Guild Wars 2

Currently there are 4 classes that have traits built around pets/summons. These are Ranger, Necromancer, Mesmer, and Guardian. Additionally there are Elementalist with their lesser elemental…

In the current state these pets don’t function properly. Ranger pets even received a rather drastic nerf recently too in their inability to be revived. Pets charge at enemies and cling to them like glue soaking up every point of damage that target dishes out, this causes them to die near instantaneously. Some ranger pets possess abilities that heal, block, or otherwise assist in survival but these abilities are too few and too little.

Pets; be they Ranger’s pets, Necromancer’s minions, Mesmer’s clones, Guardian’s spiritual weapons, or Elementalist’s elementals; all need some adjustments in their AI behavior, health pool, and damage resistance to bring them up to par.

Behavior:

• Add a dodge roll mechanic to pets so they will actively try to avoid AoE attacks much like a player, the same 2 dodge endurance tracking system that players have should be used by pets.
• Pets should actively move around enemies trying to strike from the safety of behind a target when they can. This does not mean pets should constantly try to get behind a target even if it means never attacking, just that they should make efforts to move in combat rather than standing directly in-front of their target the whole fight.

Health Pool:

• Increase pet healthpool, simple enough.

Damage Resistance:

• Essentially an armor system for pets. My idea here is for it to be based roughly on a percentage of your overall armor.
• Class pets out as “Light, Medium, Heavy” resistance granting “armor” percentage accordingly.
• Light ? 15% of your armor value
• Medium ? 25% of your armor value
• Heavy ? 40% of your armor value

I believe that these changes will make the pet based builds viable and make pets actually work rather than spending 5 seconds in combat and the rest of the battle dead.

I support these changes, especially the ones about survivability. However, I think it’d work out better if instead of a pet dodge roll system, pets just take 5-15% of AoE damage.