So I frequently see issues with ranger pets in dungeons and I thought it would be worth posting about them to see if people have solutions (or at least let the devs know they exist). Specifically I am thinking of issues where pets are either useless or become a major hindrance.
I noticed a few today on my FotM daily. During the Snowblind fractal during the Elemental Source fight my pet is unable to damage the Elemental source. It simply won’t attack it. This happens for both ranged and melee pets. The most use I can get out of my pet here (which would REALLY suck for someone running a BM build – I know, in FotM that’s pretty stuipid without agony resistance) is setting it to attack one of the Ice Elementals that spawns. The inability to target the Elemental Source is also a problem for pets during the final fight of CoF path two, where it also can’t hit the crystal during the final fight.
Another issue with the Snowblind Elemental Source encounter is that when the party is teleported during the snow storm, the pet seems to stay where it was. This can cause problems if the pet returns to you for whatever reason because it will aggro everything between your original location and your new location. While it’s possible for a player to run around the back of the huts to avoid aggroing all the Ice Elementals, pets don’t work that way. It’s not reasonable to expect rangers to save their F2 skill to counter all the poor design of pets (we are expected to use it to avoid unwanted aggro in situations like this, to save the pet’s life if it’s stuck in an AoE circle, if it takes agony damage etc).
During the archer/bubble encounter in TA F/F path, pets are completely useless. They can’t shoot through the bubble (projectiles that aren’t spells don’t seem to work – seemingly intended) but as soon as you enter the bubble (through the teleporter) the pet will be cowering because they touch it. If you swap pets while inside the bubble, the pet will be instantly cowering again. Someone either didn’t test this encounter with a pet, or didn’t care that they are useless during it. As the core class mechanic for the ranger the bar needs to be higher than that.
During the final fight of the Snowblind fractal the pet will often be cowering after the ice shards start falling. The ranger can run and dodge out of the way, but the pet lags behind or hovers around the ranger, so quite often, to no fault of the ranger, the pet will be hit by a shard. We can’t dodge for them nor can we precisely control their location during the falling shards, so seeing them defeated here (unless you stand in those exploity spots that never get hit by shards) is very common. I’d love to see metrics of how much of the time during combat in a dungeon that a pet is cowering (I’d also love to see it broken down by pet types) across all rangers. Avoiding boss AoEs can be challenging for players, it’s ridiculous when you have something as chaotic as a pet to look out for in addition to your own character.
I’ve posted in the past about my issues with pets and the deadly blossoms, pets triggering dungeon traps feels a little unfair again because of how chaotic their movements can be (often you can stop running and they will run a good 10 feet ahead of you – also a nightmare when it comes to unwanted aggro).
Pets still have no agony resistance. This is bullcrap.
Another issue with pets is the responsiveness of the F3 command. Often I will use it and the pet will either linger around the boss for a couple seconds, or it will begin to walk very slowly towards my ranger. It should move, immediately and at full speed, directly back to the ranger. The crappy responsiveness of this command makes it incredibly unreliable even for an attentive ranger to salvage value out of the pet.
When the party tries stealth mechanics using skills such as Shadow Refuge, because pets are not a low priority for AoE support skills and because AoE support skills only affect five people, the pet will never be stealthed. This causes these tactics to simply not work unless a ranger dismisses the pet (which has it’s own issues when the pet pops out as soon as you enter combat through any kind of damage). Maybe allowing pets to be immune from the AoE caps would be a good work around (especially seeing as some ranger builds rely on the ranger himself being able to buff the pet, something which is not possible when the AoE cap and priority system ignore the pet).
What are some of your pet issues you have in dungeons? How has the ranger’s “best friend” made your life more difficult lately? How do you deal with all of these issues?