Guild Wars 2

The Ranger is a perfect example of why there should be trait splits between PvE/WvW/PvE. The devs have said they don’t want to go over 1200 Range because of AI aggro mechanics not being able to handle it. It’s unfair that PvE should fundamentally change what would make for good Ranger skirmishing PvP mechanics. Rangers should have the longest range of any of the classes IMO to make them unique. 1500 range would be good for longbow. They would sacrifice a quicker point cap for whittling a target down and then going for a point cap. Mechanically I think that would be unique to them from long range and would make other classes have to react to their tactics.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Thanks for the clarification.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t had time to comment in here. I went through the past 10 or so pages and tried to grab some of the issues that have come up and address them. The balance team has been keeping up with the thread, but they haven’t had as much time lately to comment on specific ideas.

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Re: Lack of participation

• I apologize that I had been absent from this thread for a few days. I had to produce Ready Up last week and a number of other things came up that took priority (including getting a virus that meant I left early for the week). Also, I don’t work on the weekends.
• Just because we’re not responding doesn’t mean we’re not reading.
  • Sometimes we just don’t get the time to respond, but we’ll try to get better about this.

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

Thanks for the response Allie. A few things I think should be considered then since the pets being stowed is “off limits”. Could the pet become an extension of the Ranger then? I am almost thinking their damage should be tweaked in favor of almost being immune to damage like a Warrior Banner. Of course this would mean some serious reworking.

Other option IMO: Players have been asking for ages for pets to have more control over pets. You all have said that you don’t want to alienate newer players, but I think it’s necessary going forward. We need a robust set of skills to control them. They are a liability.

Thanks for posting and I hope you are feeling better. Cheers!

Allie Murdock.8152:

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Respectfully, I think you have this reversed.

We are 18 months into the game’s lifespan and the pet command (F2) still isnt even at an acceptable level of responsiveness. Pet AI is still monstrously bad. I am skeptical that working on AI is a more productive avenue than looking at the aspects or other stow option. Putting other solutions on hold until you fix the AI seems misguided.

I think there should be some pretty strong thought put in to proverbially stop the bleeding with issues with pets, pet AI and all pet related gameplay by providing rangers with some form of an out while you take the time and put in the appropriate amount of effort to fix AI and other issues.

Pets are really really bad.

ItIsFinished.9462:

I think the whole argument about “pets dying to AOE damage” is moot. If the Rangers pet dies to an AOE, it’s because its supposed too.

What I mean is, whenever I’m in a dungeon fighting a boss, and lets say I’m standing back using a LB/SB and my pets is up in it’s face, the boss lets out an AOE, now, my pet is at 20% life…..well so are the other 4 characters in my group…they also have 20% life, the difference is that most rangers don’t pet swap or call back there pet so it can heal, which is what the other 4 party members would do if they got hit hard during a boss fight. So it really comes down to micro/pet management. I hardly have problems with my pets, and I often run birds as well which have low armor and semi low health. Now, I wouldn’t disagree with adding more HP and armor to them in PvE and WvW.

Now, lets say that an enemy zerg is coming your way and your pet gets run over, of course your pet is going to die, as any other class would too.

The difference between a pet and another party member is that party members can dodge.

Pet issues in dungeons come down to the basic design of the game. Guild Wars 2 wants to promote active combat. To do this it gives enemies powerful attacks that players can counter with a powerful mechanic – dodge. If a player fails to dodge, they are punished (usually downed). Pets can’t dodge. The same mechanic used to force players to dodge is used on pets but nothing about pets was designed to counter it. This resulted in lots of dead pets and a solid stigma was created for the ranger (and rangers themselves began to feel like pets were a burden). Since launch pets received not one but two vitality buffs and for many players this alleviated some of this issue, the increase vitality combined with the evolution of the dungeon meta to “stack and spank” meant not even players have to dodge now and dungeons are still completed easily. Pet issues are still evident when you are pushed outside of the easy mode meta or face mechanics that shouldn’t impact on pets at all (like the rotating electric wall in the Aetherblade fractal – pets can’t be saved from that).

Even if rangers could command pets to dodge, it would just be an increased burden on the player to micro manage. A warrior dodges just for himself but a ranger has to be aware of both his position and his pet’s position and dodge accordingly for both. The pet becomes a micro burden not to effectively play the class, but simply because it exists. The micro doesn’t offer you a bonus for your effort, it just makes your class mechanic live long enough to perform basic functionality.

There is only so much you can do with the current tools. At a certain point you run out of pet swaps or your pet is simply not contributing to the fight any more (either dead or on passive. I know some people want more micro over the pet but I would argue a pet should be self sufficient when it comes to surviving under most circumstances. Extra micro shouldn’t be required to survive, it should help utilise the strengths of the mechanic to your advantage.

As far as zergs go, rangers are going to be considerably hindered by fragile pets in zerg combat. There is good reason why many competitive guilds don’t like rangers and you don’t see them actively recruiting them or running rosters with large numbers of them. Not all of that is the fault of the pet, but it doesn’t help.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t had time to comment in here. I went through the past 10 or so pages and tried to grab some of the issues that have come up and address them. The balance team has been keeping up with the thread, but they haven’t had as much time lately to comment on specific ideas.

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Re: Lack of participation

• I apologize that I had been absent from this thread for a few days. I had to produce Ready Up last week and a number of other things came up that took priority (including getting a virus that meant I left early for the week). Also, I don’t work on the weekends.
• Just because we’re not responding doesn’t mean we’re not reading.
  • Sometimes we just don’t get the time to respond, but we’ll try to get better about this.

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

Anything you’d care to share on the whole sustained vs burst argument? Many of us don’t find it possible to even play a power oriented class without some means to apply pressure (in the form of burst and AE as seen with every other class) or a means to actually defend ourselves long enough for the damage we are capable of doing to win out in the end. It would appear that this design philosophy is at the very center of the vast majority of problems this class has that aren’t strictly related to the pet.

What is your vision of the class and how did ANet think it was supposed to compete in a game such as GW2 where sustained damage means absolutely nothing and the only way to bunker is to devote yourself almost entirely to a condition spec (another area the Ranger is middle tier at best because most are single target and the class lacks adequate coverage).

Not to try and move this thread backwards, but I don’t see how we can move forward when the players and developers appear to be on different sides of the planet.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t had time to comment in here. I went through the past 10 or so pages and tried to grab some of the issues that have come up and address them. The balance team has been keeping up with the thread, but they haven’t had as much time lately to comment on specific ideas.

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Re: Lack of participation

• I apologize that I had been absent from this thread for a few days. I had to produce Ready Up last week and a number of other things came up that took priority (including getting a virus that meant I left early for the week). Also, I don’t work on the weekends.
• Just because we’re not responding doesn’t mean we’re not reading.
  • Sometimes we just don’t get the time to respond, but we’ll try to get better about this.

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

Well welcome back to the party, I hope your feeling better.
Just out of curiosity and to quell some concerns people have about pet AI, what are some of these changes coming in the feature patch you were talking about?
If you can talk about them that is.

I know there is a change coming that will make the F2 skills cause the pet to break off from whatever it was doing to use the skill, and thus make them more responsive. Is that what you were talking about or is there something else?

Shiren.9532:

ItIsFinished.9462:

I think the whole argument about “pets dying to AOE damage” is moot. If the Rangers pet dies to an AOE, it’s because its supposed too.

What I mean is, whenever I’m in a dungeon fighting a boss, and lets say I’m standing back using a LB/SB and my pets is up in it’s face, the boss lets out an AOE, now, my pet is at 20% life…..well so are the other 4 characters in my group…they also have 20% life, the difference is that most rangers don’t pet swap or call back there pet so it can heal, which is what the other 4 party members would do if they got hit hard during a boss fight. So it really comes down to micro/pet management. I hardly have problems with my pets, and I often run birds as well which have low armor and semi low health. Now, I wouldn’t disagree with adding more HP and armor to them in PvE and WvW.

Now, lets say that an enemy zerg is coming your way and your pet gets run over, of course your pet is going to die, as any other class would too.

The difference between a pet and another party member is that party members can dodge.

