Guild Wars 2

Ranger pets are the rise and fall of the Ranger class. Their damage and utility should not be underestimated, but they are the key to massive failure too.

By now, you may understand that this will be a wall of text, so if you want a TL;DR version, forget it.

For a long time, i have contemplated as to why Anet chose to give pets such a massive respawn timer. This would be no issue if the pet’s themselves were resilient and one could expect them to survive, even if they had zero points into beastmastery. So, i’d like to discuss this.
Considering Rangers technically has 4 weapon sets at all times, whereas two of the sets (pets) can be considered semi-controllable, the balance between these “sets” are just too big. Normal weapon set has a 9 second swap – fine, could be 1-2 sec less since rangers rely on moving from one set to the next, but that is more of a QoL thing that would just help on the lower end of the skill-ladder.The pet “set” has a 20 second swap (trait-able to 16) with a 60 second “on death” respawn timer. Considering the pet is a portion of your DPS, and that keeping the pet alive despite heavy hits flying all over the place is nigh impossible, this death respawn timer is just unacceptable.

In comparison all other profession mechanics have the ability to trait for shorter CD’s and more uptime then the ranger has. This despite that their mechanic is not essential for their damage output and defense.
The pets shouldn’t have this long respawn timer, it is too long. However, i will note that just reducing respawn time can be harsh for enemies fighting beastmastery specced builds, and as thus i suggest increasing the swap time by 8 seconds and decreasing respawn time by 25 seconds. This ensures as close to total uptime as possible without making the mechanic impossible to counter.

If a flat out change to these values is too strong, a linear scaling with the beastmastery trait line would be preferable. Allowing for more uptime (despite deaths) the more you spec into the line. Ranger pets should not under any circumstances have more then 80% uptime (between two pets) in a scenario where pets can be killed fast (intentionally). This is to ensure that in PvP the beastmaster spec will not become a “final solution” for all ranger builds thus stagnating the profession.

Pets are also “weapons” and as they are part of ranger DPS they should be treated as such. Therefore i want to raise the question; Why cannot I, the ranger, give my pets sigils or runes?
It is an interesting thought, but given that pets have base stats, allowing them to make use of sigils. It would diversify pets seeing as certain pets can make use of certain sigils, but this can also help increase usage.
Runes are also a thing to consider. Seeing as pets have their own skills, why can they not make use of runes? Why can i not grant my pet some collar or a tag that gives it 150 stat of some sort?

If the pet are considered to be an essential part of the profession, it should have a equal ability to be tailor made into the pet of ones choice. Will it change the ranger meta? YES, without a doubt. But at this point, rangers are in a peculiar spot. They can perform on all levels, often much better then many anticipate, but they are unable to display their prowess upon first glance, this leaves them behind. Most of this is caused by lackluster utilities, too long cooldown elites or simply a un-appealing design, but a huge part of it comes down to one single entity; The PET

I do like the CD suggestion, especially since it was originally 60s because WE COULD REZ OUR PETS, which was slowish, but scaled really well with healing power (which made me think all rezzing did for the longest time..), but that was taken away with absolutely 0 compensation.

However much I like the runes and Sigil idea (Collar and Tags), I would much rather see our pets balanced out. Devourers, Moas, Pigs, and bears all need some serious work since they underperform considerably compared to other pets in almost every area of the game, or are the bear and are borderline useless in every aspect of the game or are totally OP in PvE due to their unkillableness (they need a damage transfer ability that gives them retal imo).

ah i remember the time when we Need to heal our fallen pets. it was really hard in wvw to rezz his own pet xD

while i agree with everything what u say, idk if Runes would make sense and would be balanced.
Sigils for pets would be nice, thats clear. On swap sigils – cool, Duration sigils – nice (wolf+MT+Para sigil jeez), but on crit could be too strong. imagine what dmg Output a ranger could have with Air+Fire on weapon and a second one on pet. I think some rules are needed for it.

Runes on pets…not all runes would make sense and maybe it could be too strong. A list is needed which could make sense, Rune of warrior yes when its on Pet swap, on elite runes maybe when we Count the 3rd attack as elite and the cd is on 90. Our heal can Count as pet heal.
For collars the old PvP jewels would be useful for them. But for noobfriendlyness anet connencted them with the collars.

All in all:
Sigils yes, Runes have room for discussions.

