Guild Wars 2

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

xallever.1874:

nagymbear.5280:

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

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.

Dev: You will not have 3 arms in this game. Please don’t talk about that on this thread so we can focus on other things instead.
Player: OK I made this poll on wanting 3 arms instead of 2. All go and vote!

That’s what the dev said but obviously people will continue bringing this up again and again from time to time.

The poll serves to:

• Provide a way to express your opinion without needlessly cluttering the thread
• Provide a data to back up people’s expressed arguments (vs counting on the total number of participating unique users who have expressed their opinions on this matter and manually tally it up)

Not to mention its kinda the problem innit?

Why bother making this thread going “Provide us with your feedback and ideas about this class.” then it becomes glaringly obvious that the most major of issues is without a doubt pets and the extreme difficulty in ever fixing them; not to mention how few people actually want them, and then turn around and go “Oh no, no no no, we’ll listen to you, just not on this stuff that very obviouslly matters”

Can’t that be why the class is so broke? Because the devs refuse to look and realistically access the biggest issue of the class?

I just want a dev to answer, why on earth do they believe a pet is worth a massive 30% of my DPS??

Do you honest to god believe they can make up 30% of my DPS? they barely make up 5 and thats including the 5 stacks from pets opening strike

Anything short of a pet overhaul, it’s not going to be worth 30% of my DPS, that is a fact.
Keep throwing bandaids on it, like you have for the past 1.5 year.

If you are not willing to over haul the pet, than give me back my 100% dps. I don’t care what you want to do with pet, I could care less about it. But the fact you are FORCING me into playing with such a handicapping mechanic is what ticks me off.

Pets aren’t worth 30% of my DPS in any situation, even soloing PvE

That usefulness I found for my pet was when I was lvling solo 1-80 and it could survive and draw some agro away from me while I did thinks like commune skill points and what not.

It has no use for me once I hit 80 and started doing fracs/dungs/WvW/

Get rid of this pointless 30% drain to my DPS and I could care less what you do with pet, I don’t want to be FORCED into using this.

xallever.1874:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

To clear the air about pets, lets collate:

What’s negative about the pet:

• Offers no benefit to certain playstyles

I don’t see this as a negative or a positive. It will be a negative thing if it is an impediment to certain playstyles.

I don’t see the Mesmer shatter mechanic as negative if you decide to go for a phantasm-heavy build. You just simply don’t benefit it as much than if you had gone Shatter or Lockdown.

For instance, if you had gone the beastmaster route, and your pet dies too easily, makes no real threat before it’s dead, then it’s a hindrance. In which case, it will be a negative thing.

What I meant was that the pet offers no benefit to the trapper playstyle or the archer playstyle. Both playstyles would be better off if the ranger would have all the damage.
Yet we have the pet. The pet can’t help us as archers or trappers, yet we get the disadvantages, such as the dps loss.

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

Namica.2951:

xallever.1874:

nagymbear.5280:

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

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.

Dev: You will not have 3 arms in this game. Please don’t talk about that on this thread so we can focus on other things instead.
Player: OK I made this poll on wanting 3 arms instead of 2. All go and vote!

That’s what the dev said but obviously people will continue bringing this up again and again from time to time.

The poll serves to:

• Provide a way to express your opinion without needlessly cluttering the thread
• Provide a data to back up people’s expressed arguments (vs counting on the total number of participating unique users who have expressed their opinions on this matter and manually tally it up)

Not to mention its kinda the problem innit?

Why bother making this thread going “Provide us with your feedback and ideas about this class.” then it becomes glaringly obvious that the most major of issues is without a doubt pets and the extreme difficulty in ever fixing them; not to mention how few people actually want them, and then turn around and go “Oh no, no no no, we’ll listen to you, just not on this stuff that very obviouslly matters”

Can’t that be why the class is so broke? Because the devs refuse to look and realistically access the biggest issue of the class?

This pet mechanic is handicapping so many things when it comes to traits… there are soo many junk traits that I could care less about and the amount of useful ones are rare and stuck in trees I don’t want to put points in

I mean for god sakes it seems like 50% of all my traits are doing something with pets when they are utterly useless. Beastmaster is completely dead, none runs it nor would I personally even run it if it was an option.

I want more ranger traits that are useful to the ranger, not more crap helping my pets. I don’t care about using a trait that makes my pet cripple or certain types perform bleeds on crit?? what on earth? why would I ever use any pet related trait right now?

Like I said, pets are not only useless, they are also handicapping the ranger class from its full potential.

xallever.1874:

nagymbear.5280:

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

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.

Dev: You will not have 3 arms in this game. Please don’t talk about that on this thread so we can focus on other things instead.
Player: OK I made this poll on wanting 3 arms instead of 2. All go and vote!

That’s what the dev said but obviously people will continue bringing this up again and again from time to time.

The poll serves to:

• Provide a way to express your opinion without needlessly cluttering the thread
• Provide a data to back up people’s expressed arguments (vs counting on the total number of participating unique users who have expressed their opinions on this matter and manually tally it up)

The “maybe” is missing in that poll:
If they can get the pet to work: no; if they can’t; yes

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers perform much better than thieves.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

Pets don’t have any use in a group environment. This includes WvW, sPVP (spirits are better than a pet here lol), dungs/frac(again spirits are better here than our own freaking class mechanic.

They provide me nothing right now. Outside of might/fury stacks (which btw, if you are in a party, you will have plenty, pets don’t mean anything). They don’t do anything at all except die because I’m usually meleeing (much better dps and more fun)

1.5 years of this uselessness is enough, If anet doesn’t perform an overhaul, im done with this class.

Jocksy.3415:

xallever.1874:

nagymbear.5280:

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

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.

Dev: You will not have 3 arms in this game. Please don’t talk about that on this thread so we can focus on other things instead.
Player: OK I made this poll on wanting 3 arms instead of 2. All go and vote!

That’s what the dev said but obviously people will continue bringing this up again and again from time to time.

The poll serves to:

• Provide a way to express your opinion without needlessly cluttering the thread
• Provide a data to back up people’s expressed arguments (vs counting on the total number of participating unique users who have expressed their opinions on this matter and manually tally it up)

The “maybe” is missing in that poll:
If they can get the pet to work: no; if they can’t; yes

A correct poll, that takes into consideration the wide aray of possibilities mentionned, would be something along those lines

hide spoiler

1. In the ranger’s current state, do you think rangers should have a perma-stow (without stat boost) ability?
a) Yes
b) No
c) Maybe / don’t care

2. In the ranger’s current state, do you think rangers should have a perma-stow (with stat boost) ability?
a) Yes
b) No
c) Maybe / don’t care

3. If the pet was made to hit more reliably and die less easily, do you think rangers should have a perma-stow (without stat boost) ability?
a) Yes
b) No
c) Maybe / don’t care

4. If the pet was made to hit more reliably and die less easily, do you think rangers should have a perma-stow (without stat boost) ability?
a) Yes
b) No
c) Maybe / don’t care

If you put a ‘maybe’, then I assume you will be torn enough not to come up with any concrete opinion on the matter (well, you have a concrete opinion on it: the ‘maybe’).

