looking at something enhancing impact is going to be quickness. This is going to enable. You to do something like. Cast pump swap warts casting unleashed, Chavez struck wave into unleashed wild swing. Get the full value of the those crowd control bonuses, and that's like a self combo that you can do you have to worry about anything else. Alternatively, you have access to, you know, while I'm in this unleashed state, I have all my pets abilities available to me. That's another interesting thing. We didn't really talk about too much. It will be interesting to see if there's like any new pets that get a lot more use, or at least maybe people try out a few more pets because you have like direct access. I'm looking at something like Moe's, which I mean I I don't expect more to be viable as a result of this, but it's interesting to see, OK, Now I have access to harmonic cry. I have access to this area. Still, whenever I want it, I don't need to. Rely on the MOA to. Cast his ability intelligently, so maybe I'll take I take the MOA. Probably not. I mean, no one's going to. Take the MOA. But some people are going to try it out and maybe maybe it's secretly secretly the answer. That's what brings the whole spec together is slotting moa. But even stuff like, you know, looking at the the canine family, we have access to, you know, a lot more crowd control. We have crippling leap and then obviously the brutal charge. Let's see. Getting past notes John wants unleash on other weapons if possible. So this is something we talked about internally. Obviously it's like first thing that comes to mind, right? Like when literally in the live stream, no one played played the spec yet. What about? And initially, we're not going to see any interaction with unleash on other weapons. We're going to have just the baseline interaction with Val the untamed, which is going to be that kind of ability to fining or character defining like offense, defense level. So when I have a great sort of clip of still going to be able to unleash and then have mall do extra damage. We definitely talked a lot internally about like how are we going to, can we actually fit this mechanic into the other weapons in a way that feels good and also doesn't just, you know, power creep the game because there's some very easy options that we talked about of. We don't want to talk. Too much about this because it's like stuff. That didn't happen. But we did throw around the idea of like. Well, what if when I enter unleashed state we have like kind of similar to like The Mirage ambush mechanic for each weapon where it would flip over your auto attack and that would be kind of the unleashed attack per weapon. And the reason that didn't really come to end up in the final version is because it is. Kind of just, you know. And power free and it would just be adding additional skills to all of these existing weapons. Obviously there's a lot more alternatives and I won't talk through all the things. We talked about. We did consider this a lot and it's something we're still thinking about, especially as we go forward. So something to keep in mind with the beta. Obviously the hammer interactions are going to be a lot more visible. This is very similar to like Hollow Smith Heat and the interaction with the sword like sword is the only energy weapon that interacts with the heat mechanic on Hollow Smith. It's kind of. The same thing. Where we kind of built this weapon with the elite spec, so it makes a lot of sense. OK, we can do something that fits really well. It makes a lot of sense. Like we look at this with this shared cooldowns here, the offense defense toggle, these things all kind of naturally fit with the unleashed. So it's very easy. Similarly with Hollow Smith teeth, we're building a whole new weapon here. Sword. We can make the heat interactions make sense instead of trying to just like ham, fist things and other weapons. But like, that's also something we talk about a lot internally. It's like, well, should hollow Smith heat interact with other with other engineer weapons. And so that's kind of where we are with with the unleashed mechanic on other Ranger weapons at this point in time. So see how it goes with the beta. Obviously guys are going to be able to get a lot of feedback, see how it feels. I think like something like great sword getting more damage on all is good. It's obviously a little bit less exciting than flipping your whole skill bar, but it's something we're. Thinking about, it's definitely something that we want to get feedback around and obviously the the chat question makes a lot of sense because it is a very obvious hey, what about this? Let's see. What else do I got any. Any interesting talking points about that's kind of an interesting thing. If there's just going completely off the rails here. But Rudy's reading chat so. There's interesting.

Rubi: Wrap me out, man.

Cal: We totally just revealed that. But you know, we're not going to sit here and just do a full-fledged Q&A because.

Rubi: She just someone else.

Cal: We don't, really. Have we don't have time for that. That's we can do.

Rubi: No. Oh God.

Cal: That later.

Rubi: Please I have a home.

Cal: Yeah, some people, you know, have some other work to do as well. So OK. But if there's anything interesting, they will find that.

Rubi: I'll do it.

