Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: This is a heavily edited version of my first proposal, which can be found here.

ArenaNet has said that they don’t want to tinker with the base mechanics of the game anymore. I can understand that, yet I feel that there is one mechanic that needs to be looked at one last time: The Ranger Pet.

I think the pets needs to be better controllable by the player to be a worthwhile addition to the player and not just another method of dealing damage.

Here is what I’d do to the pet to increase its effectiveness:

Keybindings
F1 – Repositioning Command
F2 – First Skill
F3 – Second Skill
F4 – Pet Swap

Combat Modes
– Aggressive
– Defensive
– Passive

UI changes
– Display all pet skills with their respective cooldowns
– Add an independent indicator for when your pet enters combat

Detailed description:

Continued below…

I’ve tried my dearest to not make any aspect of the pet more clunky than it is today. I know ofcourse that the removal of F3 as return button comes at a cost, but I think that the gains are greatly outweighting the costs. If I’ve overlooked some glaring issues, I’d encourage you to let me know!

Continued below…

Questions you might have and Answers I would give

“Your suggestion requires a lot of work. Why would we want to that?”

Instead of repeating myself by saying that it would give the player so much more control over the pet, I will give some specific examples in the hope of you coming up with some of your own as well.

• Positioning your wolf ontop of a shadow refuge to pressure the enemies inside it.
• Leaving your pet at an entrance of a camp in WvW to alert you of incoming enemies.
• Your Necro teammate needs more pressure to condibomb an enemy? Command a pet with CC to aggressively protect the Necro.
• Want to participate in a “protect …” event, but also farm the nodes nearby? Let your pet guard the ally to alert you to and fend off enemies.
• If caught in an AoE, you can command your pet to take the fastest way out of the danger zone.
• When chasing a fleeing enemy, you can send your pet to the position you expect that enemy to be, rather than letting it just mindlessly chase that enemy.

“Why replace F3? That is lost functionality right there!”

That is correct, but the positive outshines the negative. Most pets have very powerful secondary skills, which you can’t easily predict when they are used currently, let alone control when or where they used. If the player could control those, the pet would get way more effective.

• Canines have a ranged knockdown
• Drakes have AoE knockback
• Birds have swiftness
• Dragons have AoE knockback
• Smokescale has blind field

This is just what I can think of off the top of my head. In most fights you are not reliant on being able to recall your pet faster than what my suggestion would allow, however having control over these skills could shift the way the Ranger is played in a huge way.

But I’ve also added the suggestion to give the option to rebind the F3 key, or any other key, to letting the pet instantly return to you, for those who really don’t want it.

“The pets are useless, even with your proposed changes. They need buffs!”

I’m not saying that I disagree, and there are some clear candidates, like procines, that need a revamp. But most of the time it’s not that the skills of the pets are bad, but that those skills have long windup times and huge tells, which make the pet miss their skills more often than not. My suggestion would give the player the ability to control where and when those abilities are used. Making those skills then actually hit could be a part of the gameplay. The Ranger has to make sure to keep the enemy in place while the pet activates its ability.

No your stuff would work, but why mess with something so simple as a heel command? Default assign it to page-up for all I care, I just want to be able to bind these things.

Well, that would certainly be no unreasonable thing to ask for, I agree.
I’ve added that to my first post.

What you suggest would indeed be better than what we got actually… Anything would be better… However, I have a feeling that it’s a bit to complicated for the playerbase and it would still not patch what’s really flawed in this pet mechanism. In fact, the actual system would already be viable if most pets weren’t flawed themself.

Before a mechanism rework, Anet need to balance pet skills so that they don’t have indecent cool down and induction time. At the moment a lot of pet’s skills are useless and sometime they even are a burden (quickening screech I hate you). Pet skills also need to be balanced against each other.

Also, I might put it in last place but it’s one of the most important thing… Pets need work on their Auto attack (not just moa, all pets!)

PS.: As QoL change, being able to chose which skill you put on F2 would be great and being able to prevent our pet from using some of their god da*n utility skill would be fantastic!

Dadnir.5038:

Before a mechanism rework, Anet need to balance pet skills so that they don’t have indecent cool down and induction time. At the moment a lot of pet’s skills are useless and sometime they even are a burden (quickening screech I hate you). Pet skills also need to be balanced against each other.

If you could keybind pet skills, things like quickening screech would be absolutely fine. However I do agree with most pet skills are so far beyond useless it’s an insult to the entire kitten company that they exist. If they released an expac pet with skills comparable to something like a murellow, it would be embarassing for anet, yet somehow it’s fine to have 90% of core pets be useless.

Wuselknusel.4082:

ArenaNet has said that they don’t want to tinker with the base mechanics of the game anymore

When did they say that?

