Guild Wars 2

I love how as players are getting stronger with Ascended gear, pets are stuck at the same base stats. This hinders a roaming ranger by a fair margin. One of the easiest way to kill a condi/BM spec ranger is to kill the pet.

Not going to go into Zerg play because we all know how that ends for a pet.

So as the player gets stronger with gear so should your pet. There are several ways this could be implemented but making it balanced would be the issue.

Anet has a long way to go with pets and how they work. I just hope some fixes come soon.

Edit: Related forum post with good ideas https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Ranger-Pet-System-Sirius-this-time/first#post3480993.

Swagg (6th post in) had a very good idea for ranger pet customization.

I agree that ascended stat creep should be compensated somehow with ranger pets.

Most suggest perma-stow for pets, and to get our damage back, which I don’t agree with. It would fix nothing. If you cannot stand pets so much try another class. Its like asking for no clones on Mesmer, or no adrenaline on Warrior, or no steal on Thief. If one enjoys high direct damage burst, that is just one more reason to start playing another class. Most also don’t think about condition builds, all they say is they want their damage from their pet back, but with a perma stow like we would also need to get condition damage from our pet. If you would want to link the damage boons to traitpoints, I think that would be too much work. Also with introducing perma stow Anet would acknowledge that they programmed the game bad, which they will not do.

Swagg’s suggestion is intriguing, mine (in another thread) was to give 20 points per BM trait points to the pet, which we could spend ourselves. so its 600 max, with 300 max per stat (condition damage and healing power included). The problem is however that with each level of new rarity we would need new trait points for our pets.

nagymbear.5280:

I agree that ascended stat creep should be compensated somehow with ranger pets.

Most suggest perma-stow for pets, and to get our damage back, which I don’t agree with. It would fix nothing. If you cannot stand pets so much try another class. Its like asking for no clones on Mesmer, or no adrenaline on Warrior, or no steal on Thief. If one enjoys high direct damage burst, that is just one more reason to start playing another class. Most also don’t think about condition builds, all they say is they want their damage from their pet back, but with a perma stow like we would also need to get condition damage from our pet. If you would want to link the damage boons to traitpoints, I think that would be too much work. Also with introducing perma stow Anet would acknowledge that they programmed the game bad, which they will not do.

Swagg’s suggestion is intriguing, mine (in another thread) was to give 20 points per BM trait points to the pet, which we could spend ourselves. so its 600 max, with 300 max per stat (condition damage and healing power included). The problem is however that with each level of new rarity we would need new trait points for our pets.

I already stated the answer to that problem a thousand time. To definitively fix the issue of item rarity/gear/pet behing unefective we need pet stat to scale with the ranger stat as well. Instead of that ridiculus + 300 to all pet stat how about adding 60% of all of the ranger stat to the pet once and for all. Like cmon a Cond ranger who dont run on power shouldnt add power to his pet same goes for the pet critical rate and critical damage, However if the ranger ran rampager the pet would be prety much stated the same way the ranger is with a variation from 0 to about 800 to 1000 between weak stat and strong stat. Then the pet species itself would also mather in the stat choice the ranger use ETC so technicaly a zerker ranger using a bear would have decent attack defence and critical rate while a cat will have very good attack great critical rate and good critical damage but Very poor defence (two decent stat become a good stat two bad stat stays a bad stat and mixing a bad stat with a decent stat leaves it to average)

ANet could just take the easy way out and simply increase the pet’s stats by X% (where X is the difference between exotic and ascended) across the board and assume that every ranger will one day be running ascended gear.

Ideally you’d change pets to simply scale off their master, but that would obliterate the class in sPvP and could make insanely overpowered pets for power builds.

But all this said, any solution that doesn’t resolve the enormous issue of pets being nearly worthless in WvW isn’t worth discussing.

actualy i wouldnt be surprised if they reduce the pet base damage to compensate for the stat gain. Now non damage based ranger wouldnt be able to run damage based pet without gearing and specing accordingly. + the fact you have less stat in pvp helps keep such option only on the acceptable level.

I guess in pet should simply gain a armor bonus versus player in wvw but again the issue is that pet gets swarmed. There aint many way we can fix this its just normal for a single unit who gets zerged to die however they can reduce the aoe damage the pets take by default.

kyubi.3620:

…snip…

I don’t like the idea of my pet having the same set of stats as me. The ability to have different stats is really nice IMO. How about infusions giving stats to ranger pets by default?

If they would just give an increase to pet stats, than rangers would need to work less for ascended benefits… well sort of.

kyubi.3620:

actualy i wouldnt be surprised if they reduce the pet base damage to compensate for the stat gain. Now non damage based ranger wouldnt be able to run damage based pet without gearing and specing accordingly.

So remove one of the uniqueness of the ranger/pet mechanic? What’s the point of the pet if it becomes a sub-performing mirror of your build?

I agree it should be a simple blanket increase and be done with it.

I know that the unpopular opinion would be unpopular – still;

Why don’t they just increase all our skill coefficients, while reducing the damage on the pet to something that’s just a minor boost? Instead of the current 60:40 ranger:pet damage mix making up the whole, just have it as 95:5. The pet would still apply buffs/debuffs, and all the petting zoo fans would still have their AI buddies running about.

or

Just make perma stow an option already. When stowed, the ranger gets a flat 30% buff to their direct damage skills.

Anyone else remember Guild Wars? The ranger, specifically, wherein, if you didn’t want to roll as a beastmaster, you didn’t have to? It was a far better setup than the non-optional AI “companion” we have now.

Required pet was the reason I didn’t roll ranger as main. Not that I didn’t like pets, in GW1, but they’d just have specific drawbacks i each format that would be hard to balance for.
Anyway, how about (new) pet types in each category that base their stats on player stats (based on gear & traits, but not buffs)?

Or, basically the same thing, multiply their stats based on the ratio of player gear / standard (exotic) gear.