But that means you neither oppose nor support the notion overall. It should be up to you to balance the probability of them fixing the pet AI happening in regards to whether or not currently you support / not support the stance. The option for you if you are undecided is not to take part in that poll. It is that simple.

Supposing I included the “maybe” option, and they end up being the majority, what good would that be for people that talk about this permastow option? “The vast majority of the people are undecided on this topic, so I think we should take this into account and go / not go for the permastow.” Or, “The vast majority of the people are undecided on this topic, so I think we should remain undecided.” If you are undecided, just remain undecided since it obviously will not matter to you whether this gets a green light or a red light.

The permastow option exists only because the reworking of the pet AI is seen by the many as unlikely to happen. I think even people who rolled Rangers wanting to play archers would not mind having a pet there if it’s working properly, making the question, “Would you still want to have the pet if the pet works perfectly?” a rather bizzare question.

So what does our classmechanic offer more than other classes have?

• Ranger can split focus on two targets (means damageloss)
• Harder to kite
• Adaptive utility (F2)
• Wide choice between melee/ranged, offensive/defensive pets
• Pet stats are independent of gear the ranger is wearing (Offensive pet while defensive gear, …) (can be a impediment)
• Aggrotank in solo PvE

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

There are 2 scenarios that work…

You either make pets highly survivable but remove the swap mechanic so players aren’t overwhelmed. Or you scale back the focus of the pet and make it an inconsequential part of the game overall.

The first would be ideal and simply making the pet take 75% less damage from AE’s that don’t have the pet targetted would solve almost all of the survivability issues. They aren’t like phantasms and clones that can be replaced almost immediately. Plus if you remove the swap mechanic from the game, players can choose to kill the pet quickly and the Ranger is then stuck with a 30% dps loss.

The alternate scenario is you just reduce the impact the pet has and you effectively turn it into a class specific DOT. All pets do the same damage, that damage is about what a 6 stack of bleed is capable of, and you call it a day. You then increase the Ranger’s damage and coefficients up to a competetive level and make the F2 functions spawn ‘sprites’ that do their pet specific abilities instead of worrying about the pet being alive or dead at the time of activation.

Neither is ideal, but both methods solve the problems players have with the pets.

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 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.

Hi Allie, First, hope you are feeling better and it’s good to see you back here with us again.

Second, I understand that the Dev’s do not want to give us an option about permastow so perhaps you can answer some questions for us on how exactly they plan on fixing aspects of the pet. My questions come mostly from a WvW perspective since that’s all I do.

1.) What do they plan on doing to allow pets to hit a moving target. Right now as long as your opponent doesn’t stop moving, the pet won’t hit him. If the person stops for a second and then moves again, the pet tries an attack but the animation time is so long that by the time the animation is done, your opponent is out of his attack range. You lose opening strike and DPS because of this. As long as your opponent is moving, you are loosing out on 30 to 40 percent of your dps, and in WvW, if you stop moving, your dead, so no one stops, everyone is always moving.
2.) In zerg’s, the pet doesn’t last more then 3 seconds due to the area effects. If you keep your pet by your side so he doesn’t die in 3 seconds, you lose 30 to 40 percent of your damage due to pet inactivity. If you send your pet in and he dies and call your second pet and he dies, you are again, for 60 seconds, loosing out on 30 to 40 percent of your dps. How are the Dev’s planning on counteracting this problem?
3.) When fleeing an attacker, if he can’t hit me but he can hit my pet, putting my pet in combat mode, my movement get’s reduced, restricting my ability to ‘run away’. Same thing if he picks up agro on an NPC while I’m running away from an opponent. His agro from a poor AI program just caused my death in game because he couldn’t avoid the ‘agro point’ as well as I could.
4.) In keep defense and offense, I lose 30 – 40 percent of my damage because my pet will not scale up or down the walls. Not even my birds will fly up or down the walls, almost as if they where afraid of heights or something. Again, this puts me at a 30 to 40 percent damage handicap. We use to be able to use guard to send our pets up and down but Anet effectively removed that option from us. In one of the patches they made it clear that they fixed it so pets no longer scale walls. This puts us at a disadvantage compared to all other classes.

5.) What other class in the game has to wait 60 seconds, a full minute, before they can use their class mechanic? What other class in the game has to give up 30 to 40 percent of their damage for 60 seconds? For a year and a half now we have struggled with this broken class mechanic. We waited patch after patch after patch for a fix. We’ve been telling the dev’s about the broken class mechanic since day one, and the forums can prove this. We have put up with Anet’s ‘vision’ of range’s being a pet class. Anet has not been able to deliver this effectively. All we ask is to put your pride aside for one minute and put yourself in our shoes. All we want, is a class that works, a class that we can be competitive without having to put twice as much work into it as other classes. If you do not want a permastow then please consider removing the 30-40 percent damage from pets and giving it back to the ranger. Leave pets in as a utility for buffs and KD’s and fear’s and stuff like that. If the pet lands a hit let it be like a bleed, 250 damage for that one hit, something that can get laughed at. If you want them to have a bigger role then increase the amount of utilities they offer. Just doing this one thing alone fixes every single problem I mentioned above and you get to keep the pet in the game. It’s a win win situation for you guys and for us. Your vision of us being the pet class is still there, we keep the pet next to us until we need that knockdown, then we can call them back to us to keep them safe from harm. You need to give us something, please! a fix to the f2 does nothing for us if the pet won’t land that hit. you need to be flexible and give somewhere, otherwise I don’t know what will happen to this game. And I don’t mean this in a threatening way or an ultimatum or anything like that but in a business perspective, if you don’t give, coming 4/4/14 you may see an exodus in the game which will really suck for those who wish to stick around. Especially WvW will be hurting since number’s will dwindle.

We are giving you great idea’s where we can keep the pet and keep our damage, I just gave you one now. Please be flexible and work with us because I for one would like to stay here and not move on but so far it feels like your not giving me much of a choice.

Specific Game Mode
PvE

Proposal Overview
Reworking Shouts into group support

Goal of Proposal
Shouts should enable the Ranger to provide group support, while emphasizing the Rangers ability to manipulate in-combat mobility.

Proposal Functionality
Remove all shouts, except Search & Rescue.
All new shouts affect the pet and 5 allies, including the Ranger.

1.) Search and Rescue!
Increase the effect range, so also players using a longbow can reliably send in their melee pet to resurrect a downed ally.

2.) To the Limit!
Grant 3 stacks of Might and Retaliation to allies in range.
Good synergy and this combination doesn’t exist in the game yet.

