Guild Wars 2

Make beast mastery a viable offensive spec
There are a few things that need to be worked on first though

1. Improve basic pet AI (getting the hell out of aoes!)
2. Improve pathing (pets should not have to take the long way around things that a player can jump from and live especially since they do take falling dmg, they should be able to chase foes off a 2 ft ledge without pathing for a ramp…)
3. Scale pet stats to ranger stats based on gear not base states (this can even be the passive trait replacing Instinctual Bond which is not very helpful in mostly all aspects of the game)
4. the Pet Attribute Bonus stats gained in the beast master line is not near enough for what it is, rangers are sacrificing their already low end dps to gain healing power and up pets stats which does no where near enough to keep them alive or make their dmg significant enough to make up for slashing weapon dmg .

If you put all of these together a ranger in dps gear with a pet would be as proficient as a decent dmg dealing weapon (ex Warrior GS, axe. Thief dagger, etc)

For a class mechanic ours is very lame in terms of battle, most people just ignore it or burn it down in aoes as they blast the area. Someone should be able to spec to have a pet as their main offense if they so chose. Would add more variety to game play, make pets actually a target to kill instead of a mosquito biting the back of someone’s leg.
Just using this as reference I know GuildWars was a different game but a pet with max beast mastery could kill a player in as little as 2 hits with nothing more than a knockdown coming from their owner, I even made a build to troll healers because everyone ignored the pet then even though they could hit harder than any weapon we had in one hit ( for the most part) the highest hit I got off was 280 with brutal strike after using gust and Bestial Mauling, which is a little more than over half health of most players in GW1 for those that never played.

Anet if you are out there and since we are stuck with the pet mechanic can we please get some buffs to make it a fun mechanic?

• And on a side note I would suggest replacing Stability Training the master trait in beastmastery with one that grants pets dmg immunity (or at least a 90% reduction) for 10 sec (or longer) after the ranger uses a healing skill

And for those of you that would complain that pets would be too powerful the whole gear to stats would also be there to keep pets from being able to do insane amounts of dmg on rangers built for bunker… IE would not have to worry about a toughness ranger’s pet critting 10k such things would be there to only worry about coming from zerker ranger. Would also mean that other zerker classes would have to actually care about pets before they line you up for that stupidly high crit and not look at rangers as a free kill with a crap mechanic.

And if Buffing the pets like this that has to be the cause of changing how pet swap works so be it, would at least make them a threat to anything that is hostile to rangers and not so much of a pushover that they can be ignored. I would rather have a Powerful class mechanic over 2 things that can’t make a dent in any of my endeavors.

No more pet updates pls!
Pets are just bad in wvw.

McWolfy.5924:

No more pet updates pls!
Pets are just bad in wvw.

than make suggestions on how to make it better just sitting on your hands and saying no to other’s ideas does not help working towards anything constructive.

Let us stove pets for buffs. Rethink the traits etc… If they start to focus on pet rangers wont be more in wvw as now

Just allow rangers to play without pets.

They’re such a wonky mechanic.

Rolyate.6753:

Just allow rangers to play without pets.

They’re such a wonky mechanic.

that would leave rangers without any mechanic and pretty much a gray area between thief and warrior, what would replace pets if they got rid of them? or what should? a while back we discussed and preparations we felt was a good option… make suggestions on things to replace if you would rather it be removed

Pets will not get replaced so dont waste your time. Instead make a short list of pet improvements that would turn them useful in every situation. This is your job guys.

Really, 99% of Rangers’ problems (and ~50% of Necros’ and Mesmers’ and 25% of everyone else’s) could be alleviated with pet AI and pet pathing.

i think pets do need fixing, but its not the solution for the terrible wvw ranger. rangers and also other classes that are ai heavy should have non ai build options with viable multitarget skills.
so a ranger should have an option to stow his pet away and have more traits that are not ai based.
its the same with mesmer. id rather have less ai on my mes and more aoe(erm light armor).
and ranger should have less pet only traits and more actual dmg traits that are non pet based. how about more traits for ranger longbows and better trap like skills?

if most of your builds are about ai then u will have a bad time in wvw. i mean yeah great that your pet can do this and that with those traits, but pet dies=traits useless.
with my mes id say its even 70% of our problem that most of our traits require either a shatter(illusion run towards target and in wvw wont reach for the shatter=no aoe=no shatter trait= wasted skill and trait) or a clone or phantasm( clones die in 1 hit, phantasms get 1 shot easily and most of them bug out or are broken like iwarden).

so anet seems to have a hard time programing ai correctly for those classes. los issues, obstructed issues, terrain issues, ai not attacking, ai to slow, ai doesnt spawn or dissappears…..
so why cant they just start reworking those classes and reduce the ai dependency and giv mes(light armor needs ranged aoe), necro( defensive skills, combat mobility and or better ways to escape combat), ranger(whole makeover!i also find it ridiculous that longbow war is better with longbow than a ranger….)

Until pets receive 0 damage from sources that don’t have them selected they’ll never be valuable in WvW. There’s simply too much splash damage and AE going around.

We also have to ask how much, if any, ANet is willing to do to resolve some of the issues pets have.

Take WoW for example… they have their pet AI move pets behind a target, they take less damage from AE, untargetable by NPC cleave, faster withdraw and engage speeds, almost total control from the player (with several more skills under player control), and more health and armor.

