I would first like to start off on saying what a great job Arenanet did with Guild Wars 2. Playing the Ranger class is joyful and fun, but there are a few things, especially with pet variety that I feel could use improvement.
The image of a Ranger, while different from game to game, has always been synonymous with the Rangers pet. While GW2 addresses this by allowing the player a chance to tame up to a total of 21 pets, I feel that its not enough. Not that 21 pets is nothing to sneeze at. Seen that Crimson Moa or Black Raptor, but became disappointed the second you realized you couldn’t tame it? You’re not the only one. Considering the amount of diversified fauna contained inside GW2, you begin to realize how extremely limited, constrained the number of tamable pets in GW2 really is.
If I were to use a pet for tanking in a PvE situation then my only option would be a pet from the Bear family like the Artodus, or Brown Bear. While the Bear does its job well, it kinda gets old using the same pet over and over and over. In fact it gets downright boring and stale.
What I would like to see is an increase in pet variety that address the different roles needed by a ranger. Wouldn’t it be cool if instead of a using a Bear pet for tanking, players had a choice to use an Armadillo? Or instead of that Shark players could use a Manta Ray, Dolphin or Barracuda? I know I would certainly like to try my new Barracuda out on some new victims.
Aside from being disappointed by the small number of pets players are allowed to tame in GW2, I was heartbroken to see that visually your pet will not change as it gets up in higher levels. Why not for example, have a pets visual look as well as size slightly change as the pet reaches every 20 levels. When a pet reaches level 20 its size increases slightly, and it go’s from a juvenile look to something slightly tougher. This new look could even occur at every 20 levels so that by level 80 the pet looks tough as hell, cooler, and nothing like its juvenile version.
One of the cool things about GW1 was that you always new the sex of your pet. While the sex was totally meaning less as far as game play was concerned why no instead of removing this feature, improve upon it? You could add it to the whole visual look variety and make certain female pets visually different from male ones. Ultimately becoming more evident as they reach level 80. For example, the male Drakes could have larger dorsal spikes, slight increase in size and brighter coloring.
Now I began reading up on the Ranger class and came across something fairly interesting. What happened to “Pets have customization options. The first of these has to do with a pet’s evolution level. Pets evolve up to 20 evolution levels. Each pet type receives automatic bonuses at different evolution levels. For bears, these bonuses might be increased health or increased damage. Pets gain evolution points when the player gains XP while the pet is active. At certain evolution levels, pets will unlock ability slots (up to 4 total). Ability slots can be filled from a list of active pet abilities based on pet type.” ? It simply vanished and was never talked about again.
I thought this was a great idea. At each evolution level not only could the pet visually change slightly (leading up to its final form) but could also unlock a new unique skill, which would be unique to that pet for a total of 4 unique skills your pet can have. The unique skills can be swapped similar to the way a player can change its utility/elite skills. As a pet reaches each evolution level they could gain at max level, a total of 4 evolution points, in which they could allocate into several things such as individual stat improvement, cool down reduction, etc. Now the pets that were squishy and not really useful in PvP or PvE situations because they died so fast could have a little more toughness and vitality added helping stay alive longer.
These ideas will add some variety in the way players customize and use their pets, and some visually flavor in the way pets level and evolve, and make the overall whole pet leveling experience something fun, joyful and exciting.
TL;DR – increase the variety of pets players can tame, re-implement the evolution system you promised us, and add some visual flair to pets as they level up.
(edited by Vigilence.4902)