Pet issues in dungeons come down to the basic design of the game. Guild Wars 2 wants to promote active combat. To do this it gives enemies powerful attacks that players can counter with a powerful mechanic – dodge. If a player fails to dodge, they are punished (usually downed). Pets can’t dodge. The same mechanic used to force players to dodge is used on pets but nothing about pets was designed to counter it. This resulted in lots of dead pets and a solid stigma was created for the ranger (and rangers themselves began to feel like pets were a burden). Since launch pets received not one but two vitality buffs and for many players this alleviated some of this issue, the increase vitality combined with the evolution of the dungeon meta to “stack and spank” meant not even players have to dodge now and dungeons are still completed easily. Pet issues are still evident when you are pushed outside of the easy mode meta or face mechanics that shouldn’t impact on pets at all (like the rotating electric wall in the Aetherblade fractal – pets can’t be saved from that).

Even if rangers could command pets to dodge, it would just be an increased burden on the player to micro manage. A warrior dodges just for himself but a ranger has to be aware of both his position and his pet’s position and dodge accordingly for both. The pet becomes a micro burden not to effectively play the class, but simply because it exists. The micro doesn’t offer you a bonus for your effort, it just makes your class mechanic live long enough to perform basic functionality.

There is only so much you can do with the current tools. At a certain point you run out of pet swaps or your pet is simply not contributing to the fight any more (either dead or on passive. I know some people want more micro over the pet but I would argue a pet should be self sufficient when it comes to surviving under most circumstances. Extra micro shouldn’t be required to survive, it should help utilise the strengths of the mechanic to your advantage.

As far as zergs go, rangers are going to be considerably hindered by fragile pets in zerg combat. There is good reason why many competitive guilds don’t like rangers and you don’t see them actively recruiting them or running rosters with large numbers of them. Not all of that is the fault of the pet, but it doesn’t help.

You are correct, pets can’t dodge, but you can use ‘Return to Me’ which is a mappable command on the pet bar. For example, use ‘Return to Me’ before Alpha uses Teeth of Primordus which is extremely predictable.

ItIsFinished.9462:

Shiren.9532:

ItIsFinished.9462:

I think the whole argument about “pets dying to AOE damage” is moot. If the Rangers pet dies to an AOE, it’s because its supposed too.

What I mean is, whenever I’m in a dungeon fighting a boss, and lets say I’m standing back using a LB/SB and my pets is up in it’s face, the boss lets out an AOE, now, my pet is at 20% life…..well so are the other 4 characters in my group…they also have 20% life, the difference is that most rangers don’t pet swap or call back there pet so it can heal, which is what the other 4 party members would do if they got hit hard during a boss fight. So it really comes down to micro/pet management. I hardly have problems with my pets, and I often run birds as well which have low armor and semi low health. Now, I wouldn’t disagree with adding more HP and armor to them in PvE and WvW.

Now, lets say that an enemy zerg is coming your way and your pet gets run over, of course your pet is going to die, as any other class would too.

The difference between a pet and another party member is that party members can dodge.

Pet issues in dungeons come down to the basic design of the game. Guild Wars 2 wants to promote active combat. To do this it gives enemies powerful attacks that players can counter with a powerful mechanic – dodge. If a player fails to dodge, they are punished (usually downed). Pets can’t dodge. The same mechanic used to force players to dodge is used on pets but nothing about pets was designed to counter it. This resulted in lots of dead pets and a solid stigma was created for the ranger (and rangers themselves began to feel like pets were a burden). Since launch pets received not one but two vitality buffs and for many players this alleviated some of this issue, the increase vitality combined with the evolution of the dungeon meta to “stack and spank” meant not even players have to dodge now and dungeons are still completed easily. Pet issues are still evident when you are pushed outside of the easy mode meta or face mechanics that shouldn’t impact on pets at all (like the rotating electric wall in the Aetherblade fractal – pets can’t be saved from that).

Even if rangers could command pets to dodge, it would just be an increased burden on the player to micro manage. A warrior dodges just for himself but a ranger has to be aware of both his position and his pet’s position and dodge accordingly for both. The pet becomes a micro burden not to effectively play the class, but simply because it exists. The micro doesn’t offer you a bonus for your effort, it just makes your class mechanic live long enough to perform basic functionality.

There is only so much you can do with the current tools. At a certain point you run out of pet swaps or your pet is simply not contributing to the fight any more (either dead or on passive. I know some people want more micro over the pet but I would argue a pet should be self sufficient when it comes to surviving under most circumstances. Extra micro shouldn’t be required to survive, it should help utilise the strengths of the mechanic to your advantage.

As far as zergs go, rangers are going to be considerably hindered by fragile pets in zerg combat. There is good reason why many competitive guilds don’t like rangers and you don’t see them actively recruiting them or running rosters with large numbers of them. Not all of that is the fault of the pet, but it doesn’t help.

You are correct, pets can’t dodge, but you can use ‘Return to Me’ which is a mappable command on the pet bar. For example, use ‘Return to Me’ before Alpha uses Teeth of Primordus which is extremely predictable.

The problem with this is you’re in melee range using your 1h sword to kill Alpha so telling your pet to return isn’t going to resolve anything. Unless of course you’re fighting at range where, pet alive or not, you’re not providing competitive damage in the first place and, despite the fact you may be providing spotter and spirit, you’re holding the group back.

And it’s still a very real issue in WvW where the pet is simply killed in seconds running next to you or not because of the sheer scope of how WvW works.

Now if a pet on passive was immune to all damage and could only be injured when it is actively attacking, that would certainly be true and would resolve a very large number of the problems.

Atherakhia.4086:

ItIsFinished.9462:

Shiren.9532:

ItIsFinished.9462:

I think the whole argument about “pets dying to AOE damage” is moot. If the Rangers pet dies to an AOE, it’s because its supposed too.

What I mean is, whenever I’m in a dungeon fighting a boss, and lets say I’m standing back using a LB/SB and my pets is up in it’s face, the boss lets out an AOE, now, my pet is at 20% life…..well so are the other 4 characters in my group…they also have 20% life, the difference is that most rangers don’t pet swap or call back there pet so it can heal, which is what the other 4 party members would do if they got hit hard during a boss fight. So it really comes down to micro/pet management. I hardly have problems with my pets, and I often run birds as well which have low armor and semi low health. Now, I wouldn’t disagree with adding more HP and armor to them in PvE and WvW.

Now, lets say that an enemy zerg is coming your way and your pet gets run over, of course your pet is going to die, as any other class would too.

The difference between a pet and another party member is that party members can dodge.

Pet issues in dungeons come down to the basic design of the game. Guild Wars 2 wants to promote active combat. To do this it gives enemies powerful attacks that players can counter with a powerful mechanic – dodge. If a player fails to dodge, they are punished (usually downed). Pets can’t dodge. The same mechanic used to force players to dodge is used on pets but nothing about pets was designed to counter it. This resulted in lots of dead pets and a solid stigma was created for the ranger (and rangers themselves began to feel like pets were a burden). Since launch pets received not one but two vitality buffs and for many players this alleviated some of this issue, the increase vitality combined with the evolution of the dungeon meta to “stack and spank” meant not even players have to dodge now and dungeons are still completed easily. Pet issues are still evident when you are pushed outside of the easy mode meta or face mechanics that shouldn’t impact on pets at all (like the rotating electric wall in the Aetherblade fractal – pets can’t be saved from that).

Even if rangers could command pets to dodge, it would just be an increased burden on the player to micro manage. A warrior dodges just for himself but a ranger has to be aware of both his position and his pet’s position and dodge accordingly for both. The pet becomes a micro burden not to effectively play the class, but simply because it exists. The micro doesn’t offer you a bonus for your effort, it just makes your class mechanic live long enough to perform basic functionality.

There is only so much you can do with the current tools. At a certain point you run out of pet swaps or your pet is simply not contributing to the fight any more (either dead or on passive. I know some people want more micro over the pet but I would argue a pet should be self sufficient when it comes to surviving under most circumstances. Extra micro shouldn’t be required to survive, it should help utilise the strengths of the mechanic to your advantage.

As far as zergs go, rangers are going to be considerably hindered by fragile pets in zerg combat. There is good reason why many competitive guilds don’t like rangers and you don’t see them actively recruiting them or running rosters with large numbers of them. Not all of that is the fault of the pet, but it doesn’t help.