Cal: Is there anything else really interesting with the untamed? I mean a lot of the cantrips ended up just being kind of similar to what we're talking about with the unleashed pet skills where they are very much tools that we want to give to this melee frontliner it's like, well, what is range of access to right now we have our signal stone is a good one, but it's kind of the only thing that you have there as the hard. The big damage mitigation, so we left stuff like perilous gift as a different way to do that. We have the big damage reduction on forced fortification as well. Interesting force fortification. This recharge time reduction per strike is not cooldown gated or anything, so if you are in these like giant level fights, you can potentially get a lot of cooldown refunded. Obvious, I'm just going to be bullying Golems who can't really move and get out of these attacks, but you see I'm leaving a bunch of enemies by the time. I've already refunded the actually the entire cooldown of this skill almost by the time it's over, and that's probably a little excessive, and I mean it's more balanced around realistic game plays, not balanced around. The goal, but we'll definitely be keeping an eye on, like how high the uptime of this skill is. But it is kind of like the defining elite skill. Here's the big damage reduction that really enables this frontline capability. So we wanted to have this interesting, interesting play where it would be more and more available as you were hitting enemies because it also gives kind of a built-in counterplay of. All right. Well, if I just avoid all the attacks, then he's gonna have much longer. On this ability. And so there was stuff like perilous gift. It's just kind of a different flavor of sickness stone, where you can't go below 1 HP, so it's damage direction when you're low and also gives kind of an interesting way to give a heel because it's going to drain health from your pet. So again, very natural counterplay there of, hey, just hit the pet while this is active instead. And that's going to reduce the amount of healing given to the Ranger in that case. And other stuff we have like, you know, exploding spores. This one's a bit more. This is probably more of a PV scale, which is going to be a big nice AOE damage ability, a little bit of potential to get, maybe some combos going with off of an allied CC, you're going to be casting this, get that nice centered, all six spores on a single target that's going to give you that knockdown. But primarily, it's more of just like this area damage. It's kind of like, well, that all happens at once instead of pulsing overtime. Then we have stuff like, you know, look at mutate conditions. Here's a big Connie cleanse, because, again, Ranger problems. Where's my condo removal? It's involved in the survival and all I can do is take those in the survival and slot wilderness knowledge, take a bunch of survival skills. That's kind of the best way for a Ranger to have access to Condi Cleanse. So we wanted to give a couple different route, a couple different opportunities for that. Within again, in the cantrips we have the full cleansing mutate conditions a little bit over tuned to lure Earth aggressively tuned 32nd cooldown, full Condi Cleanse. So we did throw the kind of the self. Vuln. On there to.

Rubi: OK.

Cal: Balance that a little bit and it also plays really nicely with just cleansing unleash because you get a big stack condies, cleanse it with new conditions, then swap with cleansing, unleash that is going to cleanse the volume on you. Alternatively, there's just kind of like a a little bit of sustained content cleanse over time as you're switching between the unleashed stances. Unnatural reversal. I mean, main characters like to be in melee range, so, and we're again. We're already getting every character shadow steps as expansion. It felt like so. You know, give the shadow step to the untamed as well. And I really like we see this mechanic on ride the Lightning as well. And Elementalist where it rewards you for hitting something. It rewards you for going in. And engaging with your enemy instead of running away from a fight. So we're using that again here because again, go in, fight people, and then you'll have more access to that mobility skill. And last step, I mean natures binding again, this is a different flavor of crowd control. We obviously have a lot of CC on the hammer already. We have a little bit of exponents board, but not really. There's just going to be that like big potentially wide area EC skill that is again going to set up your team, set up yourself for just some big damage coming out there. That's pretty much it. Not too much crazy in depth stuff to talk about with the untamed here. I mean, a lot of these CC value traits are kind of interesting because obviously like all the CC skills on the hammer are on the baseline version, but you can swap while casting it. So you saw in the past where I start casting thumb. Swap then I'm going to get quickness out of this and apply vulnerability instead of the alternative where it's stability and and weakness. So some opportunity to get that that Intel. There. But so we'll we'll wrap up for the the Bunny thumper. Of course. Bunny thumper.

Rubi: Real fast before you do wrap up. Since we aren't able to show them, do you want to run through real quick what the pets are for the Ranger? What the new?

Cal: Pets are right. New pets for the Ranger. We talked about this earlier, but just bring up again and again. These won't be. These won't be in for the beta. Won't be in for Beta 3, won't be for beta 4. These will be ready for launch. We have the Phoenix. We have the white tiger. We have the wallow and the baby siege turtle, which is awesome. I mean all of them are pretty cool, but baby sea turtle is.

Rubi: Very it's super cute and also intimidating and.

Cal: Awesome. It's pretty awesome. All right. So that's there's a little bit more of a deep dive and untamed, obviously a lot more to cover. You guys got your hands on it, play it a lot more. Maybe we'll talk about it during extra life, not super important. We'll we'll go into, we'll go into Mechanists next and try to wrap this up.

