Guild Wars 2

This is a bit of a read, because I don’t wont to do poor job talking about it fixes for the pet. So if you have tried playing a ranger or playing one now PLEASE read and comment.

Back Ground Info

I have played a ranger in GW1 and now here in GW2 and with the current state of the game I feel that rangers have just been given the raw end of the deal, and that the biggest part is the lose of damage from your pet that dies to fast, even after the Hit point increase.

In GW1 rangers Had the choose to have a pet or not, and I get that Arena Net idea of a Ranger is to have a pet, but at least give players ways to control their pet.

I have a few idea’s for improving pets for rangers and really hope that this thread gets some good feed back and ideas started for fixing the pet for rangers.

START READING HERE FOR IDEA OF FIX

First this game has a large part of high burst damage that player need to dodge out of it. But pets have no way to dodge, and only if you spend 15 points into a tree that they get “Protection” for a short time…but at the cost of you also using up one of your own dodge rolls to give them that, which is good when you need to dodge some kind of large area Aoe from a boss/champ, but this does not happen often.

And forces the players into spending points into this and not into the build they wont.

Pets need some kind of dodge, but just giving them their own dodge bar separate that of players with its own button to trigger it would just complicate the class to much I think. That’s way I think that they need a passive way to avoid large burst of damage.

My idea would be to work it basically the same as a dodge bar, (broken into two parts 50/50 with a slow regeneration to fill it back up). But it would only trigger if the pet takes a set percent of damage with-in a set amount time. lets say more then 20% damage with in 1.5 seconds, would trigger this and take 50% of the energy off the bar, an start its regen, and also give the pet 2 seconds of protection.

But with even my idea you still have the problem of boss/champ that have one hit ability’s that can drop you to a down state killing your pet, unless the protection could trigger before the pet takes the damage say over the set 20%.

Example: lets say the pets is next to a boss/champ and the next attack it does is going to be it large mage hit, unless the pet has maxed health its going to die. If the protection could be re-active in a way that the pet would still take 20% of the damage, but gain protection for 2 seconds after that.

Please, please fix the F2 abilities to react when I use them and not 5 seconds later because my pet thinks it’s cool to keep attacking an enemy instead, it often doesn’t work when the pet moves or I’m standing on another level than my pet. And please let the pets actually hit moving targets, atleast with their F2 or racial abilities >.>

Just as a thought for the F2 abilities they need to all be reworked and removed from the fact that the pets have to do them. This is what causes the delay, between when you press the button and it goes off. They need to just instantly go off not wait for the pet, with no animations at all.

For that they would finally have to redesign the complete Ranger Class in regard of their Call Utilitiries which should get integrated into the Pet Commands, to replace them with more useful new Utility Skilsl like Nature Spells to give the Ranger some utility skills that fit to its druid theme under their Nature Magic Trait Line.
Calling just only Nature Spirits isn’t enough.
Nature Spirits should also work more like Pets havign their own nature based skills and not provide only a silly passive effect only basically + one activation effect…

Rangers should get rid of that obsolete Pet Swapping and the Ranger balance should be better designed around being able to run around with 2 pets at the same time. (heck, necromancers can even run around with maximum 5 minions at the same time and get with every dead enemy if traitet even a temporal 6th minion…, it should absolutely not be a problem to rebalance the Ranger around being able to manage 2 pets at the same time (addign also the feature of pet combo skills)

Then they have to change some of their sword skills, especially the Auto Attack.

That would be all some great improvements around the ranger’s basic mechanics of gameplay. If Pets wouldn’t be needed to be swapped anymore, pets could become more impactful.
Pets should die like normal players.. if a pet loses all its health, it should get into downed state and be finishable, like every normal player, so that rangers have to be more cautious about their pets, if they don’t want to lose some of their DPS.
But Rangers should receive theirfor also better skills/traits with that their can revive/heal their pets. They have already a skill, that gives both of them a passive regeneration, that increases already the survivability of both increadibly…

Orpheal.8263:

Rangers should get rid of that obsolete Pet Swapping and the Ranger balance should be better designed around being able to run around with 2 pets at the same time. (heck, necromancers can even run around with maximum 5 minions at the same time and get with every dead enemy if traitet even a temporal 6th minion…, it should absolutely not be a problem to rebalance the Ranger around being able to manage 2 pets at the same time (addign also the feature of pet combo skills)

In the current state of playing a ranger the pet swapping is kind of strange if you think about for a MMORPG pet using class, but they use this because the pets don’t have a way to dodge one hit kills attacks and as a player you need a way to get a pet into the game again fast.