You are correct, pets can’t dodge, but you can use ‘Return to Me’ which is a mappable command on the pet bar. For example, use ‘Return to Me’ before Alpha uses Teeth of Primordus which is extremely predictable.

The problem with this is you’re in melee range using your 1h sword to kill Alpha so telling your pet to return isn’t going to resolve anything. Unless of course you’re fighting at Ranger where, pet alive or not, you’re not providing competitive damage in the first place and, despite the fact you may be providing spotter and spirit, you’re holding the group back.

And it’s still a very real issue in WvW where the pet is simply killed in seconds running next to you or not because of the sheer scope of how WvW works.

Now if a pet on passive was immune to all damage and could only be injured when it is actively attacking, that would certainly be true and would resolve a very large number of the problems.

First off, if you decide to face roll a boss and not slot a ranged weapon then you certainly must deal with the consequences, especially if you picked Ranger as your class. If you want to face roll bosses, choose Warrior. Second, you said earlier that you hardly play WvW. For someone who hardly plays WvW, how do you know Rangers pets die by running next to you? That statement doesn’t make sense.

It appears I will not be picking up my ranger again any time soon, then.

Allie, I would like to humbly suggest that the dev team attempts to simply create an archer role in some other class, then, given time. Clearly the demand is there seeing as it’s a very large basis for why people want the pet stowed, and honestly, if that isn’t happening due to the developers’ vision, then something needs to be done to accommodate for it. Warrior Longbow and thief shortbow simply are inadequate alternatives.

I believe thief currently has one less weapon combination than most classes in the game (aside from elementalists due to attunements). Perhaps room could be made there for the possibility of longbow implementation? Simply, until the archer role is established, massive populations of players will be unsatisfied with gameplay for the game fails on all fronts to achieve accommodating for such a style of play. Ultimately, it’s ArenaNet’s responsibility for catering to such large demands and simply stating that entire forms of play options are not going to be allowed due to them not being within their vision is absurd and extremely unprofessional when backed by immense demand.

ItIsFinished.9462:

First off, if you decide to face roll a boss and not slot a ranged weapon then you certainly must deal with the consequences, especially if you picked Ranger as your class. If you want to face roll bosses, choose Warrior. Second, you said earlier that you hardly play WvW. For someone who hardly plays WvW, how do you know Rangers pets die by running next to you? That statement doesn’t make sense.

2 different people here. I almost exclusively play WvW.

And it’s not face rolling… it’s playing PvE. As much as people want to pretend min/max doesn’t exist, this is an MMO… the M’s stand for min/max and the way you maximize a ranger in PvE is by using the 1h sword. If you want to do half DPS you use another weapon (the gap is really that large).

The feature patch will include a responsiveness update so we’ve really got to wait and see what that means. Instead of trying to turn the Ranger into a marksman-only class, we should be proposing solutions to keeping the pet alive when exposed to AoE and being able to hit the target.

Specific Game Mode
PvX but you could roll it out to PvP first to test.
Proposal Overview
Consolidating the Rangers F1 and F3 slots to free up a second skill for the pet.
Goal of Proposal
The primary goal of this is to satisfy the users who wish to have more control over the pet while also not overwhelming new players. Having to only worry about 1 more skill would not necessarily result in micromanagement. As it is currently, the F3 key’s function a less than optimal use of space.

The ultimate goal for the class seems to be one where the Ranger can do their own thing while the pet acts independently. Ideally, the pet would act intelligently and know which skill to use and when, but the current system of queued skills not only undermines Ranger-Pet synergy
Proposal Functionality
I think we could change the pet skill bar and make it so that #1 Attack turns into #3 Return when the game detects that the pet has entered or is going to enter combat. This way, we could free up the F3 for a second skill slot from the pet’s species.

Examples:
Bears: F3: Defy Pain
Devourers: F3: Tail Lash

Alternatively, we might be able to come up with skills for each pet family that allow for slightly passive play. e.g. a buff or a debuff. The Juvenile Murellow’s ‘Poison Butt’ would be a good example of this.

Associated Risks
The most obvious risk is that this might result in too much micromanagement that could impact the overall gameplay/feel of this class.
There is also the worry of it being intimidating to new players. However, I think the way the Engineer’s kits change the F1-4 skills is not so different from the learning curve this would require.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t had time to comment in here. I went through the past 10 or so pages and tried to grab some of the issues that have come up and address them. The balance team has been keeping up with the thread, but they haven’t had as much time lately to comment on specific ideas.

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Re: Lack of participation

• I apologize that I had been absent from this thread for a few days. I had to produce Ready Up last week and a number of other things came up that took priority (including getting a virus that meant I left early for the week). Also, I don’t work on the weekends.
• Just because we’re not responding doesn’t mean we’re not reading.
  • Sometimes we just don’t get the time to respond, but we’ll try to get better about this.

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

You mentioned everything is still on the table.
So you are saying you currently have re-working the entire pet AI system since that is without a doubt the biggest issue with pet right now, not F2 skills responsiveness.

Majority of the rangers could not care about pets F2 skill, that is literally one of the least of their worries.

So what kind of plans are there for the fact pets don’t offer anything in WvW, Dungs, fracs, pvp, basically anything in a group type setting??? Because fixing F2 skill lol, is not going to do anything to make me any of us happy.

You also mention Things that will help with pet usability… umm news flash, the pet is dead in under 5 secs unless i absolutely sacrifice more suriviability/dps into pet traits.

Dungs/Fracs, pets dead if i ever go into melee range of even trash mobs.
WvW, lol don’t even bother.
sPvP, everyone ignores the pet because lets face it, there is nothing that makes the opposing team so, o god, take out that pet before it puts a hurt on us!!

Pet fine for solo content. I didn’t purchase an MMO for playing solo.

You say you will have “some changes to pet AI”. I’m sorry, but “some” isn’t going to make them any more viable than they are. I still don’t want anything to do with my pet. All i do is put them on passive and just use them for personal fury/might buffs. Absolutely nothing else they provide me in a group setting.

The other big thing is they take away from my DPS for what?? they do nothing but die in all the content that I personally do. high lvl fracs/wvw/dungs

After 1.5 years, it sounds like you are tossing more bandaids on something that is on bleeding out profusely.

And I don’t mean to sound harsh or anything, I just don’t quite understand the logic behind these “bandaid” fixes that are most likely going to happen when an overhaul is needed. 1.5 years. It’s been long enough.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Tyops.5894:

Respectfully, I think you have this reversed.

We are 18 months into the game’s lifespan and the pet command (F2) still isnt even at an acceptable level of responsiveness. Pet AI is still monstrously bad. I am skeptical that working on AI is a more productive avenue than looking at the aspects or other stow option. Putting other solutions on hold until you fix the AI seems misguided.

I think there should be some pretty strong thought put in to proverbially stop the bleeding with issues with pets, pet AI and all pet related gameplay by providing rangers with some form of an out while you take the time and put in the appropriate amount of effort to fix AI and other issues.

Pets are really really bad.

That is perfectly valid feedback. Like I said though, we do have some changes coming that should help with this. Particularly with the one you noted (F2).

Thanks for your constructive thoughts!

I want to add my agreement with Tyops. Pet AI is insanely bad. F2 skills are only the beginning, although it’s a strong start. Since so many core class functions involve the pet, the burden this places on the AI is incredibly high. In effect, the Player Behind The Keyboard is not in control of a large portion of their character. I don’t know how hard it would be to fix, but if it turns out to be impractical, you really need to redesign the pet’s role to fit within it’s limitations.

The pet as implemented simply doesn’t work. If you can fix it, That’s great. No complaints there. But if it can’t be made to work, then the vision for the class needs to be changed.

Basically, I suppose I’m asking for reassurance that you’re willing to make drastic changes if they prove necessary.

Allie Murdock.8152:

• We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.

We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

I am one of the few who really want to keep the pet. We are, as a community, really crossing our fingers that the team will overhaul the pet.

This applies to WvW and PvE

Things to consider about the pet:
- If the pet could move while attacking, this would fix 99% of our “lost” DPS.

- The pet’s F2 needs to be more responsive (saw you were looking into that).