Rubi: All right.

Cal: Before everyone falls asleep. Including myself. But actually, I'd be really impressed if I managed to fall asleep while talking about elite specs.

Indigo: Oh no.

Cal: That would be.

Rubi: I mean, we can.

Cal: Yeah, that would actually probably be really concerning if that if that happened. So I'm not super worried about that. Let's see. Quickly switching over to the mechanist again. Flipping my.

Rubi: I can confirm that what you're saying is interesting. It's not boring. Nobody's falling asleep. So we've gone through the spectre for the thief. The untamed for the Ranger. And now we're doing the mechanist and they're giant jade robot.

Cal: Ah yes. Interesting words. Yes, the mechanist. So we're back here with the mechanist. So what's cool about the mechanist? I mean the Mac obviously really awesome. We saw a lot of kind of ways to define your play style with the Mac. That's something we really wanted to make sure existed with this character because you look at the Mac versus a Ranger pet. And there's only one your fault. You will always have this mic. You cannot take the MOA to get heels, even though no one takes money. I already made a joke about. It's not funny anymore, but you can't go for like them. More super glass candy stuff with like birds versus the dogs, which are a bit more of that mid range DPS, little bit of C or like smoke scale gazelle, yadda yadda yadda. There's a wide swath of kind of identities between Ranger pets, whereas the Mac is the mech. So we need to make sure that it still had kind of these different identities. Available to it. So we have like the condition damage, we have the power damage and we have you know that crowd control and then a lot more of the supporting stuff along the middle. Where you can really define how this mech exists. The interesting thing that you probably notice this mech has a break bar. This is actually something we've never done before on a player scale. The closest thing that we've done with that is like banners and worldview world, but those are more game mode objective mechanics, never on a professional. Ability have we seen a break bar before? So this is something that we really wanted to put on the MEC especially for PDP because you look at some of these abilities. That are kind of more long. That was not the skill I wanted. I was looking for this. But you see, kind of like these longer, like channeled abilities or these longer cast times, much more easier to disrupt the mech through normal gameplay. The ability for creatures to kind of hose the mech and interrupt it. Prevent it from actually doing what we wanted to do. Really created this this concept of well, what if? I had a break player. It's not something we ever done before. It's actually a good idea. Central PD. It actually played really well and I think it's something we want to keep. Keep moving forward with. We did leave it in for the beta to see how this plays in PvP and World World, but we're definitely open to. Any amount of changes to this like. The extreme cases the break part just doesn't exist in PDP and worldly world. There's no break bar. And that is completely on the table because. It's very much this unique mechanic that kind of it very much changes how crowd control interacts with the Mac, right? Like instead of my quarter, second days being a quarter, second days, it's just an interrupt value, it's going to instead play against this break bars, which are much different playstyle. We're not particularly sure if it's a. Healthy play style. For those competitive modes again, but we want to try it out, see how how it goes. And worst case, we just rip it out. Leave it in PV E only. But it is kind of interesting because you know now stuff like chill is going. To be damaging against this brake bar and you can see here that the brake skill here is a 5 second stun. So whenever the neck gets broken it will and that's done for five seconds, which is again we'll pretty long time. What was I going to show here? Oh, yeah. This isn't really interesting or I guess it's. I think it's interesting. It's not super valuable in actual gameplay, but when you're casting crash down, the meta actually spawns in instantly and you can just interrupt the cast and save some cast time there. Don't tell. The designers, who are probably watching this stream so it's too late because we'll probably fix that. But you can kind of sidestep the cast time at the cost of you're not going to actually get the knockback, which is kind of interesting. The neck doesn't actually do the knockback, it's the the mechanism themselves. So minor interesting. I mean stuff like that, I always think is kind of interesting. I'm going to dismiss the mic again because we have kind of this passive attack to show off, which we didn't show too much of the Met Core J drive, one of the bone. This is obviously the signature. But also while the neck is kind of AFK. It's going to periodically do this over did over there. This time when I was paying attention year close the tray window so we can see the whole battlefield you see periodically we're going to see. This kind of. A lead damage attack, kind of like orbital strike, but a little bit different. Where it's going to come down and, you know, hit enemies. It's a little bit of value when the mechanism that spawn because obviously the neck has a pretty long cooldown. You can resummon the neck with overclock signal, but you probably want to save this for the Jade Buster cannon. The big damage payoff there. So just some interesting value from this trait while the Mac is. Not active. Something else I want to run through super quick. Is the bonus effect of Jade Dynamo which we touched on earlier. This actually allows your Mac to inherit. From the explosives straight line, so a lot of these on hit traits that do stuff on explosions, well now your mech also has access to these, so we're going to see the Merc is getting their big boomer. We're already getting explosive temper. We're going to get short fuse shrapnel. You see like all these things are. Now applying to the mech. In addition to the mechanism, which is kind of this really, really interesting, I say interesting relations is really powerful because you're essentially doubling up on all these things, the mechs hitting, getting these value you. The mechanics are hitting enemies, getting these value. So super powerful trait, even if you aren't looking for that Connie damage role. This is still and you get the days on Jade mortar. The burning is not as relevant, but the damage is still good. And then just the the extra value of getting all of these potentially all these immersive rocket works too. That one takes a little bit to charge up to work, show off here. But like all these on hit traits actually give value to the Mac as well, which just creates a really interesting explosives. Back in this build already kind of starting to form as you guys as you guys theory, craft things. Interesting note with static discharge. Obviously either all replacing your tool belt skills, all the tool belt traits will function properly with the Mecca tax that's that. Discharge in particular is actually going to fire from the Mac. I think I didn't see it. Combat only. Is there a problem with one of the skills now? There we go. Static discharge fire from the neck. That's again just kind of a cooling nuance to how the neck kind of. Plays with the. Engineer trace and those two bolts goes really work with this character.