3.) Never Surrender!
Breaks stun on the Ranger and his pet.
Applies Vigor to allies in range and heals for a certain amount. The heal should scale with Healing Power in a meaningful way.

4.) Find their Weakness!
Grants a corresponding buff to allies within range.
While under this buff the next hit applies weakness and X stacks of vulnerability.

Associated Risks
While vigor and weakness sharing ties in neatly with the Ranger’s focus on in-combat mobility, thorough balancing would be necessary to tweak the numbers.

More group retaliation might be an issue in WvW.

Namica.2951:

Flytrap.8075:

xallever.1874:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

To clear the air about pets, lets collate:

What’s negative about the pet:

• Offers no benefit to certain playstyles

I don’t see this as a negative or a positive. It will be a negative thing if it is an impediment to certain playstyles.

I don’t see the Mesmer shatter mechanic as negative if you decide to go for a phantasm-heavy build. You just simply don’t benefit it as much than if you had gone Shatter or Lockdown.

For instance, if you had gone the beastmaster route, and your pet dies too easily, makes no real threat before it’s dead, then it’s a hindrance. In which case, it will be a negative thing.

Maybe he meant something along the lines of pets having literally no value in large-scale WvW.

Aveneo.2068:

Any of the devs played WoW (up until WotLK)? Hunter pets in that game seemed to behave pretty decently and I loved playing a Beastmaster there. So what did Blizzard do that ANet can’t do as well? Numerous suggestions have already been provided, so a little indepth feedback on how you guys want to proceed would be highly appreciated.

From my perspective, the main 2 things to work on are:

• Ability to hit moving targets
• Resistance to AoE

The instant F2 is nice, but that was the easy 5 minute fix. Now we’d like to hear more about the actual changes to pet AI and reliability.

I’ve been wondering about that as well; that game is like ten years old now and they managed to make pets work.

I’m not familiar with programming, but I don’t see how an older game like WoW could manage something like that while GW2 can’t.

Well the reason that WoW pets work is because they take reduced AoE damage and have since forever, plus the way their game is built allows for squishier creatures that can take some hits because there is both little to no chance of them pulling aggro (unless you’re stupid) and because it has healers. That and WoW is much less mobile, so not being able to hit isn’t an issue at all.

You are correct about the aggro (with pets you would just deactivate the Taunt) and their innate resistance to AoE (75% I believe it was) but I am not too sure about mobility. Fights in Wintergrasp PvP were pretty mobile from what I recall. Yet my pet had no trouble sticking on a target and slashing them to pieces if opponents did not bother to respond.

But that’s why I listed the two bullet-points as I believe they are two of the key aspects why WoW pets worked and GW2 pets don’t.

Giving pets AoE resistance is apparently possible as I recall the devs stating they did tests with it in dungeons a long time ago. Reliably hitting targets seems to be keyed to movement speed and animations and people apparently reported an increased chance to hit with Agility Training.

So if ‘Agility Training’ would be removed as a trait and given to pets by default, pet animations set up to perform faster and an innate resistance to AoE I think we’d be on our way to finally have pets that would be able to reliably hit their targets and not die in a heartbeat from random AoE.

Then all we’d need in addition is for pets to have their own dodge mechanic and the AI to dodge highly telegraphed attacks when able.

xallever.1874:

nagymbear.5280:

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

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.

Dev: You will not have 3 arms in this game. Please don’t talk about that on this thread so we can focus on other things instead.
Player: OK I made this poll on wanting 3 arms instead of 2. All go and vote!

That’s what the dev said but obviously people will continue bringing this up again and again from time to time.

The poll serves to:

• Provide a way to express your opinion without needlessly cluttering the thread
• Provide a data to back up people’s expressed arguments (vs counting on the total number of participating unique users who have expressed their opinions on this matter and manually tally it up)

If you frequented the ranger forums for the last year or so, you had the opportunity to express your opinion, lot of peolpe did. Your data will be meaningless because there are people who play ranger who accept what Allie said, and won’t contribute to your poll, as there is no point to vote on it.

I bolded the problem for you. Just kittening deal with it, there will be no permastow.

xallever.1874:

nagymbear.5280:

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

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.

Dev: You will not have 3 arms in this game. Please don’t talk about that on this thread so we can focus on other things instead.
Player: OK I made this poll on wanting 3 arms instead of 2. All go and vote!

That’s what the dev said but obviously people will continue bringing this up again and again from time to time.

The poll serves to:

• Provide a way to express your opinion without needlessly cluttering the thread
• Provide a data to back up people’s expressed arguments (vs counting on the total number of participating unique users who have expressed their opinions on this matter and manually tally it up)

If you frequented the ranger forums for the last year or so, you had the opportunity to express your opinion, lot of peolpe did. Your data will be meaningless because there are people who play ranger who accept what Allie said, and won’t contribute to your poll, as there is no point to vote on it.

I bolded the problem for you. Just kittening deal with it, there will be no permastow.

nagymbear.5280:

xallever.1874:

nagymbear.5280:

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

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.

Dev: You will not have 3 arms in this game. Please don’t talk about that on this thread so we can focus on other things instead.
Player: OK I made this poll on wanting 3 arms instead of 2. All go and vote!

That’s what the dev said but obviously people will continue bringing this up again and again from time to time.

The poll serves to:

• Provide a way to express your opinion without needlessly cluttering the thread
• Provide a data to back up people’s expressed arguments (vs counting on the total number of participating unique users who have expressed their opinions on this matter and manually tally it up)

If you frequented the ranger forums for the last year or so, you had the opportunity to express your opinion, lot of peolpe did. Your data will be meaningless because there are people who play ranger who accept what Allie said, and won’t contribute to your poll, as there is no point to vote on it.

I bolded the problem for you. Just kittening deal with it, there will be no permastow.

Yes, and those people will no longer participate in this CDI either. That’s as good as referring the devs to the other Ranger thread. The poll doesn’t serve as a complete tally on all opinions of all times, just whoever has any opinion and still want to express their opinion of this now.

Plus, those people who have an opinion but do not wish to express it because they regard their opinions as worthless, their opinions are as good as those who are undecided. So, the loss of these people participating isn’t a huge deal at all.

By all means, if you would be so kind as to provide people with a more complete data that will be useful for anyone participating in this CDI other than to “go back to all the previous posts that have been made and count the number of all unique users of their opinions” on this matter, go ahead.

And as I said, the poll doesn’t serve as a way to push the direction to permastow or no permastow. If it helps, good. If it doesn’t, it’s irrelevant.

The more we talk about permastow on the CDI, the less things get dealt with for ranger. I will be more than happy to discuss this in detail in a thread on the Ranger forums, where it belongs.

nagymbear.5280:

The more we talk about permastow on the CDI, the less things get dealt with for ranger. I will be more than happy to discuss this in detail in a thread on the Ranger forums, where it belongs.