- We need a way to revive our pet (make it so only the owner can revive his own pet, and it provides no exp reward, therefore this mechanic will not be exploited or used to disrupt other players.

- The pet needs to be able to dodge roll with us or actively avoid AOE (red circles).

- Would be nice if the pet could “float” up to us when we jump up small ledges.

- The pet needs to stay nearer to us when it is on “passive”. The pet still runs 10+ feet ahead right into AOE, where if it were next to me, it would not be inside of AOE circles.

Ranger Survivability

Is there any way we can have our endurance regeneration reverted back to 50% again? This was one of the few things we had in our trait lines that made up for what the rest of the ranger traits didn’t. Lack of good condition removal? Not a problem because we could dodge roll with the 50% endurance regeneration trait and avoid conditions before they were applied to us. Now we only have 25% endurance regeneration and still no condition removal that isn’t tied to the pet being alive. Really sucks if you’re a shout ranger, where most of the shouts aim to kill your pet off in your stead, and it comes back later to stab you in the back when you can’t get rid of conditions.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t had time to comment in here. I went through the past 10 or so pages and tried to grab some of the issues that have come up and address them. The balance team has been keeping up with the thread, but they haven’t had as much time lately to comment on specific ideas.

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Re: Lack of participation

• I apologize that I had been absent from this thread for a few days. I had to produce Ready Up last week and a number of other things came up that took priority (including getting a virus that meant I left early for the week). Also, I don’t work on the weekends.
• Just because we’re not responding doesn’t mean we’re not reading.
  • Sometimes we just don’t get the time to respond, but we’ll try to get better about this.

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

To be honest, I’m surprised that until now, none of the Pet fixes from GW1 have been implemented/tried. A large portion of the problems we had then are the same as we have now.

- Pets died from AoE → General Pet damage reduction of 33%in PvE. I realise this may open the door for Bots, but without Dodge, they’re still too vulnerable to oneshot attacks in most high-end PvE.
- Pets can’t hit anyhing → 20% Speed boost at all times, the benefit of this exists as a trait and has been documented to improve Pet reliability considerably, but Traits should never be mandatory when it comes to simply making class mechanics work to even “acceptable” levels.
- Horrible, tank-an-AoE AI → Ability to flag a pet where you want at any time, along with Hero controls. This one may not be possible to implement easily, but this helped HUGELY in pet survival.
- Limited skillbar due to Charm/Rez/Heal Skills → You generally needed 3 skills just to make sure your pet did not always die and stayed dead. A similar issue occurs here, your Pet dies fast. You either bring a ton of defensive measures or use your heal to save your pet (leaving the Ranger vulnerable) or accept a net damage loss. Granted, this was worse in most GW1 builds since the pet was the main source of damage, but no mechanics exist to get your pet back in the field if both of them died. Your damage is down for a full minute unless you invested in BM.

This leaves us with 2 other issues:
- No dodge: Unless you make pets immune to attacks like Molten Berzerker Stomp, Flame Shaman Arrow or other high-damage, must-dodge attacks, no amount of damage reduction will ever help the Ranger in high-end PvE when these types of bosses appear.
- Pets die/blocked/Incapable of hitting, leaving the Ranger with a net loss of damage with nothing to compensate for. As a result, Ranger can never be a sustained damage class when it can not ensure that it can deliver reliable sustained damage. A move of (all) damage from Pet to Ranger is required for this, which in turn leaves pets lackluster and weak. This conflicting definition is your Ranger Class Philosophy and needs attention.

While other factors (Shouts, Signets, Traits, SB, Sword, LB, …wow, that’s a lot…) also need to be looked at, most of us feel fixing our class mechanic, the Pet would do a lot more for the class as a whole than band-aid fixes and retweaking some skills. The flaw lies not with the Ranger, it lies with the Pet. Fixing up the edges is a rather futile task if you have a weak basis. You can’t build castles on a swamp.

It has been over a year, there is little hope the pet will ever be worthy of 30% of our damage. If we have to keep the pets, can we keep their names? Is anyone working on that?

Honestly, I feel like there shouldn’t be equal compensation for stowing the pet as opposed to using it. Obviously the AI needs to be tweaked, but it wouldn’t do much good if you were just as well off without using it, because then what would be the point of having it to begin with?

I’m not opposed to the idea of being able to stow the pet while in combat. I just think that the player shouldn’t be given FULL compensation for the damage and utility lost. The idea here is to make players want to use the pet, even if it’s not required.

That’s the point, Black. People literally just want better/more reliable damage throughput and could care less about the utility. I’d even go as far to say that I’d rather have better 1-5 and have my utilities – including even my heal – locked up and unusable (as long as I retained the mobility bonus).

But there’s not much anyone can do now except find a different class or another game. Rangers clearly are not meant to be a class with much diversity.

Arghore.8340:

runeblade.7514:

If I am reading Ally support 1 right, I think this is genius. Moving pet’s f2 skill for ranger only cast will increase the viability of f2 skills as pets can take 3/4 second to 5 second to cast their f2 skills because of bugs. A ranger casting the pet’s f2 skill will relieve those bugs and make it easier to cast. The downside is that rangers actually have to cast the f2 themselves.

I think you are reading it wrong, it merely states that the amount of Ally support skills on pets (including the F2 skills) could be increased (or shift from pet-AI-controlled to F2 controlled).

And while I agree that defensive 1 makes the rest obsolete, the other mechanics seem to be a lot more interesting. In a sense that they are actual mechanics, where no1 is just a flat damage reduction. And I personally do not see the problems with combining #2 and #4 together to make the pet more reliable, and personally think your statement of ‘immortal’ is fairly overstated.

Also don’t agree with your stance on offense #1 and #4 I don’t see any ‘perma cripple’ there? A cripple that actually lands due to #1 could then make it more likely that the rest of the pet attacks hit as well, at least for the time the movement impared condition works. After that it’s mainly a question of when the pet will hit again… (given that I haven’t tried a setup with all pet-speed skills combined to try and make hits more reliable).

As far as offensive 3 goes, I may have misunderstood the details, and perhaps they want the range increased or the reactiveness increased. These I think are mostly requested for Pet vs Human interaction and not Pet vs NPC. It was proposed in as part of the ‘I can hardly land a hit on moving targets’-discussion, so maybe something else was the ‘spear point’ of the suggestion.

So, in other words with Ally support skills, you want more skills that focuses on buffing allies. I disagree. I want more varied skills and not just ally buffing only. There are multitudes of techniques that pets could use instead of party support.

Defensive 2+1 makes the pets have zero weakness. Even if they somehow die, defensive 4 will let the pet continue attacking. So no, it is not an overstatement.

If you don’t have to have cripple in auto-attack then you better specify it. If you want cripple in skills with cooldown, dogs already have this. Perma cripple + perma swiftness will be overpowered. Locust swarm proves it. In fact, Offensive 1 + 3+ 4 sounds like a dog with Agility Training. We already have something like this.

Welcome back, Allie.

As others have noted, an improvement in the F2 would be a welcomed addition, but it’s far from fixing the pet AI.

Others have noted the other major problems, such as not being able to dodge on demand.

It’s very nice to know that there will be an improvement in the upcoming patch, but if you are not allowed to comment on what those improvements will be, then I’m afraid that there will not necessarily be a similar opportunity of a CDI on this class in the near future after the changes have been made. In other words, I’m quite paranoid that we may not be able to do a follow-up that will receive a similar attention.

“Every other avenue has been explored” may be a sensible thing to say, but this would mean that the Ranger would potentially be stuck in its current state indefinitely, wouldn’t you say? How do we know that “every other avenue has been explored”? If that entails the whole reworking of the pet AI, which nobody can know how long that would take… I don’t think another 1.5 years spent to explore every other avenue would be the kind of expectation we have (which doesn’t even sound plausible in the eyes of many). Maybe a bit unfair?

What’s wrong with a quick dirty fix to make Ranger viable first before eventually the pet AI is reworked, if ever? Are you afraid that once the Ranger has become viable without the pet, the dev team will quickly see a pet reworking as a low priority and probably abandon it altogether?

The negative consequence behind “fixing the AI”, is that it would promote even more passive playing in PvP.

For this reason, the pet system DOES needs a redesign.

