Guild Wars 2

I was thinking about this "solution today, I don’t play ranger but I got a friend who does and he almost stoped playing Gw2 atm cause of this, he, like most of the rangers like to play ranger, they don’t like to play other class’s/professions, and when the class seems broken, they quit the game which is sad.

Now, the primary issue to me, seems to be that pets die pretty fast, and when they do, ranger damage is reduced for 30%~ (I might be wrong here, can be 20% or so, correct me here) for the time it takes to revive the pets.

I have two possible solutions for this:
First one I think it was already posted before by other players, add a permanent buff to pets that reduce AOE damage for 90% like the skill “avoidance” in WoW.
My second solution for this is to add a temporary 30% (or the dmg % pets are doing in total) damage buff to rangers when their pet dies to compensate the loss in damage from the pet.

Regards to the ranger community out there from a fellow thief.

The damage reduction because of dead pets varie from build to build. In PvE atleast, I like to also set some damage onto my pet, to get the highest possible dps (not by beastmaster traitline, but things like Pet’s Prowess). So atleast for my build, you could assume atleast around 25% of the damage on my pet.
Some builds only have 10-15% dmg on their pet, others have 50%.

Reviving pets is an issue in itself. You revive them by switching your pet. That normally has 20 seconds cooldown, however when it is dead and you switch, it has 60 seconds cooldown. So basically, you wanna switch pet just before it dies, to avoid the cooldown.
The Avoidance buff you are mentioning was placed alot into the ranger CDI by WvW rangers especially. I personally am not sure how to balance this. I don’t think pets really ever can be perfectly integrated into WvW, so it is hard to say whether that is the right approach or not. I won’t say it is perfect, but I think it goes into the right direction.

Problem with temporary damage bonus would be, that many rangers that do not like to play with the pet (which is not a small number), would try to get their pet killed, to get the dmg buff and later switch it out to kill it again. I think that is a wrong approach on that matter. We should have more incentives to play and fight with our pet, but shouldn’t on top be penalized with a switch cooldown. (maybe from 20 to 30s but not to 60s. That is just redicolous) We already get penalized by the damage loss, why penalize us more for something that is sometimes inevitable.
Also, we got skills that basically kill our pet, which I don’t really like. (moving conditions to the pet/ making the pet absorb damage instead of the player). It gives the player the incentive to not cooperate with the pet, but to harm it. The ranger is and will always stay a class with a pet, so we should also play with it correctly. I can’t imagine the Thief would ever have any skill that would for example reduce initiative gain or anything similar. That is how it feels (or should) for the ranger to harm his pet.

I really love the ranger, I got 2500 hours of play time on him at the moment and I really enjoy the class, but there are just so many irregularities within the class, which I think is much more of a problem. Why do rangers think of their pet as a hindrence? Or as a problem? Why does the ranger have ways to kill is pet? Weren’t we supposed to play with it? Why are there places, where the pet is basically rendered useless?

I will never stop playing the ranger, and I will bring out a ~80 page guide for the ranger in a few weeks hopefully if it is done until then. So yeah, it is the fundamental questions that should be answered. We should have incentives to use our pet and not to kill it, and every pet should have a well defined and designed use place. The pets are all somewhat all arounder with support / dmg / and tank mixture and have no well defined uses. So yeah. I guess it is harder than just balancing the things out you mentioned ^^

Have fun and thanks for the conerns! =D

Thanks for the reply KehxD,
I don’t think giving rangers a temporary damage buff it’s a problem, if they do it right. If they make a system where it knows how much damage your pet is doing depending your current traits, rangers won’t kill the pet to have the damage buff intentionally because they are not getting more damage from it, they are just trading the pet damage, that’s all, as soon as you have your CD ready for your pet, the buff would go off.

That’s my idea of it @ least…

Kui.7245:

Thanks for the reply KehxD,
I don’t think giving rangers a temporary damage buff it’s a problem, if they do it right. If they make a system where it knows how much damage your pet is doing depending your current traits, rangers won’t kill the pet to have the damage buff intentionally because they are not getting more damage from it, they are just trading the pet damage, that’s all, as soon as you have your CD ready for your pet, the buff would go off.

That’s my idea of it @ least…

If it is correctly balanced sure, it wouldn’t really be a problem, still I think many players would actually try to kill it. You can’t imagine how many rangers are out there who think of their pet as a nuisance, which I find sad. If they get any benefit by killing their pet, they will. Many even now don’t care if their pet dies or not. They just set it on attack, if it dies, it is dead. Whatever. I just find it sad many rangers play like this. Indeed the class has alot of flaws, but feeding the people that actually want to kill their pet already now, won’t help sadly.

Thanks for the ideas though. I really do appreciate that people are concerned about the state of the ranger and help us thinking of ways to make things better =)

Have a nice day and cya ingame maybe! =D

PS:
There was an idea that I do support in the CDI though, that involved that the rangers can disable the pet in order to get an “Aspect” buff, that is different from pet to pet, with maybe even visual overhauls. I personally think it shouldn’t be a full disable, but an optional switch bonus (similar to Udyr from LoL basically) On pet switch, gain Aspect benefits if your pet is not dead when you switch, instead of the cooldown improve. That way you have benefits from actually not killing your pet, but instead an incentive to coorperate with your pet, though still allowing the ranger to be a bit more specialized in picking their pet and things like that. That way, you wouldn’t have to be concerned about the long downtime of your pet that much, since you can switch more often and things like that.