I have to agree. At this point the pet has been discussed to death. The problems with the pet should be crystal clear. Methods to resolve these issues have been discussed at length. It’s up to ANet to decide how to best handle them.

We really need to move this topic away from the pet and onto something else. If Allie has something she can deliver from the devs about the pet or she needs specific feedback about it, she can ask.

Lets move to one of the other hundred problems with this class.

/agree

15char

Finally!! Let’s talk about other than pets!!

Is Xallevar honestly trying to say there is nothing wrong with ranger?

This thread in and of itself is proof positive that the devs ADMIT there is a problem.

The issue is they admit the problem, and then we players present the problem they go “Well no, we won’t be doing anything about that”

Namica.2951:

Is Xallevar honestly trying to say there is nothing wrong with ranger?

This thread in and of itself is proof positive that the devs ADMIT there is a problem.

The issue is they admit the problem, and then we players present the problem they go “Well no, we won’t be doing anything about that”

Where do you get that idea? Lol. If I don’t see there’s anything wrong with Ranger, I wouldn’t even be interested in this thread, mate.

Atherakhia.4086:

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

There are 2 scenarios that work…

You either make pets highly survivable but remove the swap mechanic so players aren’t overwhelmed. Or you scale back the focus of the pet and make it an inconsequential part of the game overall.

The first would be ideal and simply making the pet take 75% less damage from AE’s that don’t have the pet targetted would solve almost all of the survivability issues. They aren’t like phantasms and clones that can be replaced almost immediately. Plus if you remove the swap mechanic from the game, players can choose to kill the pet quickly and the Ranger is then stuck with a 30% dps loss.

The alternate scenario is you just reduce the impact the pet has and you effectively turn it into a class specific DOT. All pets do the same damage, that damage is about what a 6 stack of bleed is capable of, and you call it a day. You then increase the Ranger’s damage and coefficients up to a competetive level and make the F2 functions spawn ‘sprites’ that do their pet specific abilities instead of worrying about the pet being alive or dead at the time of activation.

Neither is ideal, but both methods solve the problems players have with the pets.

I quite like the idea of having the pet highly survivable since it ties in with the philosophy of the rangers being supposedly “resilient”. The question would be how appropriately resilient they should be?

I’m thinking that even if the pets become more resilient than warriors, it’s compensated by the fact that they obviously cannot provide more damage/utility compared to a warrior, so is that… fair? Shrugs.

I think the fact that we have the trait system is meant so that we can have the option to choose between these two routes, though.

Talk about what?
There’s been numerous posts about signet rework, shouts rework, traits rework, many proposals for weapon, many discussion about class orientation and the ranged problem, some on synergy or the lack thereof, some on spirits, some on traps, and back to traits…

Waiting for a new light or new subject, but I think pretty much everything has been stated…

I posted this earlier in the thread but it seemed to have gotten ignored in the spam. For those of us that like having pets, I think allowing us more pet customization options would make many of us happy. If we are going to be forced to have 30% of our damage forced on us by pets, at least add depth and interest to the entire pet concept.

Specific Game Mode
PvX

Proposal Overview
Pets are supposed to be, and should be, something that we as rangers care about. The fact that pets don’t even keep their names, and most rangers don’t even bother to name them, shows how little most of us care or think about our pets. The entire pet concept is so raw that they’re completely uninteresting. I want to CARE about my pet, the way I care about my real life pets, but once charmed, you can essentially ignore the pet forever.

Goal of Proposal
Create more of a bond between ranger and pet by making each pet more unique and diverse to each ranger. Allow rangers to customize their pets looks, skills, and traits. Make them something that rangers want to show off and care about, just like our armor and weapons. Right now there is 0 time invested in a pet once charmed, allowing rangers to invest time in their pets will make them less generic and bland.

Proposal Functionality
Give each pet family its own skill, stat, and trait tree. Allow the rangers to level up each individual pet and choose their skills, basic stat allocation, and traits. Each pet family would still have basic strengths and weaknesses, so traiting a bear to DPS might not be as effective as traiting a wolf to DPS.

If at any point we are unhappy, we can choose to:
A) release the pet back into the wild and retame a new one. (The new pet could start at the lowest level and require new leveling or just start out at max level and require traiting.)
or
B) pay to retrait the pet just like we do to retrait ourselves.

Also allow rangers to customize the looks of their pets just like ourselves. Give us options to change their size, build, colors, fur patterns, tattoo designs, even give them pet equipment. It would really give the ranger flavor and make us somewhat envious to other classes.

Associated Risks
Would require lots of programming and there are still major flaws with the current pet AI.

Specific Game Mode
All Aspects of the game

Proposal Overview
The ability to ‘absorb one of your spirits’ for an added affect to your attacks. Ex, Spirit Arrows, etc.

Goal of Proposal
Make it more viable in PvP/WvW/PvE

Proposal Functionality

• Option #1:
• The Ranger can now pickup/absorb one of there Spirits for an added affect. The Spirit would no longer have an AOE bonus affect for the Rangers allies, but instead it would absorb the affects and distribute them from attacks.

• Option #2:
• All of the Spirits can be picked up for a new set of 1-5 attacks/skills.
  • If you pick up Sun Spirit you are granted a new bow that has the design and look of the direct Sun Spirits color and aura that you picked up. You would be granted with new 1-5 skills that pertain to the Sun Spirits roots.
  • Maybe Stone Spirit represents a greatsword when picked up that offers hard CC/blocks etc.
  • It would be like an Elementalists and there summoned weapons.

Associated Risks
The Ranger will now have more options, and access to skills for CC, reflects etc.

My other propositions – All under 200 words:
Master’s Bond Fix
Main Hand Axe 1-3 Triple Threat Idea
Hunter’s Shot/Hunter’s Prey Change
Poison Volley Changed to Poison Slash
Rework of the Pet System – A balanced Approach

McWolfy.5924:

I think they wont solve pet problem.
Who remember the I will avange you skill from gw1?
What if you gain a bonus like that if your pet is down or merge it with the rampage as one elite.

That wasn’t just for pets though, it was just famously used with pets for easy boosts

The issues with ranger are many, if things were to be sorted with the ranger it would have to be built from the ground up. But the key issues are Damage, damage , damage. Several questions must be asked before any developer wants to try and repair the ranger. Example – why were weapon stats are woeful compared to most other classes even knowing pets were broken. The 40% should have been added back a LONG time ago in order to aid the class balance issue. WE will never get permastow, but we can have a lot more added to ranger to make up for the damage done. If any of the recent living world taught us was how Toxic archers were quite deadly, mass torment, very good poison applications, very good damage. So how come player rangers get the short stick on the damage department when all that goes on?