Making most pet skills requiring manual input from the player to trigger could be the solution. It could also promote rewarding skill sequences between the pet and the ranger, moving the profession away from too much passive, and more into a skill-sequence-driven profession (like an engineer, elementalist, etc). That would be healthy to the competitive side of the game, but also very fun by itself.

AoE resistance (but lower health so that targetted effects can counter it), innate faster moving speed, and a way to flag the pet would also be awesome.

Pet flagging could be a ground-targetted sequence skill that would force the pet to go to choosen location until the skill is clicked on again.

WatchTheShow.7203:

Allie Murdock.8152:

• We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.

We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

I am one of the few who really want to keep the pet. We are, as a community, really crossing our fingers that the team will overhaul the pet.

This applies to WvW and PvE

Things to consider about the pet:
- If the pet could move while attacking, this would fix 99% of our “lost” DPS.

- The pet’s F2 needs to be more responsive (saw you were looking into that).

- We need a way to revive our pet (make it so only the owner can revive his own pet, and it provides no exp reward, therefore this mechanic will not be exploited or used to disrupt other players.

- The pet needs to be able to dodge roll with us or actively avoid AOE (red circles).

- Would be nice if the pet could “float” up to us when we jump up small ledges.

- The pet needs to stay nearer to us when it is on “passive”. The pet still runs 10+ feet ahead right into AOE, where if it were next to me, it would not be inside of AOE circles.

Ranger Survivability

Is there any way we can have our endurance regeneration reverted back to 50% again? This was one of the few things we had in our trait lines that made up for what the rest of the ranger traits didn’t. Lack of good condition removal? Not a problem because we could dodge roll with the 50% endurance regeneration trait and avoid conditions before they were applied to us. Now we only have 25% endurance regeneration and still no condition removal that isn’t tied to the pet being alive. Really sucks if you’re a shout ranger, where most of the shouts aim to kill your pet off in your stead, and it comes back later to stab you in the back when you can’t get rid of conditions.

Hold up. The conversation is really getting skewed here.

I have no idea how you guys play or if this is a result of a game of telephone where someone started saying that Ranger pets have hidden code that causes them to insta-die and now that’s your whole opinion of them, but pets are NOT that catastrophic. And it is NOT the majority of us that want permastow and to turn the class into a marksman-only-profession and I would like it if y’all quit claiming that.

To be frankly, I read the very first thread over and over again for past days, because one of the statements bothers me, the class Ranger Design Philosophy,
“The Ranger is a resilient profession that excels at skirmishing by drawing from nature to support themselves as well as their allies. Alongside their pet, they have some of the best single target and sustained damage that will whittle their opponents down.”
Well, to me, this statement is more like describing ENGINEER not ranger, and better yet, engineers do much better than rangers in terms of class functionality: they have tons of cc, healing skills to support them “wit their foes down”(except they "draw"power from “machines” instead of “nature”; in the meanwhile, engineers can also do better “sustained damage” for a long-haul fight for BOTH single and aoe targets ("alongside their tools ofc, not “pets”).
So, this is my question, are we becoming another engineer class? because engineer is more meet the ranger’s philosophy (except the “nature” and “pet” part, it is perfect to replace them with "technology"and “machine”).

Because for me, I do believe gw2 ranger is much more than a “skirmisher”, first we are great ARCHERS, yes I DO believe, as a class that can use both longbow and shortbow, we should be a “master archer” above all classes. then we are the SKIRMISHERS as the class philosophy mentions (except engineers do much better at this point). at last, we also supposed to be a great [b]SCOUT [/B], and I think this the biggest part which ranger different from other classes, at WvW ranger should ability to scout and detect incoming foes on map, or extra-range vision to detect foes, and expose invisible, so rangers can always find and report enemy players location in a certain-long range when other classes cannot reach ,for PvE mode, rangers also have ability to detect nearby foes/mobs on map. moreover, certain invisibility will also support ranger class to ( I reckon certain long cooldown skill will help) to become a competent “scout”

I do appreciate that the problems with a pet are recognized and seemingly being treated with gravitas.

But, I’m kind of more wondering at this stage if there’s been any headway on getting more clear direction for Ranger in a group play situation? What unique asset am I supposed to be bringing to the table across all the gamemodes? The AI could be functioning Pitch Perfect tomorrow, and I still really wouldn’t know this.

Or is that something the CDI should be offering more alternatives and input on?

As Allie didn’t want this CDI to be all about the permastow option (or turning it into an aspect), I’d just like to come up with a poll:

http://poll.pollcode.com/38561745

Obviously, a significant majority will be telling factor (not close to 50-50), but even without the percentage, if there are enough participants, I think the numbers also will show some weight.

The point of this is to lessen speculative statements for future discussions.

I hope everyone who has an opinion would take part in this short ‘yes’ or ‘no’ poll. I’d also post this in the Aspect thread.

DeceiverX.8361:

It appears I will not be picking up my ranger again any time soon, then.

Allie, I would like to humbly suggest that the dev team attempts to simply create an archer role in some other class, then, given time. Clearly the demand is there seeing as it’s a very large basis for why people want the pet stowed, and honestly, if that isn’t happening due to the developers’ vision, then something needs to be done to accommodate for it. Warrior Longbow and thief shortbow simply are inadequate alternatives.

I agree with you 1,000% on the bolded part… wait, should have bolded the whole kitten thing because looks like I’ll be spending even less time on my Ranger… Until it comes time to throw stuff into the forge.

From hence forth it shall be known as The Ranger Mule.

blud.8174:

WatchTheShow.7203:

Allie Murdock.8152:

• We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.

We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

I am one of the few who really want to keep the pet. We are, as a community, really crossing our fingers that the team will overhaul the pet.

This applies to WvW and PvE

Things to consider about the pet:
- If the pet could move while attacking, this would fix 99% of our “lost” DPS.

- The pet’s F2 needs to be more responsive (saw you were looking into that).

- We need a way to revive our pet (make it so only the owner can revive his own pet, and it provides no exp reward, therefore this mechanic will not be exploited or used to disrupt other players.

- The pet needs to be able to dodge roll with us or actively avoid AOE (red circles).

- Would be nice if the pet could “float” up to us when we jump up small ledges.

- The pet needs to stay nearer to us when it is on “passive”. The pet still runs 10+ feet ahead right into AOE, where if it were next to me, it would not be inside of AOE circles.

Ranger Survivability

Is there any way we can have our endurance regeneration reverted back to 50% again? This was one of the few things we had in our trait lines that made up for what the rest of the ranger traits didn’t. Lack of good condition removal? Not a problem because we could dodge roll with the 50% endurance regeneration trait and avoid conditions before they were applied to us. Now we only have 25% endurance regeneration and still no condition removal that isn’t tied to the pet being alive. Really sucks if you’re a shout ranger, where most of the shouts aim to kill your pet off in your stead, and it comes back later to stab you in the back when you can’t get rid of conditions.

Hold up. The conversation is really getting skewed here.

I have no idea how you guys play or if this is a result of a game of telephone where someone started saying that Ranger pets have hidden code that causes them to insta-die and now that’s your whole opinion of them, but pets are NOT that catastrophic. And it is NOT the majority of us that want permastow and to turn the class into a marksman-only-profession and I would like it if y’all quit claiming that.

I play mostly WvW and PvE. I have over 2,000 hours played on my ranger. Been playing it since beta. The pet underperforms even when micro-managing it as much as I do (which is a lot).

xallever.1874:

As Allie didn’t want this CDI to be all about the permastow option (or turning it into an aspect), I’d just like to come up with a poll:

http://poll.pollcode.com/38561745_result?v

Obviously, a significant majority will be telling factor (not close to 50-50), but even without the percentage, if there are enough participants, I think the numbers also will show some weight.

The point of this is to lessen speculative statements for future discussions.

I hope everyone who has an opinion would take part in this short ‘yes’ or ‘no’ poll. I’d also post this in the Aspect thread.

Correct link:

http://poll.pollcode.com/38561745

Allie Murdock.8152:

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

So, you want the class itself to have some input? Is this my moment to shine?

Rangers themselves do need help. From your description, I have a myriad of ideas.

Specific Game Mode
PvP

Proposal Overview
Give Rangers more resilience.

