Guild Wars 2

The many ways in which you could seriously improve the ranger profession:

Pets:

1. Change how they are tamed. Add some imagery, some quick movements, something to make it take about 3-4 seconds before they trust the ranger instead of it being the immersionless click “do you want this now” menu system.
2. Make it so that maxing out the traits in the pets trait line allows for the taming of special pets, creatures that the standard ranger without these traits would never get. Like Plants, Bats, Marmox, Dolyaks, Minotaur, Skale, Worms, Skelk , Wind Riders and Raptors.
3. Give pets their own trait trees so rangers have more options on customizing them complete with their own skill choices that they’ll perform automatically as well as their own CC choices or threat management choices.
4. Allow pets that would normally be the tanky types the ability to AOE swing. It’s been necessary and added to every game out there where pets needed to AOE swing gain aggro from their controller. WoW had it for their hunters on tenacity pets, LOTRO had it for the bears on the LM trait line specific to pets. It’s just a necessary evil that most games need when they have a class like this because what happens and I’ve seen it multiple times is a bear will be paying attention to one enemy and the other one right behind him will be attacking the ranger and the bear won’t immediately change targets to grab them both.
5. Collars: items that you place on the pet to enhance their stats or performance. It’s something common to games like TorchLight II but it’s very nice to have. You can add spells to the pets to enhance certain functionalities by allowing the purchase of these collars so they can do special maneuvers and there wouldn’t be the boring same old ranger running around looking and acting like a cookie cutter of everyone else.

Skills:

1. Kill Shot: There is no kill shot in this class and there should be. It was a snipe of sorts in many other games where the class had the option of attempting to end the life of the target quickly. You have it for the underwater weapons but not for land weapons like the Long Bow. This skill is absolutely necessary it’s as necessary as the warrior’s snipe shot and It could easily replace the Useless #1 skill on the Long Bow with a sensable cooldown.
2. Return the damage ratios to traps in PVE. The reason being is that Traps add a whole new dimension of tactics to the game. You lead the enemy into the trap to devastate them. It’s so much nicer than just #1 spamming everything or doing the single #5 AOE on the longbow, it adds character to the gameplay.
3. Go for the Throat Shout: Another missing skill that would be very useful for animals that do bleeds. It could be like a mini kill shot for the beastmaster style ranger that allows the pet to do an enormous damage attack to try to end the life of the enemy quickly and would certainly help with the burst damage in PVE.
4. Add a skill for camoflauge. It was the single most useful tool especially in PVE against enemies. I could sneak around like a rogue for a minute so long as I didn’t get too close to the enemies and when I came to a complete stop I had stealth instead of camo so I could remain safe for 60 seconds of stillness. It was nice. It had a hefty cooldown but that was okay because it’s usefulness was worthit.
5. Make stealth for pets a toggle. It’s not going to break anything to make them move 30% slower and give them a permastealth, they’ve already been nerfed in PVP so making the cat families have this is a no brainer they do this in the wild anyways why not have it as a choice to make it more realistic. Also it would be nice to see this stealth permanent on the guard shout because it makes no sense to give them 6-7 seconds of stealth while waiting for an attack, it’s useless entirely.
6. If you do plan on expanding pets by allowing for pet specialization builds please allow for skills specific to the special pets to be available, they tend to be AOEs and add functionality to the pets that their regular attacks lack.
7. Trait to increase the damage of all pets would be nice as part of the passive to tame specialized pets. It would be nice to get this as an automatic so this combined with the passive to tame specialized pets should definitely be within the same trait on the ranger pet trait line.
8. Also I would suggest combining the skill bonuses for each type of pets into one trait so that you can add some of these other ideas into that ranger pet trait line, like Rending attacks and Vigorous training could be combines while Stability training and Intimidation training could be combined.
9. Give the option for F2 to be autocast by the pet. If we’re to believe that these things were trained by the ranger they should instinctively know to cast that skill.

Niceties:

1. Pet food: New recipes for chefs or enhance the old ones to have guides in their tooltips on what exactly it does for your pet if you feed your pet this food. It was nice for buffs and was found in many games. LOTRO had some special food for their bears for Loremasters to make them more resistant and more threatening with some added bonuses to vitality.
2. Raising pets from babies. Loved this in both WoW and AoC. You could start off with a tiny level 1 critter and do some daily activities usually noncombat at first and raise them to be adults. Added some fun to the game.
3. Give us more skins for every kind so that we can customize which pets we get. Either we should be able to change their skins to make them more personalized or there should be rare ones out there in the forest for us to go hunt down. Cannot tell you how big this was in WoW people would pay monthly to just go around hunting rare skins on pets all day on their hunter. Huge.
4. Emotes: It’s been a nice system of having emotes from plugins on various games where in the RP channels pets and players could interact with each other thru storyline style text emotes. I would also love to see the ability to emote some graphical interaction between pet and master.
5. Toys and Leashes: One of the great things about being a hunter in WoW was that you could go to a pet store buy some special wash, a leash, and some toys to play with the pet. They’d interact with the toy and you could make it seem like you weren’t just some character model with another mob character model standing around in the city. It added some immersion.
6. Holiday Event only Pets: It would be awesome if pets could be added to the holidays so that Rangers could go hunting for that special skin to tame during the holiday events that way they could have a little extra specific to their class and it would be something more useful running around with you than a level 1 mini.