We could have so much that other classes have such as a shortbow bleed as a base attack without the need to flank, allow us to trait for shortbow longer range, add decent torment/confusion/ fire/ heal applications on weapon skills . Give us back more damage to the player and less to the pet. Axes, dear god who ever thought mainhand axe (or any axe for ranger was good when they decided the stats). Axes would be great to deal with mesmer clones but they lack any damage whatsoever to burst through them or anything else for that matter. Entangle, my mothers washing line is more deadly than this elite, it does exactly the opposite of what it is called. It is too easily escaped from, it is also too easily avoided. It should root every poor sod within range and strangle them until the very life is sucked. Make the ranger into something that people go " Oh holy S**T, you think that dude has entangle on him?" Give us traps that act like necro wells with exactly the same if not better damage applications. Rangers also have very little in the way of gap closers in all but one weapon choice and even then it is not enough to catch up with more mobile professions ( especially when the range to Shotbow was nerfed “TYVM”)

Lastly why should any autoattack be seen as a means to have bad damage stats. Any other class can AOE by swinging aimlessly for a lucky hit with massive damage, so why should ranged classes suffer because they “pew pew”. If anything it is ranged classes that need the damage to keep the aggressor back and staying back and with so many other distractions such as in WVW with other NPC creatures, mesmer clones, thief clones etc to easy dispatch those quickly and efficiently. End of the day ranger needs more damage stats than it has now as standard and perhaps we might get a little closer to enjoying this class more.

Atherakhia.4086:

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

There are 2 scenarios that work…

You either make pets highly survivable but remove the swap mechanic so players aren’t overwhelmed. Or you scale back the focus of the pet and make it an inconsequential part of the game overall.

The first would be ideal and simply making the pet take 75% less damage from AE’s that don’t have the pet targetted would solve almost all of the survivability issues. They aren’t like phantasms and clones that can be replaced almost immediately. Plus if you remove the swap mechanic from the game, players can choose to kill the pet quickly and the Ranger is then stuck with a 30% dps loss.

The alternate scenario is you just reduce the impact the pet has and you effectively turn it into a class specific DOT. All pets do the same damage, that damage is about what a 6 stack of bleed is capable of, and you call it a day. You then increase the Ranger’s damage and coefficients up to a competetive level and make the F2 functions spawn ‘sprites’ that do their pet specific abilities instead of worrying about the pet being alive or dead at the time of activation.

Neither is ideal, but both methods solve the problems players have with the pets.

Actually I can think of a third option.
A great deal of the problems with pets stem from the fact that they are both always on and non-optional. We don’t have these problems with Mesmer Illusions, even thou they are non-optional, but we do have similar problems with Necromancer Minions that are always on.

So what if the pet wasn’t always on, but rater a summon?
You summon them, they do their thing while also giving you a pet skill, then they go away. Sort of like a Phantasm that can change targets, and a great deal tougher.
You could have up to 4 pets this way bound to each of the F1-F4 keys, and once summoned the bar changes to what we have now, with F4 recalling your pet and putting it on cooldown so you can summon another pet.

Then the Power and Effectiveness of the Ranger vs the pets can be reworked, you can have pets that are very powerful, but don’t last long. And the Ranger isn’t as required to have a chunk of their power go towards having the pet around at all times.
They could share a similar relationship between a Mesmer and their Illusions.

This way they wouldn’t have to survive an AOE encounter, as they could be traited for on death effects, and you would have enough backup pets to fall back on, some of which might be better for dealing with that situation.
It would solve a whole lot of problems, and I think it’s a good compromise between permastow and not.

Yoh, your idea also has the advantage of fitting the sustained model that ANet wants this class to fill. Ranger needs some added DPS? Activate the pet for a marginal DPS increase.

Another option though, if we stick to the permanent model, is to simply make it so the pet, when set on passive, is immune to all damage and can’t be harmed. Pressing F2 or commanding the pet to do something would ‘activate’ it and then it could be harmed. But if you set it back to passive by telling it to return to you, the pet could be given protection for 5 seconds, and if it lives for the 5 seconds, it becomes ‘inactive’ again and can’t be harmed.

Not ideal for PvE other than gaining protection to avoid some damage. But in WvW, it would at least give the pet a fighting chance to work in a zerg.

Atherakhia.4086:

Yoh, your idea also has the advantage of fitting the sustained model that ANet wants this class to fill. Ranger needs some added DPS? Activate the pet for a marginal DPS increase.

Yes, effectively.
Some pets could be designed more of sustain and last a long time, others could be more burst and don’t last as long.
Or tanky, or support, whatever.
And you could have enough pets that you should be able to always have one of them out at all times, or at least during combat provided it doesn’t drag on too long or get all your pets killed.

They could specialize the pets much more then they can now without throwing out the balance, as you now have both duration and recharge time to work with.
Because honestly, pets are incredibly generic. They just don’t do much of anything, they are just sort of there.
Give me a Phantasmal Beserker any day of the week.

Yoh.8469:

Atherakhia.4086:

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

There are 2 scenarios that work…

You either make pets highly survivable but remove the swap mechanic so players aren’t overwhelmed. Or you scale back the focus of the pet and make it an inconsequential part of the game overall.

The first would be ideal and simply making the pet take 75% less damage from AE’s that don’t have the pet targetted would solve almost all of the survivability issues. They aren’t like phantasms and clones that can be replaced almost immediately. Plus if you remove the swap mechanic from the game, players can choose to kill the pet quickly and the Ranger is then stuck with a 30% dps loss.

The alternate scenario is you just reduce the impact the pet has and you effectively turn it into a class specific DOT. All pets do the same damage, that damage is about what a 6 stack of bleed is capable of, and you call it a day. You then increase the Ranger’s damage and coefficients up to a competetive level and make the F2 functions spawn ‘sprites’ that do their pet specific abilities instead of worrying about the pet being alive or dead at the time of activation.

Neither is ideal, but both methods solve the problems players have with the pets.

Actually I can think of a third option.
A great deal of the problems with pets stem from the fact that they are both always on and non-optional. We don’t have these problems with Mesmer Illusions, even thou they are non-optional, but we do have similar problems with Necromancer Minions that are always on.

So what if the pet wasn’t always on, but rater a summon?
You summon them, they do their thing while also giving you a pet skill, then they go away. Sort of like a Phantasm that can change targets, and a great deal tougher.
You could have up to 4 pets this way bound to each of the F1-F4 keys, and once summoned the bar changes to what we have now, with F4 recalling your pet and putting it on cooldown so you can summon another pet.

Then the Power and Effectiveness of the Ranger vs the pets can be reworked, you can have pets that are very powerful, but don’t last long. And the Ranger isn’t as required to have a chunk of their power go towards having the pet around at all times.
They could share a similar relationship between a Mesmer and their Illusions.

This way they wouldn’t have to survive an AOE encounter, as they could be traited for on death effects, and you would have enough backup pets to fall back on, some of which might be better for dealing with that situation.
It would solve a whole lot of problems, and I think it’s a good compromise between permastow and not.