Goal of Proposal
Rangers are suppose to be the sustain damage class while being resilient. This is Anet’s vision of the class as per Allie said.

The problem is, Rangers are not resilient. If anet wants rangers to be resilient, then it needs to be resilient.

Proposal Functionality

Weapon skills
Every ranger weapon set need some sort of reliable defense without needing to trait for it. Like necro weapons have a snare for their attrition class.

Sword- evades need to break immobilize and allow dodging while auto-attacking. Reduce auto-attack damage to compensate the buff.
Dagger- evades need to break immobilize.
GS- Improve auto-attack damage. The resilient factor is fine here.
OH Axe- Fine in resilient factor, but could use improvements elsewhere.
Axe- Remove winter’s bite and put cripple in Splitblade. Then add a new third skill that transfer a condition. I propose removing winter’s bite because Axe is not a single target weapon, it is an AoE weapon. Otherwise, add a leap to it. Then the dual axe ranger can charge in and then use Whirling defense or the axe ranger can leap to safety.
Torch- Throw torch inflict fear because enemy is crying in pain. Bonfire removes Bleeding and chill because Rangers can use fire to burn the skin to stop bleeding and defrost the snow.
Warhorn- Warhorn Birds give blind and/or Warhorn 5 removes condition.
Shortbow- Give cripple in quickshot. Keep Crippling shot the way it is. The problem with this is that Crippling shot is not flexible. Quick shot is.
Longbow- Hunter shot or PBS give immobilize when hit. Longbow needs help in maintaining distance since it is not a flexible weapon. Many skills requires the enemy to be in front of the ranger or be rooted. Unlike the Mesmer GS, the mesmer can be running away while casting spells. Rangers cannot.

Utility skills
Huge change in survival skills- Every single one of them needs to remove certain Condition in some ways. Lightning Reflex can remove Immobilize, chill and cripple. Muddy terrain removes bleeding, burning, torment. Quickening Zephyr removes weakness, blind, and confusion. Sharpening stone needs change, should apply cripple AND bleed.

Traps get a grandmaster trait- “Bide Time.” Remove a condition and gain regeneration when a trap is activated. The idea here is that Rangers uses the moment that slowed the enemy to recuperate.

Shouts- Protect me should transfer condition, stuns, damage straight to the pet. Other than that, shouts are fine.

Signet- Should not require me to take Signet of the Beastmaster to use the active effect. If anything, it should be reversed. SotB will give the pet the active effect instead.

Traits
Empathetic bond changed Melandru’s resilience, which reduce 33% condition duration. This is a very ranger like skill. Since my Rangers suggestion get loads of condition removal, current EB would be a bad trait.
Fortifying Bond- Need a vice versa. Especially for bearbow rangers.

Other traits-
Beastmaster adept trait- Activating a F2 skill will remove conditions.
Skirmishing Master trait- If you leap and doesn’t hit anything(or just leap in general), you gain swiftness. So that when swoop and Monarch leap is used to escape, you get to run away.

Everything here is about raising survivability and control which rangers lack really hard especially on a resilient class that cannot burst.

tl;dr: Add more control/support skills and condi removal!

Associated Risks
When you buff something, it runs into a chance of being OP. Rangers is suppose to trade burst for survivability which is a good trade to me for PvP. But right now, we trade burst for nothing.

ItIsFinished.9462:

xallever.1874:

As Allie didn’t want this CDI to be all about the permastow option (or turning it into an aspect), I’d just like to come up with a poll:

http://poll.pollcode.com/38561745_result?v

Obviously, a significant majority will be telling factor (not close to 50-50), but even without the percentage, if there are enough participants, I think the numbers also will show some weight.

The point of this is to lessen speculative statements for future discussions.

I hope everyone who has an opinion would take part in this short ‘yes’ or ‘no’ poll. I’d also post this in the Aspect thread.

Correct link:

http://poll.pollcode.com/38561745

Thanks! Edited.

DiogoSilva.7089:

The negative consequence behind “fixing the AI”, is that it would promote even more passive playing in PvP.

For this reason, the pet system DOES needs a redesign.

Making most pet skills requiring manual input from the player to trigger could be the solution. It could also promote rewarding skill sequences between the pet and the ranger, moving the profession away from too much passive, and more into a skill-sequence-driven profession (like an engineer, elementalist, etc). That would be healthy to the competitive side of the game, but also very fun by itself.

AoE resistance (but lower health so that targetted effects can counter it), innate faster moving speed, and a way to flag the pet would also be awesome.

Pet flagging could be a ground-targetted sequence skill that would force the pet to go to choosen location until the skill is clicked on again.

This. x100 times.

AI bots are not interesting to play with, boring to watch, and annoying to play against because it feels cheap.

These are not things you want in a healthy competitive scene. They introduce far too much randomness and skill debasement into the meta.

Stop and think about what “fixing pet AI” means. It means they should hit more consistently, in this case, without input. All that’ll get you is more QQ in the spvp forum, and get you less people interested in the game because the concept of watching a bot in doing what you’re suppose to be doing is frankly the antithesis to real competition.

Higher skill cap is a good thing, whether it be in the form of multiple pet/aspect rotation, (2 is not enough) or manual controlling both damage sources of the toon.

Thank you for the feedback Allie!
@ Range limit: It does not matter when most of enemies still reaching you, as they should. It will not brake anything IMO, so do not worry about it.
Let’s give you an example: You’re shooting the target with LB’s new range of 1500:

• If its a mage with ~900, it will move ~600 towards you to get in range – by using a single skill.
• If its a melee foe, then it will or would charge at you anyway, so that range difference will be disappear shortly.
• At 1v1 fights IF you can keep up the 1500 range, then you deserve it. If not, then it doesn’t matter, but yet you still can.
• At 1vX, some will get close anyway…
• LB’s range update would solve the WvW hit-detection bugs I hope.

DeceiverX.8361:

It appears I will not be picking up my ranger again any time soon, then.

Allie, I would like to humbly suggest that the dev team attempts to simply create an archer role in some other class, then, given time. Clearly the demand is there seeing as it’s a very large basis for why people want the pet stowed, and honestly, if that isn’t happening due to the developers’ vision, then something needs to be done to accommodate for it. Warrior Longbow and thief shortbow simply are inadequate alternatives.

I believe thief currently has one less weapon combination than most classes in the game (aside from elementalists due to attunements). Perhaps room could be made there for the possibility of longbow implementation? Simply, until the archer role is established, massive populations of players will be unsatisfied with gameplay for the game fails on all fronts to achieve accommodating for such a style of play. Ultimately, it’s ArenaNet’s responsibility for catering to such large demands and simply stating that entire forms of play options are not going to be allowed due to them not being within their vision is absurd and extremely unprofessional when backed by immense demand.

I just wanted to point out that the Thief and Warrior actually do make better “archers” than rangers. Both, the Thief and Warrior have 6 attacks with their bows, and both have better skill flow from one skill to the other on ether setting up combos or strait up burst dmg spam. In most occasions Rangers only use 3 of the 5 bow attacks for any given bow (in pve). Using the other 2 abilities will have one of these outcomes for a ranger.

kitten
1. off any melee member in the party for knocking the foe even if it was knocking the foe into a more favorable position.
2. to kill your self by running up to the boss.
3. to run for your dear life because something wants to kill you.

your assumption that there is no “archer class” is dead wrong by the proof of the success of thief and warrior archer builds (hell even the warriors have a very deadly pvp build that involves the LB and the combos/ burst it does). Basically what is being stated is there is no archer niche in another profession even though both of these professions are better with the bows than the ranger in terms of usability and damage output only because neither can use both of these bows right?

I am sorry that you feel that ranger was supposed to fill this archer roll, nothing about this class and its origins scream archer though, if anything it screams roamer and loaner since we are always so far away from the group when attacking with a bow rather than in the thick of the fight. If you look at weapon skills and traits before hand it would do you loads of good when you want to pick a class to fill a role you like. I would even recommend reading the wiki and all the skills and traits available.

Really the biggest disappointment with ranger is how unimpressive pets are, for reference in GW1 a well buffed/well stacked pet at max beastmastery could take off over half the health of another player with one critical, which was balanced because going that deep into BM reduced your own dmg output but made your pet something to fear. not to mention ranger pets didn’t die so easily and were much quicker to get back in the fight once they did in GW1 than they are in GW2.