TL;DR: I know that I mention WoW alot in this however WoW wasn’t the first game to have these options and it shouldn’t be the last. Even games like Godswar Online added tameable combat pets in 2011 and the community exploded with joy at chatter about how great their pets were and the functions of their own personal set of skills they trained them to do made them unique. I just think if they changed the way this class worked it would make it more exciting a class and would change the dynamic of the game tremendously because customization is always preferable to cookie cutter.

I’m going to be honest Tigirius, most of the time I disagree with your post on the forums even if I don’t post my counter arguments. I have a ranger on my second account that I rarely play. If they implemented even a few of these ideas I would spend the gems to add a ranger on my primary account. +1

Plz make something more interesting out of the taming process… Make it look nice at least (perhaps there is a short scene of catching/gaining the animals trust that takes place when u activate the “tame”). Not just “tame” poof – done!

Plz, make pet manes be saved or remova that thing all together (remove the juvenile once the pet is tamed). The current system get me killed because of all typing in names! Apart from that it is – annoying!!!

I also like the pet raising idea.

Some holiday skins for pets would be nice… or some added now and then in general. like u did with the Reef Drake. And plz, make Those pets be ones that look good/cool. Otherwise ppl wont use them (speaking for muself here about some green UGLY poison spitting drake that is very good – but ugly!!!)

Whatabout making some rare pets hard to get? Like u have collect some mats to turn in at a tamer to get him to realese special pet for u to tame for example (could be spieces like griffons or pheonixes perhaps)…. Just thinking out loud here.

These ideas are great. They makes sense.

I just don’t expect any type of feedback from Anet since watching the preview live stream you can tell they don’t play the class, nor have any idea how the class works right now.

These are fantastic ideas. I especially would love the ability to customize the pets with colors, leashes, skins, etc…

The pet aspect of GW2 just feels like it’s lacking. Anyone remember the gw1 menagerie? I’ve said many times that I’m very happy with GW2 and I don’t miss GW1. But I must admit that I miss the menagerie aspect of the game. One of the first things I did in GW2 was collect all the pets.

I would love a menagerie of some sort, and the ability to breed. One would have to collect male and female animals in the world, and breed them. It would be nice if the animals, let’s take Lynx just for an example, came in different color variations in the wild. Players could breed for specific traits (both cosmetic and stats). We could even get into cross breeding to create new species only available by breeding! If we wanted to get fancy, the babies could be sold between players.

I also like the idea of having to raise and train the babies. A leveling up system of sorts. You could teach them new tricks and commands for combat! (I see a master trainer achievement here )

And I’m probably in the minority on this one, but I would like to see it where other professions could use pets too. Not full time like the ranger, but more of a summon with a cooldown. Anet could even make this skill available for gems only ($$$). This mechanism is already built in for every character in the game (see summon mistfire wolf: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Summon_Mistfire_Wolf). This way ANY profession can purchase a unique pet (from a ranger of course :P ) and be able to summon it for a short period of time.

I have so many in-depth ideas about how this all would work, but am trying to keep it lite so I don’t have a wall of text that is tl;dr.

I just miss this aspect of all of these other titles that had such great pet ideas they brought to their games that made the pet ownership more viable. What we have in this title is similar to what they did with the ranger tree in Rift which was just as bad. You’d get an automatic pet for traits you’d place in the ranger tree and there was NO taming in that game. You can imagine my disappointment with that!

In AoC when you trained a pet it would soon become your mount after the dailies in WoW you could tame one and do dailies to raise it to a mount, in Black Desert they are talking about making them tamable raiseable and allow some to be mounts at the same time.

So much space for improvement here’s to hoping their new collaboration helps this situation.

Mel.8769:

These are fantastic ideas. I especially would love the ability to customize the pets with colors, leashes, skins, etc…

And I’m probably in the minority on this one, but I would like to see it where other professions could use pets too.

I have so many in-depth ideas about how this all would work, but am trying to keep it lite so I don’t have a wall of text that is tl;dr.

Thanks!

They have elites where summons occur they could expand upon that most definitely.

Be sure and add some ideas I haven’t already posted.

Tons of ideas roughly taken from World of Warcraft. Although, I don’t mind, Hunter class pre-MoP was best MMO ranged class ever designed.

Thank you for taking the time to put these ideas up on suggestions , great ideas
If Only ……..

I don’t want other classes having pets. It’s a Ranger thing! Other classes already have theri things, minions, phantams, holographic weapons etc…

One thing that I DO want back from GW1 is the Menagerie! Just imagine what a Beautiful Place the A-net Team could build! Perhaps it could be acsessible from the home instance?