This suggestion mainly pertains to PvE, world bosses and dungeons, but in some cases can be applied to PvP. I mainly have 2 major suggestions/reworks for the pet ai so that pets can be more useful in dungeons and boss fights. As it stands right now, a ranger’s pet is completely useless in most dungeon encounters because of the typical high damage aoe attacks, pull combos, lockdowns, or all of the previous put together. They quite literally melt in the first few seconds of any fight unless you pick a ranged pet, and lets face it, ranged pets are practically worthless unless they are spiders. Ranged pets only last another few seconds before a “global” aoe attack insta gibs them. My first suggestion is more ai focused and realistic. My second suggestions is more of a rework to damage related to pets. It gets the job done, but doesn’t look as pretty.
1a. The main focus of this idea is adding ai for the pets to detect incoming aoe attacks much like players seeing aoe circles and evading (hopefully) before impact. Pets with evasion skills such as devourer’s can be programmed to check and see if Devourer Retreat isn’t on cd and make use of it if available. Another pet example are bears using Defy Pain. Pet’s without evasion skills or pets with skills on cd will simply cancel any attack and attempt to evade the aoe as fast as possible. If in the attack mode, pets will naturally resume attacking. If in the passive mode, pets will attempt to avoid aoe attacks while staying within a 450 radius of the player.
1b. Another addition I would recommend would be giving ranged pets a “warning” radius (for lack of a better word atm) of about 500 units. If any enemies cross this circle, the pet will want to flee, but will not necessarily flee instantly. The more enemies that approach, the higher the desire to flee. Damage taken drastically increases the desire to flee. When fleeing, the pet always runs toward the player, turning around to attack after it is withing 200 units of the player or makes 600 units of distance between the nearest enemy. (If it didn’t stop at the player I fear it would run forever, adding an exploit where the pet’s attacker is so focused on killing the pet that it leaves itself vulnerable to the player.)
2. The main focus of this rework is to make pets immune to certain attacks (mostly bosses), pulls and “global” aoe’s mainly. I would also implement suggestion 1b into this because it just seems logical. Note that nearly no changes will be made to pets for PvP in this case.
Obviously, I really would like to see suggestion 1b in the game if nothing else makes it. I prefer all of suggestion 1, but if they decide they like this suggestion and add both I won’t have any complaints. I know this thread is mainly ranger related. That is because my necro is level 2 and my ranger is level 80. I’m sure a necro can see benefits from these suggestions, but I don’t have any first hand experience. Thanks for reading.