Also I guess GW2 is missing a lot of pet utilities/traits that rely on BM to put pets up there in damage.

But back to your topic, go check out the 6 skills that both Warriors and the Thief have on their bows and look at how they can be chained to create openings, combos, and etc. Then go look at ranger bow skills and look at how often you use those abilities when you want to make something dead/keep something from escaping/get to your target/survive effectively.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t had time to comment in here. I went through the past 10 or so pages and tried to grab some of the issues that have come up and address them. The balance team has been keeping up with the thread, but they haven’t had as much time lately to comment on specific ideas.

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Re: Lack of participation

• I apologize that I had been absent from this thread for a few days. I had to produce Ready Up last week and a number of other things came up that took priority (including getting a virus that meant I left early for the week). Also, I don’t work on the weekends.
• Just because we’re not responding doesn’t mean we’re not reading.
  • Sometimes we just don’t get the time to respond, but we’ll try to get better about this.

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

Welcome back. I wish you would consider thinking of the ranger’s pet as a mesmer clone and not as an extension of the ranger. The AI is bad, so bad in fact that giving pets such a high percentage of OUR power feels like a serious class Nerf. In PVE pets are meat shields which they could still be even if they didn’t posses a third of our damage potential.

Many of us are willing to get rid of pets in our gameplay just to recoup that damage but if you want to keep pets out at least consider nerfing pets and buffing the actual player.

After pet AI gets worked on and fixed could the addition of pet utility attacks be too far out of question?

Something that functions kind of like F2 and causes them to exiqute a special attack that can be ether devastating or apply some kind of effect much like a weapon attack but used by pets. Even an attack that functions differently given circumstances with triggers for double dmg based on foe’s hp or the presence of a condition or boon?
This could also increase the roll of pets and the desire to have them for encounters.

I am not putting this in the CDI format because it probably sounds like a crazy man screaming, but GW1 had utility for pets and some of them when set up correctly just warms your heart when you see your pet attack 8 targets at once in an aoe or take out the majority of someone’s health, or lock your foe out of their abilities because of a well placed attack by your pet.

Specific Game Mode:
All

Proposal Overview:
Reasoning why the pet needs a complete revamp

Goal of Proposal:
Diminished reliance on a mechanic that has never worked

Proposal Functionality:
The class will stay how it currently works, with its main and obvious detriment lessened

Associated Risks:
If the pet stays, but as a slotted skill, new mechanic would need to be balanced (though I propose that anything would be easier to balance than a pet)

Proposal:
Simply put, and the dev poster itself touches on this and its stated time and time again by players:

There is nothing good about the pet.

It’s to squishy making it none-viable in WvWvW and PvE, it has pathing issues making none-viable in anything, it has attacking and moving issues making it none-viable in anything. Honestly, look at other class mechanics: are any of them a detriment to the class? Do any of them cripple the play of the class? No, only rangers terribly implemented mechanic does that. It’s the only class mechanic that a large amount of the class would want to have removed (and has been asking for its removal for months)

There is quiet literally nothing good about the pet, and unless some sort of miracle patch comes along and revamps the pet system in its entirety, then nothing will EVER fix the ranger class so long as it revolves around pets to such an alarming extent.

I’d go so far as to suggest a complete revamp of Ranger with pet removed as the class mechanic. Perhaps replaced by something to make range and movement more viable (since ranger players, as is blatantly obvious in this thread, don’t like being medium armor warriors, and do like being skirmishy and using bows), or something spirit based. Anything is better than a pet which is quiet literally the worst mechanic in the game and should be nothing more than a slot skill similar to GW1 that is completely optional. Because let’s be honest; if you could only get a pet by slotting it as, say an ultimate (like flesh golem) how many people would use even that?

Aidenwolf.5964:

Welcome back. I wish you would consider thinking of the ranger’s pet as a mesmer clone and not as an extension of the ranger. The AI is bad, so bad in fact that giving pets such a high percentage of OUR power feels like a serious class Nerf. In PVE pets are meat shields which they could still be even if they didn’t posses a third of our damage potential.

Many of us are willing to get rid of pets in our gameplay just to recoup that damage but if you want to keep pets out at least consider nerfing pets and buffing the actual player.

a ranger without a pet is a warrior without adrenaline. if you get the base damage without the mechanic what is there that makes you, well you? Besides the lack of depth and skill ceiling.

Dropping pets would be a horrible move if you hate the Ai I think your energy would be better expanded on stating what you expect from the Ai and where it is falling short. What if the AI got fixed would you rather a pet with a smart Ai doing next to no dmg and looking pretty or would you rather it tearing through enemies while you focus on another aspect of the current combat you find your self in?

There are two sides to every coin. yes the AI is bad atm and I would like to see 18k crits from my own attacks without setting up for it. But wouldn’t that get dull? wouldn’t you crave a more interesting way to play? I do agree though that there should be a way to spec so you can play a more strait forword.. dull build by taking some grandmaster trait in marks that gimpifies your pet with a stat boost to you but it is not something that should be the norm nor should it be preferred. it should be something if anything that is easily countered, and makes you feel like a fish out of water while you have it.

on the flip side there should be a way to make the pet more of a part of you as much as Necromancer minions are when they run minion master or Mesmer phantasms when they run zerker. High damage and utility capability much more so than currently available with the benefit of it being there and fighting with you rather than being a hindrance to your or it’s own survival. We should be empowered to be fighting with our pets not punished…we should also flip out and smash more face should something happen to them and they should be the same should something happen to us. just think how K9 officers react should someone hurt their hound or how their hounds react if someone attacks their officer, they only get more aggressive, more passionate to the other and more lethal to the attacker.

Allie!
I trust in you guys. Pls let us to play WvW! Do what you need but i want to play WvW with my ranger!

Thats all i want.

Criminal.5627:

Aidenwolf.5964:

Welcome back. I wish you would consider thinking of the ranger’s pet as a mesmer clone and not as an extension of the ranger. The AI is bad, so bad in fact that giving pets such a high percentage of OUR power feels like a serious class Nerf. In PVE pets are meat shields which they could still be even if they didn’t posses a third of our damage potential.

Many of us are willing to get rid of pets in our gameplay just to recoup that damage but if you want to keep pets out at least consider nerfing pets and buffing the actual player.

a ranger without a pet is a warrior without adrenaline. if you get the base damage without the mechanic what is there that makes you, well you? Besides the lack of depth and skill ceiling.

Dropping pets would be a horrible move if you hate the Ai I think your energy would be better expanded on stating what you expect from the Ai and where it is falling short. What if the AI got fixed would you rather a pet with a smart Ai doing next to no dmg and looking pretty or would you rather it tearing through enemies while you focus on another aspect of the current combat you find your self in?

There are two sides to every coin. yes the AI is bad atm and I would like to see 18k crits from my own attacks without setting up for it. But wouldn’t that get dull? wouldn’t you crave a more interesting way to play? I do agree though that there should be a way to spec so you can play a more strait forword.. dull build by taking some grandmaster trait in marks that gimpifies your pet with a stat boost to you but it is not something that should be the norm nor should it be preferred. it should be something if anything that is easily countered, and makes you feel like a fish out of water while you have it.

on the flip side there should be a way to make the pet more of a part of you as much as Necromancer minions are when they run minion master or Mesmer phantasms when they run zerker. High damage and utility capability much more so than currently available with the benefit of it being there and fighting with you rather than being a hindrance to your or it’s own survival. We should be empowered to be fighting with our pets not punished…we should also flip out and smash more face should something happen to them and they should be the same should something happen to us. just think how K9 officers react should someone hurt their hound or how their hounds react if someone attacks their officer, they only get more aggressive, more passionate to the other and more lethal to the attacker.

A ranger without a pet is nothing like a warrior. Our weapon skills are nowhere near as good as warrior. Lose pets and buff traps and redesign our bow skills and sword and then we’d be somethng special.

Pet AI hasn’t improved since beta so my suggestions to improve the class disregard the pet as Anet has done during the life of the game. They probably will improve F2 but it took a year and a half to do just that. As I’ve said before, with ascended gearing I want to only play my ranger, and they need to be fixed.