I actually rather like this idea too. Plus, it suits the beastmaster theme to it. You can have an array of animals that serve you that you can command at will.

xallever.1874:

Yoh.8469:

Atherakhia.4086:

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

There are 2 scenarios that work…

You either make pets highly survivable but remove the swap mechanic so players aren’t overwhelmed. Or you scale back the focus of the pet and make it an inconsequential part of the game overall.

The first would be ideal and simply making the pet take 75% less damage from AE’s that don’t have the pet targetted would solve almost all of the survivability issues. They aren’t like phantasms and clones that can be replaced almost immediately. Plus if you remove the swap mechanic from the game, players can choose to kill the pet quickly and the Ranger is then stuck with a 30% dps loss.

The alternate scenario is you just reduce the impact the pet has and you effectively turn it into a class specific DOT. All pets do the same damage, that damage is about what a 6 stack of bleed is capable of, and you call it a day. You then increase the Ranger’s damage and coefficients up to a competetive level and make the F2 functions spawn ‘sprites’ that do their pet specific abilities instead of worrying about the pet being alive or dead at the time of activation.

Neither is ideal, but both methods solve the problems players have with the pets.

Actually I can think of a third option.
A great deal of the problems with pets stem from the fact that they are both always on and non-optional. We don’t have these problems with Mesmer Illusions, even thou they are non-optional, but we do have similar problems with Necromancer Minions that are always on.

So what if the pet wasn’t always on, but rater a summon?
You summon them, they do their thing while also giving you a pet skill, then they go away. Sort of like a Phantasm that can change targets, and a great deal tougher.
You could have up to 4 pets this way bound to each of the F1-F4 keys, and once summoned the bar changes to what we have now, with F4 recalling your pet and putting it on cooldown so you can summon another pet.

Then the Power and Effectiveness of the Ranger vs the pets can be reworked, you can have pets that are very powerful, but don’t last long. And the Ranger isn’t as required to have a chunk of their power go towards having the pet around at all times.
They could share a similar relationship between a Mesmer and their Illusions.

This way they wouldn’t have to survive an AOE encounter, as they could be traited for on death effects, and you would have enough backup pets to fall back on, some of which might be better for dealing with that situation.
It would solve a whole lot of problems, and I think it’s a good compromise between permastow and not.

I actually rather like this idea too. Plus, it suits the beastmaster theme to it. You can have an array of animals that serve you that you can command at will.

That idea definitely has potential.

Hopefully ANet takes notice

Yoh.8469:

So what if the pet wasn’t always on, but rater a summon?
You summon them, they do their thing while also giving you a pet skill, then they go away. Sort of like a Phantasm that can change targets, and a great deal tougher.
You could have up to 4 pets this way bound to each of the F1-F4 keys, and once summoned the bar changes to what we have now, with F4 recalling your pet and putting it on cooldown so you can summon another pet.

Love it!
Though it would demand a nice rework of the traits – maybe to encourage calling the pet – by putting in “me and the pet” options (that wouldn’t be detrimental to “me or the pet”)?

:D

Might also need to work around CD (how long between pet summons? how to avoid a ranger choosing 4 buffing pets to use them before battle?
Maybe a 5 seconds lock on each pet upon summon before player is able to press F4 to go back to pet selection?
And a 20-30 seconds CD per pet summon?

Yoh.8469:

Atherakhia.4086:

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

There are 2 scenarios that work…

You either make pets highly survivable but remove the swap mechanic so players aren’t overwhelmed. Or you scale back the focus of the pet and make it an inconsequential part of the game overall.

The first would be ideal and simply making the pet take 75% less damage from AE’s that don’t have the pet targetted would solve almost all of the survivability issues. They aren’t like phantasms and clones that can be replaced almost immediately. Plus if you remove the swap mechanic from the game, players can choose to kill the pet quickly and the Ranger is then stuck with a 30% dps loss.

The alternate scenario is you just reduce the impact the pet has and you effectively turn it into a class specific DOT. All pets do the same damage, that damage is about what a 6 stack of bleed is capable of, and you call it a day. You then increase the Ranger’s damage and coefficients up to a competetive level and make the F2 functions spawn ‘sprites’ that do their pet specific abilities instead of worrying about the pet being alive or dead at the time of activation.

Neither is ideal, but both methods solve the problems players have with the pets.

Actually I can think of a third option.
A great deal of the problems with pets stem from the fact that they are both always on and non-optional. We don’t have these problems with Mesmer Illusions, even thou they are non-optional, but we do have similar problems with Necromancer Minions that are always on.

So what if the pet wasn’t always on, but rater a summon?
You summon them, they do their thing while also giving you a pet skill, then they go away. Sort of like a Phantasm that can change targets, and a great deal tougher.
You could have up to 4 pets this way bound to each of the F1-F4 keys, and once summoned the bar changes to what we have now, with F4 recalling your pet and putting it on cooldown so you can summon another pet.

Then the Power and Effectiveness of the Ranger vs the pets can be reworked, you can have pets that are very powerful, but don’t last long. And the Ranger isn’t as required to have a chunk of their power go towards having the pet around at all times.
They could share a similar relationship between a Mesmer and their Illusions.

This way they wouldn’t have to survive an AOE encounter, as they could be traited for on death effects, and you would have enough backup pets to fall back on, some of which might be better for dealing with that situation.
It would solve a whole lot of problems, and I think it’s a good compromise between permastow and not.

Please Anet, I don’t want to become a MM Necro or Spirit Ranger AI type class. Imagine a spirit Ranger which can have up to 5 spirits cluttering up the screen, + the 1 pet, adding 4 additional ‘weaker’ pets for a total 9 AI npcs cluttering up the screen..no thank you.

Specific game mode
PvP if I have to chose.

Proposal Overview
Merging, modifying and reworking EXISTING traits and reordering trait lines.

Goal of Proposal
The goal of this proposal is just to give suggestions about modifications of existing traits/trait lines that don’t work very well in-game, are odd or just would need to be adjusted.

Proposal Functionality

• “Eagle eye” trait should increase Shortbow range as well, adding the possibility to regain 1200 range with SB if traited properly. The goal here is to have the option to boost Shortbow, since there are no option for that by now.

• “Tail wind” Skirmishing minor trait: making this trait work even out of combat (like “speedy kit” trait from engi already does) would be a great decision; it will give Rangers’ a lot more mobility (mainly in PvP) without making it a perma-swiftness trait (9 sec CD for weapon swap).

• “Fortifying bond” minor trait: I would suggest a complete rework: the Ranger should gain a boon based on the condition his pet gets: for example if the pet gets Crippled or Immobilized, then the Ranger would gain N seconds of swiftness; if the pet gets Vulnerability then the Ranger would gain N seconds of Protection. I would also add an internal CD to this trait (10 sec.) to avoid it to be too powerful. This would grant a good reward by keeping the pet alive (or at least by trying to do so).

