Right now, Rangers feel a lot like Warriors with half of their damage moved onto a minion. This is largely due to the lackluster AI that pets are given. Pets will not move out of AoE circles unless you manually call them back to you – which means not only do you have to take them out of the fight entirely for a few seconds, you have to keep watching to know when you can send them back in. There is no option to tell you pet to kite around the enemy and continue the attack. The other large issue is that pets seem to just use whatever skills aren’t on cooldown, save for their F2 skill.
Now, AI is rather tricky to figure out for pets in GW2, because different situations rely on different methods. I obviously don’t want to spend my time dropping poison fields around enemies that cannot be poisoned, or attempting to immobilize enemies that cannot be immobilized. So, I propose that pets be able to be manually controlled, with an AI kicking in if a command is not received given some time. For instance, holding shift (or some other modifier key) and clicking on the ground would order the pet to move to that spot, pathing to the best of its ability. This would resolve the issue of “I want my pet to get out of the giant red circle of death, but I don’t want my pet to leave the fight for the entire duration”. Holding shift and clicking on a target would order your pet to attack the target. This would solve the issue of “I want my pet to attack an enemy different than me, but I can’t spare the time it takes to target a different enemy, order it to attack, and retarget my own enemy”.
Last, the biggest change to how pets are handled are the F keys. As it is, F1 and F3 are both movement related, and the proposed shift-click movement would render those unnecessary. So, F1 would use the 3rd skill displayed when examining a pet’s info, F2 would use the 4th skill, and F3 would use the first skill (which is currently mapped to F2). The second skill would simply be an autoattack like it already is, being used whenever the pet is not being ordered to use a different skill. To see why this would be necessary, the Jungle Spider – an otherwise great pet ruined by shoddy AI – provides a great example.
It is all too common to come across 2 or more enemies bunched up that you want to take out methodically, or maybe you only want to kill one. Instead of being able to lure 1 enemy away from the group, have your Jungle Spider immobilize it with Entangling Web (3rd skill), then have your Jungle Spider throw down Poison Gas (4th skill) while you finish off the enemy, the Jungle Spider will frequently toss Poison Gas the second you start shooting, aggroing everything in the group while conveniently missing the enemy you’re actually aiming at because it has moved toward you, and then immobilizing your preferred target after it has left the circle and become dangerously close to you. With manual skills, Entangling Web would be mapped to F1, Poison Gas would be mapped to F2, Paralyzing Venom would be mapped to F3 (currently mapped to F2), and Spit would be an auto-attack, therefore resolving any AI issues.
Another upside to this entire system would be that it would make it harder to forget about your pet, forcing you to pay more attention to where it is, what it’s doing, and how much health it has left, instead of just hitting F4 whenever you notice your pet is down.