Jocksy.3415:

wolfyrik.2017:

Permastow isn’t the same thing as getting rid of all pets. It would be an advantage to many players in certain environments and wouldn’t affect people like you at all. It wouldn’t harm your gameplay, it wouldn’t affect how you play, it wouldn’t prevent you from using the pet. It would only grant people the option of not using the pet, when the pet is a liability.

Risk: People expect rangers to stow their pets, thus playing with pets might be seen a lesser playstyle…

Using the pet in a dungeon already IS a lesser playstyle and already does lead to rangers being kicked from dungeons. If they refuse to fix the dungeon mechanics, this will continue to the be the case. Rangers will remain a lesser playstyle. Allowing stow with buff to damage, would make rangers appealing to group with again, or at least less objectionable than they are now. Band-aid fix but it would work.

Abrilete.1439:

Regarding the 30% DPS lost becasuse our pets never hit…
It’s been tested by several players that the “30% faster pets trait” (Agility Training) helps a lot improving pet’s DPS.

Giving our pets that speed increase by default, and also increasing the range for their mele attacks, could be an easy-to-implement patch until ANet decides to fix pet’s AI.

Ohoni suggested something similar and while it would help in a pvp environment, it would do next to nothing to help the dungeon/fractal/boss fight problems. Would still be a great QoL band-aid in the mean-time tho.

Aidenwolf.5964:

A ranger without a pet is nothing like a warrior. Our weapon skills are nowhere near as good as warrior. Lose pets and buff traps and redesign our bow skills and sword and then we’d be somethng special.

Pet AI hasn’t improved since beta so my suggestions to improve the class disregard the pet as Anet has done during the life of the game. They probably will improve F2 but it took a year and a half to do just that. As I’ve said before, with ascended gearing I want to only play my ranger, and they need to be fixed.

I know a ranger without a pet is nothing like a warrior, I am just using that as an example of a ranger without a pet is a class with no mechanic, low skill ceiling, and boring repetitive play style. Which is very much like other MMOs where you can press skills in order half asleep and still be competitive with someone widely aware of the fight.
…it is like Mesmer without any clones, or thief with no initiative if that makes it better for you.

it is clear no band-aid fix will improve our class we need something significant and meaningful designed for a fix rather than general balance. it would be better to fix and let it see where the meta sits as a whole then balance off of the fixed pets than to slowly build pets up to an acceptable level of Ai, damage, and responsiveness. That was pretty much how they buffed warriors since beta, they buffed the hell out of them then slowly tinkered with them as time went by.
the excuse that we get from anet is that any drastic change will throw off all the other classes, and the game meta. which imo might be a good thing since most of the other classes see rangers as a joke still. a drastic change and balancing after would put us in a better spot than their approach of testing the water slowly as they are doing now.

Buffing skills after losing pets will not make us special. we will still only be that gray area between the thief and warrior and still not be desired for group activities. Pets, like them or not, are what makes us special currently and we need them to work better and smarter such as avoiding red circles much like the AI anet tested in beta on game mobs which was later removed because of the chaotic fighting instances that occurred when attacking large groups of npcs.

I hate to say it but rangers have a bigger stigma than pets for group activities. There are more groups that will kick you if you have a LB as a ranger than if you have a pet solely because they expect that you will use point blank shot off CD and make fighting hell.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t had time to comment in here. I went through the past 10 or so pages and tried to grab some of the issues that have come up and address them. The balance team has been keeping up with the thread, but they haven’t had as much time lately to comment on specific ideas.

Re: “Shot down” ideas

• The only thing we are not open to is a real permastow option that would essentially take away the pet completely (ie an option that said always stow).
  • We kicked around the idea of giving the ranger an “aspect of _______” which we moved to a new thread because it is elaborate and should be a single topic in itself. The idea is that it would give the pet more utility with swapping/stowing, but it wouldn’t retire the pet completely.
    • We want to fix issues with the pet AI and general usability before we consider doing something to this extent.
• We acknowledged that Pet AI does need help, but we did not say we would not be doing this. You will see some changes in the coming feature patch that should help with the pet’s usability.

Re: Lack of participation

• I apologize that I had been absent from this thread for a few days. I had to produce Ready Up last week and a number of other things came up that took priority (including getting a virus that meant I left early for the week). Also, I don’t work on the weekends.
• Just because we’re not responding doesn’t mean we’re not reading.
  • Sometimes we just don’t get the time to respond, but we’ll try to get better about this.

Re: Fear that we will only work on pets

• Don’t stress about this. We wanted to look at the class as a whole with you. We didn’t make this thread specifically to get feedback on the pets. It just happens to be one of (if not the biggest) the top issues with Ranger right now.

That’s great, Allie, thanks.

Most of us would be happy with the aspect idea, I think, so long as (I can’t remember which user said it umpteen pages ago, apologies to them) we don’t get a “hobosacks: Ranger edition”. This would suit the general vision of fantasy rangers, the more magical aspects of the present GW2 Rangers as well as the described vision of the ranger as posted at the start of this thread.
Furthermore it would allow a greater array of play options. Most rangers throughout all game modes, would see the advantages of knowing when to go aspect and when to use the pets for CC healing or guarding positions, allowing us to bypass presently impossible mechanics is just a bonus.
As I and others have said, those who perma-stow would be debuffign themselves in a lot of content and this would be recognised through gameplay. Gamers, as we must all recognise, I very good at finding the optimal way to play in a game and I think it’s unrealistic to imagine the advantages of a pet being ignored by the really good ones.

Frankly, where some, including the devs, seem to think that removing the pet from perma-active gameplay is a lessening of the class vision, I see it as a furthering, since it deepens the gameplay and build variety meta, giving rangers broader tactics and a more nature magic stylee by actually merging with their pets.

To be perfectly honest, the idea of sprouting ghostly wolf-ears when merged with my Fern-mastiff does rather appeal more than the buff to damage……

Criminal.5627:

a ranger without a pet is a warrior without adrenaline. if you get the base damage without the mechanic what is there that makes you, well you? Besides the lack of depth and skill ceiling.

Dropping pets would be a horrible move if you hate the Ai I think your energy would be better expanded on stating what you expect from the Ai and where it is falling short. What if the AI got fixed would you rather a pet with a smart Ai doing next to no dmg and looking pretty or would you rather it tearing through enemies while you focus on another aspect of the current combat you find your self in?

There are two sides to every coin. yes the AI is bad atm and I would like to see 18k crits from my own attacks without setting up for it. But wouldn’t that get dull? wouldn’t you crave a more interesting way to play? I do agree though that there should be a way to spec so you can play a more strait forword.. dull build by taking some grandmaster trait in marks that gimpifies your pet with a stat boost to you but it is not something that should be the norm nor should it be preferred. it should be something if anything that is easily countered, and makes you feel like a fish out of water while you have it.

on the flip side there should be a way to make the pet more of a part of you as much as Necromancer minions are when they run minion master or Mesmer phantasms when they run zerker. High damage and utility capability much more so than currently available with the benefit of it being there and fighting with you rather than being a hindrance to your or it’s own survival. We should be empowered to be fighting with our pets not punished…we should also flip out and smash more face should something happen to them and they should be the same should something happen to us. just think how K9 officers react should someone hurt their hound or how their hounds react if someone attacks their officer, they only get more aggressive, more passionate to the other and more lethal to the attacker.

In bold, seriously, this.
Pet dies, we raaaaaaaaggee!!111!!!!one!1!

I just want to throw in that Necromancers was advertised also as a attrition, sustain based class and it became a ranged condi nuker. Just sayin.
On topic:
This whole sustained damage thingy should be throw out in the window. Every class should(!) have options to play a more spike oriented way or give up some burst to get some extra sustain from their builds. Of course condi builds are slower by their nature, but with a main hand axe ranger is already in a decent position with it.

I completely agree with dumping the pet and going with the aspect as well. You can keep your pet or put it away, it’s your choice. Anet saying that pets are important to the ranger and are a core class mechanic is a bit silly tbh because they’ve been broken the whole time. If you didn’t bother to fix them then why are you so against letting us stow them?

If all we get is a LONG OVERDUE fix to F2 response time then we’re still sub par. Take this a time to look at what players are asking for please.