I’ve been using Porcines in hotjoin pvp lately. It started out as a joke, you really never see these pets being used, but slowly I’ve began to see the potentional these pets have. Yet there’s one major thing that makes them kinda the worst pet: the way forage works. Now, forage can be good but it has some heavy strings, perhaps some of which could be easily fixed. I’ll try my best to review the good and the bad.
The different kinds of forage:
Boar: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Forage_
Bone Crack stuns your foe for 3 seconds, this skill can do amazing things at times and has good synergy with things like “Moment of Clarity”. Throw gunk does decent damage and can be used to apply some confusion to the enemy, it’s not half bad. Throw rock looks good at first glance, but due to how slow the projectile flies it almost never hits it’s mark and it can get obsecured when you reposition while it’s in midflight. Skullfear at close range can but a very long very on the enemy… but it has 120 second cooldown, meaning if you get it twice in a row, it’ll be on CD and your pet ability was just wasted. You are forced to pick it up though, because else the enemy can do this and fear you into oblivion.
Pig: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Forage_
Alright, a condi cleanse heal, a heal with a useless secondary ability and an invuln. It doesn’t look too bad at first, however… due to how you need to pick up the items, it kinda is bad. By the time you need these items, you pet first needs to do it’s forage animation, then you do your pick up animation and then you do the casting animation. It simply never works out, picking these up before combat is also kinda useless.
Siamoth: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Forage_
Consume Plasma can be good, the other two are the same, giving you stealth. These aren’t too bad but just a bit boring. There are certainly some uses for these items though.
Warthog: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Forage_
Throw gunk is shared with Boar, Exploding venom sack is a decent, it’s a poison field and applies a lot of poison. Throw scale is strong, it applies a long duration of weakness, bleeding and poison on your foe. Fear skull is shared with boar.
Personally I think the Boar and Warthog have the best forage, the siamoth’s one is decent but not too interesting while the pig’s one is just not very good due to how forage works right now.
The main issues:
Now, forage has a few problems. First of all… it creates the item on the ground. This brings a few problems with it. First of all, when you pick it up your character does a pick up animation and is more or less rooted during this time. This makes it almost impossible to use these items when you are engaged in combat unless you stealth yourself or move away for a moment. However, the item is created near the pet so you must first run to it or make it run to you, which just takes too long sometimes.
The second problem is that everyone can pick this item up. It could sometimes be cool to give these items to your allies, sure, however… enemies can also pick them up and make use of them. This makes you think twice about using forage in combat.
Third problem is specific to the Fear Skull skill, as I mentioned already, whenever you get this one during it’s 120 sec CD, you cannot use it and it’s basicly a wasted use of forage, however, you have to pick it up to prevent enemie from doing so. Ofcourse an ally could pick it up, but most won’t bother.
A fix suggestion:
A simple way to fix this would be that the item appears in the ranger’s hand after the porcine has done it’s forage animation. This way it could be used in combat. The skullfear, while good, needs to either be changed so it can be balanced with low CD or just changed/removed and some of the throwable items need their projectile path changed so that they also are more viable to use. Another way to fix it would be that only the ranger can pick it up and make the pick up happen on the move, instead of rooting the ranger.
Anyway, these are my thoughts. What do you all think?