Orpheal.8263:

Pets should die like normal players.. if a pet loses all its health, it should get into downed state and be finishable, like every normal player, so that rangers have to be more cautious about their pets, if they don’t want to lose some of their DPS. But Rangers should also receive better skills/traits with that so they can revive/heal their pets.

NO

this would not fix anything but make pets a dead weight for sure and completely kill the ranger class. Think about it most people in game now don’t rez players if their standing on top of them….do you really think they would take the time to rez a pet.

If the ranger class gets with the redesign the right skills to heal and revive pets better, YES

In GW1 there you had that skill, with that you could heal and revive your pets in a matter of seconds, without having to be in the near of their dead corpses…

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Comfort_Animal

Skill. You heal your animal companion for 20…87…104 Health. If your companion is dead, it is resurrected with 10…48…58% Health. If you have Comfort Animal equipped, your animal companion will travel with you.

Something like this could be implemented as a new Healing Skill under Slot 6 for the Ranger, so that you can decide, if you want to have the comfort in your class build to instantly revive dead pets, or if you don’t want that comfort, then you have to revive your pets manually.

Or add the revivign effect for pets to the Troll Unguent Skill, if ANet doesn’t want to implement an extra new skill for that …
Anet could add the reviving effect also to some utility skills, liek the nature spirits, so that if you summon a nature spirit, a dead pet will get auto revived..

There are lots of ways how you can improve the ranger into that direction, without that silly obsolete pet swapping and making the class in the same move more fun to play due to having 2 pets at the same time with that you could perform Pet Combos then like a real Beast Master.

Orpheal.8263:

For that they would finally have to redesign the complete Ranger Class in regard to their Call Utilities which should get integrated into the Pet Commands, to replace them with more useful new Utility Skilsl like Nature Spells to give the Ranger some utility skills that fit to its druid theme under their Nature Magic Trait Line.

To go into a bit more detail I said early.

Its nice that with each pet that they have each a different F2 ability. But they need to be bit more impactful and there reaction time needs to be instant and not connected to the pets having to do it.

The first one that comes to mind is the panthers ability “stealth”. It would be just cool if both the ranger and the pet would go into stealth when the F2 key is hit. But I would not stop there with it, I would restrict movement on the stealth and make it last for a good bit of time say 15 to 20 seconds. What’s the point of how it works now its only good in PvE.

Orpheal.8263:

You heal your animal companion for 20…87…104 Health. If your companion is dead, it is resurrected with 10…48…58% Health. If you have Comfort Animal equipped, your animal companion will travel with you.

Now if they would replace the Pet swap key with This function and have both the healing of your pet and the amount of health once resurrected base on Healing power.
That would just be awesome, just as long the cool down would not be long say around the same times of the pet swapping right now if you press before your pet is dead your cool down time is 30 seconds, if the pet is full dead then around 60 seconds.

with this function then giving the pet a down state like you had said before makes a lot more sense, and as a ranger you could still resurrect your pet if it gets stacked in pvp or WvW.

Another thing that need to be reworked and balanced right is “masters bond” in the beast mastery line. The fact that you can not see any buff on your pet is just poor and needs to be fixed and place above the other pet info. The fact that the bonus it gives resets when you swap pets is just completely against every other trait in the line and makes it useless. They need to fix it so the buff stack on the ranger and resets when he goes into a down state and/or death.

Jon Peters already admited that pets are broken, so much so that it reworks enough work as to put it off completely and just band aid it instead.

Knowing that they know it and still haven’t given the flip…