Guild Wars 2

Problems with pets:
1. Can’t chase and hit enemies effectively. Melee pets attack as soon as they are within ranger and miss. Ranged pets attack as soon as they are withing range but they too miss. “Out of Range” for both.

2. Very easy to kite just by strafing left to right. If the enemy strafes 4 meters to the left, the pet will move about 6 meters, then if the enemy strafes 4 meters back to the right the pet will move 8 meters. The pet overshoots it’s target whenever the target changes direction.

3. Pet’s movement is far from smooth.

4. Pet can’t evade.

Solution suggestions:
1.a Let the pet deal full damage if it started the attack within range. The attack would then only be mitigated by evasion or other skills that mitigate damage.

1.b Let the pet run ahead of it’s target. This is more complicated because of 3 (see below)

2. See 1 (above) or 3 (below)

3. The best reason I can guess is that the pet’s movement isn’t smooth because the pathfinding algorithm isn’t called often enough. I’ve read that the pet AI is the same AI as for enemy creatures. I have no idea who decided this but you surely notice that it doesn’t work for pets which are part of rangers. Rangers rely on their pet. I for example need my spiders to act correctly so that they can tanks REAL enemy players for me by letting them fire at the enemy while I am kiting the enemy around my spider. The battle will be very difficult if the pet decides to use an ability that repositions it.

I need my bear to function correctly if I happen to need a condition cleanse. Countless times it have happened that I was fleeing and the enemy applied either cripple or chill to me but the bear’s F2 failed and went on short cooldown, causing me to die because the enemy could catch up.

I need my wolf that can sometimes fear 5 people off a cliff. Have done it 3 times now but it is very difficult because I have to be either lucky so that the howl activates instead of going on short CD or use som immobilize to “stop time” for the wolf.

The best you could do is to make a separate system for the pets. Let our computer control the pet and you can check for abnormal things like pet teleportation or the like to avoid hackers.

4. There is a (by word) simple solution. When recalling the pet, assume that the pet is in a red circle. Check the red circle and move the pet outside of the circle at the nearest edge.

Regardin the perma-stow option:
Everyone who is for the perma-stow option should know that pushing a problem aside won’t resolve it. Perma-stowing and giving rangers a damage bonus requires a lot of change in utilities, trait and huge amount of balancing. It is simply a stupid idea to add perma-stow.

Im against perma stow too..
Its ok to have a pet, its not a bad idea at all..

But….
Anet gave Rangers probably the worst mechanic in this game…
And they treated it very badly in my opinion..
They are changing, nerfing/buffing the pets with the philosophy:

Damage VS pet responsiveness/how often pets hit-miss

This is totally wrong, it has no logic behind it and its just a simple minded aproach just to say that “we are working on it”..
It covers the fact that they CANT deliver a solid pet mechanic.

Its not a risk/reward thing cause you cant handle 100% your pet, even if you play with F1-F3 all the time still sometimes you are gonna miss some major attacks..

Pressing F2, the ONLY active option we have, and going on a short CD cause pet just ignored the command its not a option if a game wants to have high quallity content..

Suggestions:

Just rework the F2 and make it passive, it would be less frustating than knowing that you could had survived that encounter if the F2 actually did what it supposed to do.What Anet said that it will do..

Rework all the F2 into “the next attacks your pets does X”, no casting time needed.

Make the F2 a passive for Rangers attacks..Having a Wolf it gives the Ranger a 5% chance to fear for like 1-2 sec on attack..Having Bear gives Ranger a 5% chance to remove a condition…Etc Etc

Already i made 3 suggestions that are way better than the current broken system..There are hundred more out there in the forums

I dont understand why you keep going with a bad idea instead of picking another from forums..Its an ego thing or what?

I’m 100% in favor of perma stow. We’ve already been told that they are not going to address the pet issue. Instead of bashing heads against that wall, why not try for something we might actually get?

Other reasonable approach would be to have the pets’ damage reduced to, say, 5% of the total packet, and make them boon/debuff generators instead.

I was thinking of some ways to improve F2 skills for pets. Here is a set of suggestions:

1) Make them instant
2) Increase CD based on skill (to compensate for instant cast).
3) Add Blast finishers to some F2 pet skills. Sort of like if tail swipe(drakes) was an F2 skill. Add a knock back
4) Make leap type abilities to close gaps on players who are just avoiding the pet. Add some kind of bonus for landing a hit.
5) Combine speed training and commanding voice. Keep in Adept tier. This would work because of the increase to CD stated in #2.

Just throwing these out there. Oh and new pets!!!! More unique pets could add flexibility when creating abilities. Pleaseeeee.

solrik.6028:

Regardin the perma-stow option:
Everyone who is for the perma-stow option should know that pushing a problem aside won’t resolve it. Perma-stowing and giving rangers a damage bonus requires a lot of change in utilities, trait and huge amount of balancing. It is simply a stupid idea to add perma-stow.

Stale has it right:

stale.9785:

I’m 100% in favor of perma stow. We’ve already been told that they are not going to address the pet issue. Instead of bashing heads against that wall, why not try for something we might actually get?

Other reasonable approach would be to have the pets’ damage reduced to, say, 5% of the total packet, and make them boon/debuff generators instead.

I’d say it’d take a lot less work to balance around a Ranger without a pet then to rewrite the entire creature AI code to improve pets to the point they are working as well as other professions class mechanics. Going without a pet and getting coefficients returned along with 100% damage to Ranger sounds much more likely to get done then to get the entire code use for creature AI rewritten from the ground up. I put people in the “anti-perma stow” group in the delusionist pile. Those people want everyone to suffer equally instead of getting our class fixed. I, for one, want the class I love to play to be on par with my other toons, i.e. working as intended.