That’s a whole heck of a lot of work just to get pets to the point they could stand up for 5 seconds in WvW. We still haven’t resolved the things that make it so pets even work regardless of the game mode they’re in: F2 responsiveness and the ability to hit moving targets.

This is why Rangers are waiting for the CDI thread. We need to know if ANet is even going to consider player input like the above, or should we just wave the white flag and be searching for ways to work around the very obvious problems pets have if not remove them entirely from the class?

Well, make the pets also optional. It’s nice to have an animal companion, but I would happily trade the pets as they are now for some significant damage boost plus some party utility.

I agree pets urgently need to be stowable. Yet a ranger should be stronger if he uses his pet, like every other class is stronger if it makes use of its core mechanic. So whatever the ranger lacks right now, give it to different pets and fix their AI and lacking evasion.

Thats all he needs.

Criminal.5627:

Rolyate.6753:

Just allow rangers to play without pets.

They’re such a wonky mechanic.

that would leave rangers without any mechanic and pretty much a gray area between thief and warrior, what would replace pets if they got rid of them? or what should? a while back we discussed and preparations we felt was a good option… make suggestions on things to replace if you would rather it be removed

That would leave ranger as archers, which I would completely fine with, if they’re effective.

I doubt we can see the pet removed from ranger, and while they other weapons on ranger exist we will see changes that are not entirely for the better, if short bow/longbow become to widely see (or longbow gets Warr/Nercoed [defined as over-tune to rapidly in haste to make a option seen/viable for an event (i.e Pax,) then basically painting the devs in a corner of when/how to adjust it to level where it is used but not totally dominate)} then suddenly ranger is backt to, or at a worst place.

@Orca: Currently the archer only playstyle can only be at a disadvantage as one this game/its vocal community are focus on melee superiority and preaching risk vs reward (stacking near instanced melee kill are ok somehow and I didn’t see the risk). The game design is partly to blame as the limit on the range of boons (probably to deal with the spvp map basic design) and the increased effectiveness of most blast combo pushes for the continued stack formation we see.

Ranger is a profession with many archetypes we have the archer, the beastmaster, the druid (nature magic/spirit) the guerrilla. It would be nice to know what Anet wanted and it partially seem that ranger is the product of the early cutting room floor when Archer (as a profession) and Warden got the axe.

1 thing they could do

Give option to personnalise the pet in depth such as pet traitline (depending on your number of point into beast mastery you can spent a specified number of trait point into the pet, we remove the +300 to all stat and make it a +30 trait point for pet)

Regardless of traitline bears and cats will still have their own stat style but will be changeable with defrent abilities. We can then take all those pet trait that have no place in the regular ranger spec tree (actualy all trait that arent in the beast mastery tree) and put them in the new pet traitline so that the master can personnalise his pet as he wants to as long as hes actualy specialised into beast mastery. Then we replace these trait who should be for pet user only with actual survival or ranger damage oriented trait like idk an increased damage at X range or a boon that makes the ranger gain might on critical strike or an increased range on weapon, god knows what long as its actualy based on the ranger itself. There needs to be serious incentive to run 30 in beastmastery because right now the +300 to all stat (not even true because it doesnt beef up critical damage Healing power and condition damage) is not Worth the point and the traits just wont make most people jump on a pet spec reguardless of how cute having a cat is.

Those that dont put point in BM gets to have a pet somewhat looking like what we curently got with current damage reduced by 75% but you keep the pet utility for the F2. Ranger damage will be increased by 25% to compensate the huge nerf on the pet damage. You can now theoricaly play as you ever wanted to play your petless sword ranger and might as well carry a moa or a spîder for immobilize because between 100 and 500 damage your pet wont do much effect save for the F2 and the slight tanking.

Just model them after classic 3.5 D&D rangers, then everyone will be happy. Possibly.

honestly, just let me use ALL of my pet skills at my command… Instead of just one measly F2 skill…

all pets have 4 skills and the master can only have control of 1? what kind of junk is this?

Pets use their skills at times when I don’t need them to and don’t use their skills when I do need them to

Let me have full control of my beasts I say… I would be perfectly happy with this…even if it means having to trait it

Didn’t even bother reading the OP’s wall of text. Wouldn’t have read the TL:DR either because of the simple fact that the pet is a band-aided to work class mechanikittenil the class mecahnic is tore down and completely built independant of mob AI there is nothing you can do to fix it through tweaks. The only true fix is to give an option out of it by perma-stow-buffing or something similar that transfers 100% damage output to the Ranger since the Ranger is balance around the pet being up 100% of the time doing dps 100% of the time.

Faster cast times on F2 and 75% AOE damage reduction.

That’s a very far-going idea but how about making rangers a little bit more like sorcerers? Make pet’s stats scale together with yours; give them ‘simultaneous dodge’ – when ranger dodges pet gets evasion frame for that duration; give each pet two skills (F1 and F2) that affect it directly e.g might, fear, stronger attack and two skills (F3 and F4) that affect ranger and/or allies e.g. cleanse, regen. Alternatively, you could dumb down pets and treat them like mobile banners (don’t do damage and don’t die) and give ranger F1-4 skills that are tied to the type of pet.