There is just too much wrong with ranger and it seems to all involve the pet. For power builds its a literal percentage of your damage potential, albeit a unreliable source, for support builds they aren’t that impressionable, and for condition builds they are more of just a side kick that goes on cooldown. I’ll never understand the decision to make the pet mandatory let alone a crutch.

In relation to the “rez” pet thing, maybe it could be an elite but even then they die so quick. It seems more of an issue of pet swap than anything because if the pet’s were strong and hard to kill pet swap would be broken on a BM spec. Make an elite skill to raise the pet or heal them directly (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Comfort_Animal) and remove pet swap after reworking all the pets to be viable from general reworks to their skill effects. Even if some of them are situational, they should fill some role that’s relevant in more than 1% of the game.

I’d prefer a pet revival tied to Heal as One, and if we get Comfort Animal it should be a utility skill and be similar to this http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Comfort_Animal but with a not ludicrous CD.

A elite skill just to revive the pet? why should someone equip it
Rather add this to a shout to make it more usable. Add this effect to S&R…or as an side effect of RaO

snow.8097:

A elite skill just to revive the pet? why should someone equip it
Rather add this to a shout to make it more usable. Add this effect to S&R…or as an side effect of RaO

It could be worthwhile especially if the cooldown was somewhat low. Now they have the options of utilizing “on-elite” runes better, a BM spec pet would be very difficult to defeat. It wouldn’t fix pet but it would help for those who have a BM spec pet that is still just dying to massive AoE spikes. An example for the elite

[Comfort Animal]- Heal (only) your pet for 3,450(.15 healing power scale). If your pet is defeated, instead resurrect them to 33% health while doubling the cooldown of this skill. Cooldown 45(90) seconds. 1.25 second cast time.

F5 – 6 second channel. Ressurect your pet.

The rest? Would be nice but highly unrealistic and not near the top of my list.

I don’t see why we should be forced to waste an utility/elite slot, or be forced to use specific heal skill, just to be able to use our special mechanic. I like the idea of 6 second channel which ressurects the pet, but not forcing me to waste space for a specifil skill which allows me to use my special mechanic.

Also I still can’t get used to idea that ranger is the only profession that loses something because of a special mechanic, which we aren’t able to fully control. Is there any other profession that loses anything just by having a special mechanic?

We had been robbed of estimated 30% of our dmg just because we have pets.
Do necromancers have less hp, because of deathshroud?
Do warriors do less dmg because of burst skills? Do engi because of toolbelt? Or eles?
Do guardians lose anything? Mesmers? Thieves?

The only class that is punished for having a special mechanic is Ranger.

Seisyll.5914:

Is there any other profession that loses anything just by having a special mechanic?

We had been robbed of estimated 30% of our dmg just because we have pets.
Do necromancers have less hp, because of deathshroud?

In fairness, Necros are somewhat hampered by their mechanic as well. They have clearly been deliberately given no defensive mechanics besides DS (no eveades, mobility, insane healing, blocks, immunities, anything really). Eles also do lose weapon swapping from having attunments, and whilst they do overall get more abilities from the tradeoff there are some forced drawbacks (fewer sigils, less build diversity by not being able to mix and match weapon combos / have a range + melee set at once).

Still, it remains true that rangers suffer the most drawbacks from their mechanics and are the most unable to escape it.

With regards to the OP, I think giving pets their own runes or sigils is going a bit far.. though they should share in the runes / sigils that the ranger is using in some way. Afterall, it’s clearly not fair that stacking sigils, or +% runes/sigil effects are only effecting 70% of the whole player (30% being the pet, which is not effected).

I always thought it would be nice if there was no respawn timer, but rather pets didn’t reset every time they were swapped. So when a pet is swapped out, it slowly recharged it’s health (taking say 40s to go from zero to full). Pets could be swapped without any dealth penalty, they simply would still be partially damaged when bought out if they hadnt been given sufficient time to regenerate.

This would allow people to effectively put pets out of the fight is they were keeping pressure on the active pet and were damaging it faster than the inactive pet was healing (because after a while both pets would be virtually dead, and whenever the ranger swapped the pet that came out would more or less insta die because it hadnt healed yet), but would also allow the ranger more freedom and use of their pets on demand if they really needed it just for one burst or one F2, and without just a huge penalty for it’s death.

It would be nice if we had a successor to GW1 rangers. It seems like they destroyed everything good about them in the change to GW2. They should have stuck to their original idea and split rangers into 2 or 3 classes.