• The “Skirmishing” trait line has very few good traits: if you’re not interested in traps or in “Quick draw” (X) trait, I don’t see why I should invest in this “damage orientated” line since there are no good traits for dps right now, apart from the stats it gives you (Precision and Crit. Damage). I would consider moving some traits here from other trait lines: a suggestion may be to move here all the “bows traits” making this trait line the one you want to invest points in if you’re interested in using bows. This would give “Skirmishing” trait line a much more clear specialization.

• Skirmishing trait “trapper’s expertise”: this trait only gives you a 600 range for traps making them not so useful in a condition orientated build, forcing you to stay melee in order to deal damage with them; considering that a necro conditionmancer has a lot more AOEs than ranger and that they all have a 1200 range why should I go with a Ranger trapper build instead of a necro condition build?
  I think devs should not only add the combo fields to the trap skills but also improve the range of them to 900 at least (by traiting “trapper’s expertise” of course). It should also be considered to add some more buffs to traps skills and traits (something like ripping boons from opponents in the trap radius for example, or cleaning conditions), making it worth to spend points in a trait line that buffs your precision and crit. damage (really not the stats I’m looking for in a condi. build).

• “Beastmastery” trait line: there are a lot of useless traits here: VII, VIII, IX; I’ve never seen a Ranger using this traits, never ever since release: replacing them with something new or merging them into one trait should be considered. Grandmaster traits of this trait line are also far too weak to be positioned so deep in this line: that’s why no one goes 30 in beastmastery anymore. Reworking this trait line is mandatory in my opinion. All traits in this line have so little impact in a fight that are a total waste of points by now but I really don’t have a clue where to start from.

• “Master’s bond” trait (II): I would consider to have the bond reset when the Ranger is downed or killed, not when the pet dies. At least make the bond stay even if pet is deactivated or swapped, this would make the trait a good choice for both dps and bunker builds.

Associated Risks
So many changes all at once could mess up with the design of the class, even considered that strong and brave changes are very needed in order to make this class work properely.

ItIsFinished.9462:

Yoh.8469:

Atherakhia.4086:

xallever.1874:

Tryxtr.6295:

General question to progress this discussion further:

In PvE, the pets do not generally die that quickly, except for in dungeons when stacking. Pets can tank mobs pretty well.

In WvW pets almost insta-die and can be easily ignored (ran past) due to the fact that they can’t hit a moving target.

How can Anet fix this issue to make it work in both game modes?

Can’t make the pet way tankier (for WvW survivability) because then they’d be basically OP in PvE and Anet doesn’t want to separate WvW from PvE. Could make them a little bit tankier, but that doesn’t really help WvW since they need a huge boost to keep them alive.

Maybe a pet’s vitality and toughness could scale with the number of enemies around them. Not sure if that would fix the issue.

How do you guys visualize the pet ought to perform in WvW?

In a zerg encounter for instance, what do you expect the pet ought to do for you?

The arguably better archers like thieves or warriors also don’t bring too much into the table during such encounters. The thieves can put a poison field, but also die quite easily if they are targeted.

The thing is that if the Rangers are meant for single encounters, they are better suited as roamers. Just that at this juncture, thieves and mesmers (and arguably eles too) perform much better than rangers.

I don’t see it problematic that certain professions bring more to the table in a zerg situations such as guardians, warriors and eles. Just that currently every other profession can do what the Ranger can do better.

There are 2 scenarios that work…

You either make pets highly survivable but remove the swap mechanic so players aren’t overwhelmed. Or you scale back the focus of the pet and make it an inconsequential part of the game overall.

The first would be ideal and simply making the pet take 75% less damage from AE’s that don’t have the pet targetted would solve almost all of the survivability issues. They aren’t like phantasms and clones that can be replaced almost immediately. Plus if you remove the swap mechanic from the game, players can choose to kill the pet quickly and the Ranger is then stuck with a 30% dps loss.

The alternate scenario is you just reduce the impact the pet has and you effectively turn it into a class specific DOT. All pets do the same damage, that damage is about what a 6 stack of bleed is capable of, and you call it a day. You then increase the Ranger’s damage and coefficients up to a competetive level and make the F2 functions spawn ‘sprites’ that do their pet specific abilities instead of worrying about the pet being alive or dead at the time of activation.

Neither is ideal, but both methods solve the problems players have with the pets.

Actually I can think of a third option.
A great deal of the problems with pets stem from the fact that they are both always on and non-optional. We don’t have these problems with Mesmer Illusions, even thou they are non-optional, but we do have similar problems with Necromancer Minions that are always on.

So what if the pet wasn’t always on, but rater a summon?
You summon them, they do their thing while also giving you a pet skill, then they go away. Sort of like a Phantasm that can change targets, and a great deal tougher.
You could have up to 4 pets this way bound to each of the F1-F4 keys, and once summoned the bar changes to what we have now, with F4 recalling your pet and putting it on cooldown so you can summon another pet.

Then the Power and Effectiveness of the Ranger vs the pets can be reworked, you can have pets that are very powerful, but don’t last long. And the Ranger isn’t as required to have a chunk of their power go towards having the pet around at all times.
They could share a similar relationship between a Mesmer and their Illusions.

This way they wouldn’t have to survive an AOE encounter, as they could be traited for on death effects, and you would have enough backup pets to fall back on, some of which might be better for dealing with that situation.
It would solve a whole lot of problems, and I think it’s a good compromise between permastow and not.

Please Anet, I don’t want to become a MM Necro or Spirit Ranger AI type class. Imagine a spirit Ranger which can have up to 5 spirits cluttering up the screen, + the 1 pet, adding 4 additional ‘weaker’ pets for a total 9 AI npcs cluttering up the screen..no thank you.

That wasn’t the idea, learn reading comprehension.
The idea wouldn’t have anymore pets out at any given time as you do now, one.
You’d just have 4 pets that you could summon/swap to. You summon one, and then it either dies, is recalled or times out. Then you have three left to go through, one at a time.

Yoh.8469:

That wasn’t the idea, learn reading comprehension.
The idea wouldn’t have anymore pets out at any given time as you do now, one.
You’d just have 4 pets that you could summon/swap to. You summon one, and then it either dies, is recalled or times out. Then you have three left to go through, one at a time.

With your idea we could bypass some AoE issues and the pet would become more versatile. But we still wont be able to deal competitive top tier damage since the pet is simply a damageloss.

Jocksy.3415:

Love it!
Though it would demand a nice rework of the traits – maybe to encourage calling the pet – by putting in “me and the pet” options (that wouldn’t be detrimental to “me or the pet”)?

:D

Might also need to work around CD (how long between pet summons? how to avoid a ranger choosing 4 buffing pets to use them before battle?
Maybe a 5 seconds lock on each pet upon summon before player is able to press F4 to go back to pet selection?
And a 20-30 seconds CD per pet summon?