Rubi: Real quick, I do want to confirm you can name your Mac.

Cal: Oh, absolutely, yes.

Rubi: An important question.

Cal: If you want. To rename the Mac right here. Right click on the F4 and you can name this. Well, obviously, if you're a PvP player, you name it the same as your character because that creates the maximum amount of confusion with nameplates. So here we go. Now I have the Mac, which is also called CMC beta as this character completely throwing off all of my opponents. But yeah, you can rename, rename them back for sure. So I expect to see a lot of flavorful mech names running around in the world once we get into beta, and obviously as we move forward to launch as well. Honestly, I don't have too much more to deep dive in the neck because like all of the neck mechanics are kind of built into the traits like it's very well defined in how you interact with this character really kind of talked about everything and like there's going to be interesting to see which builds do people like the Connie build more the power build, more support build. Or what trade lines you take and what skills are you taking? Like all these things are obviously interesting across all the specializations. But the mechanism we did talk about pretty much all there is to it and of course 5 Sigma engineer, hopefully the new meta, but most likely unfortunately not. But we will kind of wrap things up here and we'll toss it back to Ruby again for the second wrap up of the show. Because we are pretty much done here with it when it comes to talking about the last three of each specializations that you'll be seeing in beta 3.

Rubi: Thank you for doing so much heavy lifting on this show. As always, you were amazing. I do want to call out when you said that we could name the mech, I glanced down at my laptop for just a second in time to see someone say Optimus Lime. Thank you for that. That was amazing. I want to give one. More shout out to the winners of our four fans by fans Dragon Challenge contest. This was a design contest for the community. The grand prize winner wish and the runners up, gentle Giant La Hoya and Trist. All of you. Congrats. Thanks everybody for entering. And you can get their designs in January. Once 4 fans by fans has them designed and up and running for the elite specs that we saw today. You can try them for yourself. Starting next Tuesday, October 25th, 26th. Don't know dates. Time has no mean. Anymore Tuesday, October 26th, the beta starts. Everyone is invited. You just need to log into the game after the beta event starts, you will find that 3 beta character slots in your character lineup. To get started on the beta will run until October 30th on Saturday, so jump in. Try those out, see what you think. After seeing what Kell had to say about them. The beta event also will give you something else during the time that event is running. Every day you log in is a chance to win this DX racer Pro Racer gaming chair that DX racer provided for us. We are going to be giving away one of those end of Dragons launches February of 2022. It is almost November we're getting so close you can pre purchase it now and get some cool event, cool items that you can use on your account starting now and some more things like this Shinji Dragon boat skiff skin that will be available to you when end of Dragons launches. We have more expansion previews coming for you all through the rest of the year. The next one is November 12th. We're going to give you a partial tour of the EE Vald Wilde map. We're not going to spoil everything, but we are going to give you a good peek at that before that on. November 5th. Wow, I really am losing track of. Right. Before that on. November 5th we are going to begin our annual 24 hour extra Life charity event. We're raising money for Children's Miracle network nonprofit children's hospitals. A whole bunch of at Arena net here are teaming up to live stream for 24 hours and we have some cool surprises both in and out of game. So join for that. Don't miss both of those and everything else coming up. Follow our channel to make sure you don't miss them and all of the other previews coming. We will see you next time. Thank you again, Cal.

Cal: Thanks for having you.

Guild Chat - Episode 112

Transcription[edit]

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