Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been fantasizing about animals; you know…thinking about how great they could be as pets in this game. At the moment they are in my opinion the weakest aspect of balance.

Problem 1 - The pets have been left behind

They have been left behind in two ways.

Firstly, they haven’t been balanced significantly since launch.

Secondly, as players learn the game and their skill levels increase the aspects of the game that involve skill will become more efficiently utilized, therefore becoming in a sense (although not inherently) more powerful. As player interaction with pets is so minimal, the skill aspect is so small that they get very little benefit from this increase in player skill since launch. In other words the AI never learns so it’s as good in the hands of a newbie, as it is in a veteran’s. I understand that the developers don’t want to make the pets too complicated, but I think they could move closer to a middle ground between too complicated and too simple. It’s a problem regardless.

Problem 2 - The pets don’t leave an impression on the fight

Here are a some quotes I can’t imagine someone use as they reflect on a fight they just had, unless they were writing a book about it:

“and then my sigil triggered”

“then I applied a stack of bleeding”

and most tellingly…

“and then my pet auto attacked them”

So those above things are the forgettable parts of combat and unfortunately almost everything pets do falls into this category, even the F2 skills.

Here are quotes you might hear:

“then I immobilized them to stop them getting into melee range”

“I was doing a load of damage but then got knocked back”

“I had to move back as I could see the Churning Earth he was channelling was about to end”

So we need the pets doing things like the second set of quotes rather than the first.

Unfortunately it’s harder to be imaginative with the rangers pets as they are mostly realistic-ish animals (teleporting dogs?) than with the necromancer’s undead minions. This would be more for an expansion pack, when perhaps more mythical pets could be added, but here are some existing skills that have the effect on the combat that F2s should have.

Pull - but shorter range and not unavoidable

Magnetic Inversion

Smoke Bomb

Net Attack

Muddy Terrain

Blinding Powder - but without the blind

Churning Earth - with smaller radius and less damage

Unsteady Ground

Swirling Winds - with smaller radius

Haunt - but no blind

Problem 3 - Pets are too slow moving for PvP

The third and final problem is in the first reply.

There are three things I think could help with this.

Firstly, the gap closing skills such as Icy Pounce (without the chill) or Haunt (in my dreams) could be on the list of the cooldown skills that are used by the AI, and could be triggered for use by the AI when a target is a certain distance away – although I have no idea how hard that would be to code.

Secondly, as I wrote about before a lot of the passive AI controlled skills are worse than the auto attack in PvP and the pets would be better off without them.

The third solution would work like this; think how Sigil of Fire triggers every 5 seconds, this causes a mini spike and would work most efficiently in situations such as when your target goes in and out of stealth or cover, where you can’t hit them for 5 seconds, then you can and it triggers, then you can’t for 5 seconds, then you can again and it triggers. Now, pets are too slow for PvP even if they have the 30% speed increase from the trait, so they have gaps between their hits all the time. If they had their auto attack damage lowered and if the attacks controlled by the AI that have a cooldown had their damage increased significantly, this would result in the same damage output over time, such as in PvE situations where mostly stationary targets are being hit, but would have the same effect as the sigil when gaps are left between their attacks. This would give people something to remember, as well as helping them to keep up damage wise in PvP.

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think.

Do people agree that those are the problems?

Does anyone have any other solutions?