Guild Wars 2

My suggestion to make almost all pets, if not all, viable is to change the F2 skills.

• If it is a howl, screech, roar, or any PBAoE skill, then the attack is instant; however, the cast time will be moved to aftercast cooldown. Making the pet useless for 1-3 seconds.
• If it is a leap, slash, maul or any single target skills, then the attack will shadowstep the pet toward the target.
• When traited with Beastly Warden, the taunt will activate where the pet was. So if you wanted to make your snow leopard taunt an enemy from 1200 range away, you have to send the pet over to the enemy and press f2. Thus making the taunt + shadowstep advantage useless and no better than what already is happening right now.
• This would probably indirectly nerf Beastly warden rather than buff it. A ranger has to time the taunt when an eagle gets to the target other wise it is useless. A wolf taunt is useless because it can’t chain CC anymore.

If the cost is beastly warden being useless in order for all pets to be useful, then I would take that cost. If pets are still imbalanced, then it will be a matter of cooldown on the F2 skills.

This would probably not fix pets in WvW because pets will still die in the AoE bombs.

What this would do is make pet F2 skills so reliable that it becomes an extension of your build.

Too much coding.
You probably already have the premonition …

That would fix nothing.

Fact is, bears and moas do less damage on an autoattack than a 1-stack burning condition’s tick from a condi spec.

Using anything but cats in pve is an absolutely large dps loss. Drakes are used because they’re the only pet that can cleave and the only pet that doesn’t die to 2-3 boss autoattacks that can still do some damage.

They need to normalize the health pools and damage of all the pets and simply give them their identity by F2 skills and other CC/utility. All melee pets should cleave, and ranged pets should have bouncing/piercing projectiles.

If you make pets with inferior damage, PEOPLE WILL NOT USE THEM.

Cats are also the only pet that puts a melee ranger in competitive damage output range with any other class. Change the pet, and the ranger drops at or below mesmer/necro levels of terrible damage output in PvE.

To think I got my HoM points only to find out my black moa, white raven, and even black widow would never be used in PvE….

Zenith.7301:

If you make pets with inferior damage, PEOPLE WILL NOT USE THEM.

I use carrion devourer while roaming wvw. Amazing for camps.

To make all pets viable and actually work; Increase melee attack range to 300. Increase base run speed by +20%. Decrease all non-attack cast times to 1/4s. Halve all attack cast times. Give pets the Playing Favorites mechanic as baseline. Done.

Zenith.7301:

To think I got my HoM points only to find out my black moa, white raven, and even black widow would never be used in PvE….

Wut?

There are many, many situations where a pet will evaporate in melee range. The only option then is either jungle/widow or the cave spider.

Birds may not have a higher dps over a long duration than a cat but they can front load a huge amount of damage when using the ravens’ to F2 immediately after they attack normally. I’ve seen mine easily pump out 7k+ damage to enemies that will be dead less than 3 seconds later anyway.

Drakes are the obvious choice for anything that emphasizes cleaves.

As far as the black moa goes, it’s ugly as sin and isn’t even rigged correctly. No big loss there.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

To make all pets viable and actually work; Increase melee attack range to 300. Increase base run speed by +20%. Decrease all non-attack cast times to 1/4s. Halve all attack cast times. Give pets the Playing Favorites mechanic as baseline. Done.

Playing Favorites would be a nice solution for pets dying in zergs and boss encounters. Completely forgot they had that in game O.o

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

To make all pets viable and actually work; Increase melee attack range to 300. Increase base run speed by +20%. Decrease all non-attack cast times to 1/4s. Halve all attack cast times. Give pets the Playing Favorites mechanic as baseline. Done.

Pretty much this.

Substance E.4852:

Zenith.7301:

To think I got my HoM points only to find out my black moa, white raven, and even black widow would never be used in PvE….

Wut?

There are many, many situations where a pet will evaporate in melee range. The only option then is either jungle/widow or the cave spider.

Birds may not have a higher dps over a long duration than a cat but they can front load a huge amount of damage when using the ravens’ to F2 immediately after they attack normally. I’ve seen mine easily pump out 7k+ damage to enemies that will be dead less than 3 seconds later anyway.

Drakes are the obvious choice for anything that emphasizes cleaves.

As far as the black moa goes, it’s ugly as sin and isn’t even rigged correctly. No big loss there.

There’s not a singe encounter where you can’t use a drake if your jaguar will get murdered, and that’s already a DPS loss.

Standard MM/Skirmish/BM build allows you to sub in drakes where jaguars die reliably. That already puts you behind other classes’ DPS in PvE.

If you’re using ranged pets in PvE, you’re gimping yourself and the group, period. I don’t think you people understand how much lower damage output any pet that isn’t a jaguar does.

Birds are crap. Burst=/= DPS. The birds’ attack speeds are much lower than a jaguar, they are putting out less DPS, proccing lesser bleeds (they crit less often due to less attacks per second, so your adept is worse).

In PvE, nothing competes with DPS. You bring in enough utility, but there’s a reason why eles are stacked. And it’s not glyph of sandstorm (thief can blind spam better). It’s not might stacking (warrior covers that by himself).

It’s the raw DPS output of meteor shower/ice bow and fireball+lava font. In PvE there is no greater utility than killing a boss faster to reduce the time of risk to the group.

In GW2 it’s so obvious, but even in WoW and MMO’s with the trinity you see competitive guilds trying to bring as few healers as they can so they can bring in more DPS.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

To make all pets viable and actually work; Increase melee attack range to 300. Increase base run speed by +20%. Decrease all non-attack cast times to 1/4s. Halve all attack cast times. Give pets the Playing Favorites mechanic as baseline. Done.

Additionally I would like to test out an auto 0.1 second taunt on melee hit by pet as baseline. This would mean that at least they get you detargetted – which is as it should be if a big animal was jumping into your enemies face!

Probably OP but would be nice to try

That would be very OP.

Pets are viable they have taunt to force in their F2 attacks. They shouldn’t be unavoidable.

Zelulose.8695:

Pets are viable they have taunt to force in their F2 attacks. They shouldn’t be unavoidable.

When the ranger has lower personal damage coefficients on every weapon that isn’t a longbow or conditions set (since unlike power weapons conditions don’t have lower coefficients to account for the pet)…..

You bet your kitten they should be unavoidable when greatsword and 1h sword do so much less autoattack/ability damage than other classes.