BETTER PET CONTROL

• Remove the 2 pet skills from the pet’s attack queue that aren’t the auto-attack or the F2 skill.
• Introduce [Pet Whistle] utility skills.
  • Function identically as Engineer [Weapon Kit]s in how they activate and how they change a player’s weapon skills.
  • The first 2 skills are always changing with the pet. This is to where the 2 non-triggered pet skills have moved. The other 3 skills vary depending on the selected [Pet Whistle] kit.
  • [Pet Whistle] kits remove the Ranger’s ability to attack directly but allow him/her to quickly queue up a chain of abilities for his pet to perform while he/she then swaps back to a weapon and continues attacking. [Pet Whistle] 3-5 skills are always associated with pet positioning, maneuvers and/or a combo attack chain skill that involves both the pet and the Ranger.

CUSTOMIZING A PET’S CONTRIBUTION TO BATTLE

• Pet’s now get their own traits (pic sort of related, I guess there should be 5 trait trees, but the picture is old and I’m not going to make another one).
• Pet get 35 total trait points to spend on traits (if there are 5 trait trees; if only 4, the total points would need to be lowered). Only the “grandmaster” tier is the slot that provides multiple trait options. These traits are meant to increase a pet’s survivability, DPS or CC contribution to a battle.

TO COMPENSATE

• Pet hp is now lowered back to original, pre-March 2013 levels.

According to a certain Dev that posted the sticky we aren’t going to get more control over the pet than we already have because it’ll scare away new players, but I like the idea of traiting pets… Didn’t they do something like that in GW1?

Hopefully Jon can go into more detail on this subject after the disastrous results of the 12/10 thread, but it was my understanding that the pet problem with F2 abilities is that the AI isn’t multithreaded and they don’t have a thread sitting there waiting to receive a command from the player? Instead the attacks sit in queue until they can be used. Judging from his responses in that thread, it doesn’t look like there will ever be a solution to this problem either?

If this is the case how can you justify 1.) even having a pet class in this game and 2.) handicapping the Ranger for having a pet out? If the pet works (which requires your target to be stationary) the pet is reliable. In PvE, aside from the unavoidable 1hit death stuff from time to time, the do reliable damage. In PvP, they still aren’t responsive enough to use effectively, but there’s not so much AE being thrown around so spirits and pets actually contirbute something to it. WvW is another thing all together and the pet is 100% useless for anything but solo/small group roaming.

So how do we allow the pets to still function in WvW and not overpower them in other game modes? The only thing I’ve been able to come up with that keeps the above mentioned system limitations in mind is to unlink the F2 abilities from the pet and make them Ranger activated. In the 12/10 thread you mentioned the main thing holding back progress is the animations… so scrap the animations.

My suggestion:

When a Ranger pushes F2, a spirit copy of the pet you have active (imagine the spirit wolf that is summoned with multiple horn uses) spawns next to the Ranger. After .25 to .5 seconds, the spirit pet uses a skill identical to the F2 ability centered around the spirit pet instead of your normal activated pet or the Ranger. If it’s a buff or AE like wolf howl, it’s not a problem. If it’s a damaging ability like a bird’s strike, the spirit pet can just turn into a spirit arrow (think guardian down state #1 ability) and attack the target for X damage and do whatever other side effect it normally would have.

So for a full effects example:

Ranger has his Wolf active and it’s chasing someone. The Ranger hits F2. Even though the pet is running after someone else, a spirit is summoned next to the Ranger and .25 to .5 seconds later that spirit wolf howls and fears all targets around the Ranger away. It removes some of the offensive ability of the wolf because it wouldn’t howl where your pet is currently, but I’d wager most people have their pets on passive and use the howl defensively anyway given the other pet limitations.

This approach to the pet F2 abilities solves 2 problems: The ability is now responsive and the ability will go off whether the pet is alive or not.

thefantasticg.3984:

According to a certain Dev that posted the sticky we aren’t going to get more control over the pet than we already have because it’ll scare away new players

I choose to ignore that post. The only way that Ranger is going to be a class that isn’t Superspam Warrior with AI slogging behind it is if the Ranger actually gains better control of the pet. It would make the class a much more intuition and timing based profession by providing it more options with which to queue its companion’s time on the field.

thefantasticg.3984:

but I like the idea of traiting pets… Didn’t they do something like that in GW1?

Not really, no. Pet hp or damage was never influenced by attribute points. You had to raise your pet a certain way for it to get certain hp pools or DPS levels. Pet-related attack and defense skills were influenced by putting attribute points into the Beast Mastery attribute line. It was a more active way to influence how a pet contributed to battle since you the player were actually activating all of the skills manually. Traits are always passive, which is dangerous for balance.

Yeah.. I never played GW1 so I wouldn’t know. Sounds more in depth then the pets we have in GW2.

I agree with Atherakhia. If the pets f2 ability was not centered on the pet but gave the ranger some special ability or attack that would solve a lot of problems. You just need any AOE buffs to be centered on the ranger which helps with activating the f2 while running because you will not run out of the range of the buff before the pet is able to cast it. Then even people who like to keep there pets on passive ( for WvW or what ever ) could do so and the f2 attacks and buffs would always be effective.

I am sure that this is also not an easy thing for the devs to do but it sounds like it would be easier than making pets perma stow or fixing the AI. This is not a perfect solution but at least pets would not be useless in WvW or dungeons.