Guild Wars 2

What pets do you like best…..on land and under water?………were talking PVE.

I’m am no expert, but so far my favorite land pet would be a salamander, and water pet, a shark.

What are your favorites?

On land:
I like the juvenile wolf. Sure, you got to go into WvW Eternal Battlegrounds to get it, but it’s been decently useful. Useful enough for me to keep active. Of course, when doing Orr areas it’s probably a good idea to go with the brown bear for its ability. Also it’s general “tankiness”. Other pets might be useful to you, it really depends on what you play with.

Drakes are generally average I’ve found, Bears have a lot of health and defense, spiders/devourers are fragile but good at putting conditions at range, and the cats are roughly glass cannons.

In water:

Drakes are amphibious, but I go with the river drake for the AoE lightning shock and . . . yes, another bear. Because I’m a ranger and can’t tank for crap so I let the pet do it for me on veterans.

Birds have highest damage but super-fragile
Felines are a little lower (except Jaguar which is the best) and a little more durable
The drake with the lightning breath is the best AoE damage with 2 strong AoEs

Eagle and shark are my fav pets

Hyena because you get that F2 BOGOF deal, Buy One Get One Free.
Fernhound cos just look at his cute little planty face and comical overbite. Plus area heal on F2.

In the water, Shark because… sharks are awesome. The description says so.
Plus Rainbow Jellyfish because I love Gorillaz. Yeah, he’s called Superfast.

I use pets that compliment my current build.
It’s a condition Ranger at the moment, so I use a snow leopard and jaguar on land and a shark and river drake underwater. The trait “Rending Attacks” means they apply bleeds on critical.
That particular trait can be changed whenever you like to confer benefits based on what pets you’re using, so for optimal results, choose pets based on that trait.
It’s a case of finding synergies in other trait lines and with your equipment.

For land:
Devourers – I swap between two of them (carrion and lakittenail)
They do decent ranged damage, have aoe combo finishers, tough, and have a good AI evade. They require the least micro-management of all the pets.

Underwater:
Jellyfish – the regeneration has saved me so many times, and they do a decent attack
Armor fish – very tough

edit: oh my lakittenail … stupid, stupid filter ….

I really like my stalker, partially for the damage (without being so much of a glass cannon) and partially for nostalgia reasons – in GW1 I’ve still got the Melandru’s Stalker I tamed in the tutorial area 5 years ago. I also like the black moa and the river and reef drakes.

In water I like the jellyfish (I use rainbow most of the time, not that you can tell since it’s skinned the same as the blue) and either a drake or armorfish as a secondary pet.

I was disappointed by the shark, decent damage but kept dying too easily.

But at the moment I’m going through a phase of switching pets around a lot because I recently hit level 60 and I’m starting to think about my final build.

It might depend on your setup, but I like drakes and devourers for world PvE & dungeons, and canines for WvW. I’m full-out support beastmaster 0/0/20/20/30.

Drakes outlast bears on long fights because their higher toughness makes more efficient use of my constant healing. Both their basic attacks and their tail sweep are AoE, and against two opponents, they will out-damage a cat. They can grab and hold the attention of a pack of mobs without target switching, even with me flinging axes around. While not naturally high precision, the +300 from 30 points in Beastmastery puts them at over 39% crit rate, enough to make Rending Attacks (5 sec bleed on crit) useful. I don’t take the trait for +condition damage, but I am constantly piling Might on it. Fury & Master’s Bond just make it even better.

Drake breath weapons are super slow to cast and lock the drake while doing it. For this reason, I’m much less fond of drakes that bounce their breath weapons (river & marsh), which are better against big packs, and lean towards the cones (salamander, ice, & reef) for screwing over a single target locked into a tank & spank. Among those, I can already burn, but freezing and confusion are both useful. In the end, I use reef drake the most, and ice mostly when running double drakes.

Some mobs are not meant to be melee’d without dodging, and against those, any melee pet is going to die quickly. For that reason I find a ranged pet useful as a standby. Devourers, with their high armor and evasive retreat, survive far better than spiders. They also make use of the Rending Attacks trait, which is nice. Mongst devourers, I prefer the poison field of the carrion.

Most of the time I run drake/devourer, with the devourer out only when the drake can’t be. In areas where I must have a tank or die, I’ll run double drake. Against certain dungeon bosses, I’ll run double devourer.

They work well enough underwater that I keep the same pets there as well.

In WvW, however, the targets are constantly mobile, and there the canines shine. Their stats match the drake, but they are single target with nice CC rather than multitarget. Honestly, I don’t do enough WvW to have a strong preference which dog to use.

Land: Fern Hound keeps me alive. Jungle Stalker has good dps and love his F2. Porcines…yea they’re clunky but fun & hearty.
Water: Shark..he’s so bitey.

Oh yeah, and the Jaguar is possibly the only REALLY useful pet when there’s lots of enemies around in WvW. Its stealth move can be used to target people behind enemy lines, and they don’t reveal themselves when attacking from stealth.

Blue Moa for the F2 protection and Brown Bear for the F2 condition removal in dungeons.
Devourers for everything else
Water – shark and jellyfish

This belongs in the Ranger section, but that aside my favorite pets are Jaguar/Bear for land and Jaguar/Armor fish for water. I like to always have a DPS and a Tank pet so I can switch on the fly depending what I’m up against

on land: Jaguar for sneaky ninja wall climbing and surprise attacks goodness. reef drake to sneak up and scream some confusion in your ear. devourers sound like a great idea for a nasty melee boss mob. i’ll have to break mine out next time i’m killing the Nageling giant, a dragon, or Maw or something. my pets die so fast doing those >.>

in water: shark. cuz… sharks are awesome. and again, a drake. i have to give the jellyfish a try.

I’m a fan of cats and birds. You need to finesse them though, so there’s a lot of pulling them out of combat before big attacks and sending them back in again. Jaguar is great for that with their stealth ability. If you let them tank though, they die. Horribly and quickly.

In the water, nothing compares the my rainbow jellyfish. I don’t recall the name of the special attack it has (it’s the spinny one), but I’m always amazed at the ridiculous amount of PBAoE damage it dishes out. If you can get the mobs clustered around it and stationary, that attack will decimate them. Doesn’t work so well when your jellyfish needs to go chasing them though.

Tom (OP) said, “…were talking PVE.”

So let the pet hold aggro and the player does the damage.

On land, brown bear is the best tank. Soaks up damage, absorbs conditons.
Low damage, but very tough.
Devourer as a tough ranged back-up

In water, armorfish. Same philosophy.
Jellyfish as backup. And, of course, ranger with a speargun is a high damage machine.

You wanna talk WvW, that is a whole different thread.

In Dungeons: Brown Bear and Black Bear
In the world running around doing events: Brown Bear and Stalker
Underwater: Armor Fish and Shark
PvP in all it’s forms: Whiptail Devourer and Lakittenail Devourer

Edit: it won’t let me say Lash tail

Whats wrong with Lakittenail?

Just because s?h?t is txt-speak for a rude word?

Lame.

Edit: LOL cannot even type those 3 letters with . between…