Beowulf advice

[SaiColors]

I don’t really understand why Beowulf looks like he has decent damage, but in practice feels very underwhelming. He has good wave-clearing potential in Act 1, and with this game's strong snowball mechanics he should offer a smooth gameplay experience.
But in reality, he struggles a lot in Acts 2 and 3. Both his skills and basic attacks have a hard time clearing enemies quickly. I even feel like Scarlet performs much better than he does — yet most tier lists put Scarlet at the very bottom.

Does anyone have any tips or suggestions on how to play Beowulf effectively?

[Plumber]

Get a Charmstone, Raven Wing, and/or Seven-League Boots for smoother movement and animation cancelling (wing stacking is busted but Charmstone+SL Boots is more stable and fun to play). Get his dash/defense attack modifier talents for their speed and power. Take Sparkling Shield or Raging Chain to open up crowds and beefier enemies that are trying to force you to dodge. If you're getting caught after Defense/Special often, keep in mind that Defense can buffer inputs into a Special for extended iframes, or an extra Defense if you have an Adder Stone.

Ch2 and Ch3 feature a lot more enemies that are capable of zoning you out if you don't have the stagger or mobility / iframes / health to ignore them, and have multiple that are very slow to kill without some way to break their stagger bar quickly, assuming you haven't hyperscaled with eggs or something already. This is true for every character: prioritize talents that give you stronger moves or extra casts over passives. While theoretically possible to win encounters just by baiting enemy attacks perfectly and kiting them well, it's slow. You want some kind of can opener to circumvent those situations entirely; even flawless no-hit clears of POIs can be slow if you can't kill things fast.

It's okay to take passives or simpler talents early, especially if you're taking the Explosive Fire starting talent since it automates most of Beo's early gameplay, but make sure you have something by Lv4 you can use to wrangle heavies. It doesn't matter how much damage you theoretically deal if you can't get an opening to deal it, and bulkier enemies want you staggering them to nullify their armor or get them to stop teleporting and flying around.

For ultimates, Raging Chain is by a wide margin the better of his two ults for its reliability, higher damage, enormous stagger, iframes, and relatively short cooldown. The stagger is so extreme that it's often faster to use this early into fights rather than while enemies are stunned. The rank 9 unlock for its alt Lv10 talent, Fireball, is obscenely strong; he's one of the handful of characters where simply reaching Lv10 is effectively a win condition.

Fiery Slash and Retaliation smooth out every part of his kit, have synergy with almost every talent directly and indirectly for mobility alone, and scale the hardest off of his passive talents. Absolutely core picks; there's no phase of the game they're bad in. Indisputably his strongest standard talents regardless of build. When I first started playing the game it was these two unlockable talents that pushed Beo from my favorite character to my favorite character. (And then I played Wukong and he stole the spotlight, but Beo's still a fond second place...) The faster movement, more natural combos and animation cancelling, and better uptime on fire are all very appealing; plus his other abilities are slow enough that you need only one Charmstone to seamlessly cycle between his abilities after using either attack modifier. F.Slash in particular replaces his first attack in a normal attack chain rather than overriding it, allowing you to get mileage out of his Heavy Strikes and Breath of Fire talents.

On the other hand, for dealing damage when you shouldn't be able to, Sparkling Shield lets you reflect damage back to enemies with blockable attacks. He's one of only two characters that can outright reflect or counter damage like this, the other being Wukong. If a tentacle nightmare, bubble crab or purple jinn (or a whole clown car of them) is about to force you to back off or dash through them, you can just stand on top of them instead and shotgun them with their own countless projectiles. High-damage fodder enemies like knife cultists can be left alive and used as ammunition against heavies. Naturally, it works well with Retaliation, though it's not necessary to get good mileage out of it. Keep in mind the counterattack damage scales with the enemy's attack power, and because it's treated as Defense damage, you'd need to take generic dmg/crit in order to boost it - though barring lucky circumstances it's usually best to do that on most characters anyway.

Battle Cry, Eruption, and Double Shock are nice and simple on their own, but getting any two of them in conjunction makes it much easier for his Power to build stagger on groups of enemies from a distance.

Fiery Seismo and Bladestorm for his Special can get the job done slower, but still viably. Bladestorm extends the iframes on your Special, but also prevents you from doing anything else for longer, so unless you get extra charge items for your other abilities it's mostly a defensive pick. Odds are you won't get much mileage from either of these talents lategame, but it's fine to take them for ch1 through early ch2 while you look for something better. Furious Blows is generally outclassed by the contemporary attack modifiers, but works okay if you already have other Special talents built up. I nonetheless recommend respeccing away from Special builds later in the run if you get the chance.

Hope this is helpful for general advice; if there's a specific enemy or boss that you're struggling with then we can talk specifics too.

[Yogurt]

Get sparkling shield, it's pretty hard to lose a run with it.

[Aetemes]

https://buildmaker.ravenswatch.com/

Visit that for ideas, but he's very strong.

I play around either power spam, or the the spam dash attack/eternal roses build.
(I dunno what is your character level, and what gets unlocked when though).

The dash attack build is pretty strong, eternal roses and fiery strike, then every AA talent he has (maybe not the special attack after a defense one), and dash purple items, maybe dash legendaries. Take the second ult and take the dragon spits fire when you dash. Your goal is to dash attack...that's it. Taking crit damage boosts for grimoires is an idea.

Power build, you just need the two waves and explosion at the end talents, then power damage scaling/power purple items to spam it. You also have the shield resets power talent value.

Holy grail, with some defense charges is good value for sustaining.

For me, his explosions starting talent is helpful for chapter 1 sure, but it doesn't scale well eventually or even in chapter 1 with all these big enemies, it's still worth it for ghouls/spiders (it's worth more in multiplayer imo).

Personally I lean towards the rampart shield, having a strong personal heal and some armor is likely helpful for any chapter, it's a nice tool to have but it will slow your snowball sure.

The shorter trait cd talent is worth considering for the power build damage wise for all chapters as well, but it's not as "game saver" as having the emergency heal imo.

I think maybe you're trying to play around his autoattack chain too much, which for most of them never feels good no matter how hard you scale, most of the AA builds perform much better if you play around the dash attacks if they have one, with eternal roses/dash cd reduction.

His special is good for "iframing" and moving through enemy attacks, but damage wise it's not super great to play around, and can get you killed - imo.

[Isley]

Don't fall into the special trap. It's really good in Act 1, but will get you in trouble in later acts. Most people save special as an iframe dodge to get OUT of trouble.

Dash builds are pretty solid and not that difficult to make happen.

I love sparkling shield with almost any build. You can tank and hurt at the same time.

I also alway prefer to take the starting Defense/Shield dash.

[Plumber]

Draconic Binds is more stuff happening more often so it’s the one I gravitate to but yeah, none of his starters are ‘bad’ so much as Explosive Fire is the easiest to play and arguably strongest overall since it massively speeds up act 1.