Yeah, about 20-30 sec on average, but they could be traited for longer.
You wouldn’t have to lock out the player on pet summoning for that long, because when you recall the pet it goes on CD, so blowing all your summons before battle would be a bad idea.

You would want a 1-sec lock out just so that you don’t accidentally double tap, and have your new summon use it’s pet skill or be recalled.

Traits for the most part could work as is, but the only thing that would have to change is Utility skills that only effect your pet. They would have to effect both the Ranger and Pet by default. Namely Shouts and Signets

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Yoh.8469:

That wasn’t the idea, learn reading comprehension.
The idea wouldn’t have anymore pets out at any given time as you do now, one.
You’d just have 4 pets that you could summon/swap to. You summon one, and then it either dies, is recalled or times out. Then you have three left to go through, one at a time.

With your idea we could bypass some AoE issues and the pet would become more versatile. But we still wont be able to deal competitive top tier damage since the pet is simply a damageloss.

Well here’s the interesting part. Since doing it this way Anet now have the CD and duration to work with in balancing, they could radically change the scope of how pets function while in combat.
You could have Birds for example have 50% more movement speed, and dive bomb the area like Risen Eagles do.

Or Canines could jump in and AOE nuke there area, etc, etc.
You wouldn’t have the same limitations in there attack patterns because you now have new ways to balance them.

Flytrap.8075:

Maybe he meant something along the lines of pets having literally no value in large-scale WvW.

Let’s be fair. A singular character anywhere in large-scale WvW (i.e. “WvW zerg blobx”) isn’t of much consequence. That’s why they blob up and fight, to take advantage of having multiple targets and multiple sources of damage. That’s the whole reason zergs work against nearly every target ever since the advent of combat tactics. Throw enough people together and you can overwhelm a significantly smaller force.

There are two things of value in large-scale WvW. Strong enough defenses to stall out the enemy force by attrition inflicted by the second thing – rapid, powerful AoE damage . . . such as those of arrow carts or a few places where cannons can be of some use.

If the Ranger is made to be of “value” in large-scale WvW, there are thus two options by this conclusion. They either need to be able to dispense the large-range damage of an arrow cart, or be resilient enough to stand 1 v 10. Either case runs the incredibly likely and high risk of making them unbalanced for any other use . . . or on the other side, being so useless for small-group usage we’ll be back here in six months talking about how Rangers are always beat 1 v 1.

I have a build that Anet must see before people really screw things up.

How do I post a build that is restricted for Anet eyes only?

This is something they did right.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Flytrap.8075:

Maybe he meant something along the lines of pets having literally no value in large-scale WvW.

Let’s be fair. A singular character anywhere in large-scale WvW (i.e. “WvW zerg blobx”) isn’t of much consequence. That’s why they blob up and fight, to take advantage of having multiple targets and multiple sources of damage. That’s the whole reason zergs work against nearly every target ever since the advent of combat tactics. Throw enough people together and you can overwhelm a significantly smaller force.

There are two things of value in large-scale WvW. Strong enough defenses to stall out the enemy force by attrition inflicted by the second thing – rapid, powerful AoE damage . . . such as those of arrow carts or a few places where cannons can be of some use.

If the Ranger is made to be of “value” in large-scale WvW, there are thus two options by this conclusion. They either need to be able to dispense the large-range damage of an arrow cart, or be resilient enough to stand 1 v 10. Either case runs the incredibly likely and high risk of making them unbalanced for any other use . . . or on the other side, being so useless for small-group usage we’ll be back here in six months talking about how Rangers are always beat 1 v 1.

Utility is always nice, which is why you see Mesmers, Necros, and staff Eles. Periph killers are also utilized in some zergs, but Rangers will never be very good at that because of the damage split with their pet and their lack of burst.

If it was all about damage and durability, zergs would only be Guardians and Warriors.

desertleaf.5403:

I have a build that Anet must see before people really screw things up.

How do I post a build that is restricted for Anet eyes only?

This is something they did right.

Send a PM to ALlie.

Flytrap.8075:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Flytrap.8075:

Maybe he meant something along the lines of pets having literally no value in large-scale WvW.

Let’s be fair. A singular character anywhere in large-scale WvW (i.e. “WvW zerg blobx”) isn’t of much consequence. That’s why they blob up and fight, to take advantage of having multiple targets and multiple sources of damage. That’s the whole reason zergs work against nearly every target ever since the advent of combat tactics. Throw enough people together and you can overwhelm a significantly smaller force.

There are two things of value in large-scale WvW. Strong enough defenses to stall out the enemy force by attrition inflicted by the second thing – rapid, powerful AoE damage . . . such as those of arrow carts or a few places where cannons can be of some use.

If the Ranger is made to be of “value” in large-scale WvW, there are thus two options by this conclusion. They either need to be able to dispense the large-range damage of an arrow cart, or be resilient enough to stand 1 v 10. Either case runs the incredibly likely and high risk of making them unbalanced for any other use . . . or on the other side, being so useless for small-group usage we’ll be back here in six months talking about how Rangers are always beat 1 v 1.

Utility is always nice, which is why you see Mesmers, Necros, and staff Eles. Periph killers are also utilized in some zergs, but Rangers will never be very good at that because of the damage split with their pet and their lack of burst.

If it was all about damage and durability, zergs would only be Guardians and Warriors.

The one with more guardians and warriors will always win. Periphery classes help and Mesmers can make a huge difference if they time veils right, but it’s the heavies with their boon spam and hammer train that get the job done.

I’d much rather have a zerg with too many heavies than one with too few. They both just deal waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much damage for the durability they have. No other classes can combo tank/spank in such a way for such effect.

Pretty much everyone else is there for cc spam/killing siege (Ele’s), choke spam (necros), or utility (mesmers).

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

McWolfy.5924:

I think they wont solve pet problem.
Who remember the I will avange you skill from gw1?
What if you gain a bonus like that if your pet is down or merge it with the rampage as one elite.

That wasn’t just for pets though, it was just famously used with pets for easy boosts

Revive IWAY?!

The collective reaction of everyone who played GW1 during that nightmare…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umDr0mPuyQc

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.

I didn’t read all the responses after this, so this might have been said by someone else, but why is a permanent stow option out of the question. I understand that the ranger is the pet class option in GW2, but they were also the pet class option in GW1, but didn’t require you to take a pet. It seems self limiting to impose that restriction (or rather force that aspect) on yourself in GW2.

Suggested Proposal Format:
Specific Game Mode
PvX
Proposal Overview
This has probably been mentioned but I feel that pet’s F2 skills should interrupt whatever action their AI has them doing.
Goal of Proposal
To make Pet F2 skills reliable.
Proposal Functionality
Make casting the Pet’s F2 skill instantly cancel whatever action the pet is performing, and start their F2 skill channel.
Associated Risks
None that I can see.