I like the suggestions about being able to control what your F2 ability will be (looking at Spiders and their poison cloud ability that you can’t control) but I think altering the F3 Follow command would actually be a large hit to QoL. It sounds like it would be needlessly over complicated to get the functionality back via your suggestions. I also like the pet stances suggestion but, honestly, before more controls are introduced I’d rather they buff pets and make them scale better with new content. Not everyone will care how much fine control they have over their pets but they would definitely notice better DPS/Survivability of our furry and scaly friends. Also, give pigs something more useful than Forage because I never see anyone running with them and I find myself avoiding the entire species.

Dadnir.5038:

Before a mechanism rework, Anet need to balance pet skills so that they don’t have indecent cool down and induction time. At the moment a lot of pet’s skills are useless and sometime they even are a burden (quickening screech I hate you). Pet skills also need to be balanced against each other.

While I agree that many pets need a touch-up as well, I’d still say that my suggestion should take priority. Many pets that are currently not used have great abilites, but due to them being uncontrollable, those pets see no use.

To know which pets really need a rework, I’d implement my suggestion first to see which pets are still lacking afterwards.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Wuselknusel.4082:

ArenaNet has said that they don’t want to tinker with the base mechanics of the game anymore

When did they say that?

I don’t know when exactly they said this, but somewhere around the HoT release.

Irijia.6073:

I like the suggestions about being able to control what your F2 ability will be (looking at Spiders and their poison cloud ability that you can’t control) but I think altering the F3 Follow command would actually be a large hit to QoL. It sounds like it would be needlessly over complicated to get the functionality back via your suggestions. I also like the pet stances suggestion but, honestly, before more controls are introduced I’d rather they buff pets and make them scale better with new content. Not everyone will care how much fine control they have over their pets but they would definitely notice better DPS/Survivability of our furry and scaly friends. Also, give pigs something more useful than Forage because I never see anyone running with them and I find myself avoiding the entire species.

I personally don’t think that forgoing the F3 key as return command would be a huge hit, especially the survivability can be increased by being able to send your pet to a current location. With this, it will be way easier for you to make sure your pet isn’t standing in AoE’s or gets cleaved down.

As for the pet’s DPS and skills, that is another can of worms I don’t want to open in this thread.

With all due respect, I’m not going to micromanage crappy pets that struggle to keep up and hit moving targets, have super long f2 animations with attacks that also miss moving targets, die constantly and screw over so much of our personal damage and builds… when I’m getting blasted in the pixels by effortless 10k+ hits in wvw and spvp…

If pets were simply made to move and attack faster, kept pressure on moving targets and hit reliably, were more resilient… then I think most players would be happy.

I can understand that the pet should do more damage and I do feel the same, but I think that the pet should be more than just another source of damage. It should be a fully fledged utility tool.

For example, every time I try to break a breakbar by myself, I struggle as a Ranger, since most of the hard-hitting CC is on pets. My suggestion would make that CC easily accessible to you.

Another example is the positioning in a fight. I can use my wolf’s fear against enemies, but I can only control when my pet is going to use it, not where. Against stealthed enemies pets are currently completely useless, because even if you know where the enemy might be, getting your pet to use its F2 at that position is more than just a hassle.

And a simple damage- and survivability buff wouldn’t fix that.

Wuselknusel.4082:

I can understand that the pet should do more damage and I do feel the same, but I think that the pet should be more than just another source of damage. It should be a fully fledged utility tool.

For example, every time I try to break a breakbar by myself, I struggle as a Ranger, since most of the hard-hitting CC is on pets. My suggestion would make that CC easily accessible to you.

Another example is the positioning in a fight. I can use my wolf’s fear against enemies, but I can only control when my pet is going to use it, not where. Against stealthed enemies pets are currently completely useless, because even if you know where the enemy might be, getting your pet to use its F2 at that position is more than just a hassle.

Pets are awful, the fundamental things need to be fixed first before we go asking for more ways to micromanage our pets.

I’m all for pet improvements btw, but when our pets hardly hit anything that moves, die all the time and screw over our builds and damage output… that needs to be addressed over anything else.

Adding all the bells and whistles to a car with a crappy engine still makes it a crappy car… First things first.

Edit- made some edits. Also, if anet goes the “micromanage pets” route, then we better get the option to make pets optional because I’m not running around in pvp modes fiddling with pets.

Ranger should be about working together with the pet, not letting the pet do its own thing and hoping it does something useful. They shouldn’t be some kind of passive dmg with barely any counterplay. I mean, how are you supposed to deal with high dmg pets like birds or cats if you couldn’t kite their autoattacks that can hurt quite a bit? Of course many pets need improvements, but ranger shouldn’t become something like turrent engi v2.

Its very unlikely though that anety will improve control and mircomanagement for pets, because it seems that they want to make the game easier, not more complicated. Pets that work on “autopilot” are more likely to happen.

I like your suggestion and agree with fluffy, that return is critical and it would be bad to loose that. I would love to be able to keybind it and have what you suggested.

I tried to get around using Smokescale and Bristleback after the last nerf, but determined it is not possible. The only way they could nerf these pets to be as useless as the others would be to remove their ability to hit. I use them because I can rely on them when needed.

All things being equal, the pet MUST hit a target to win an even matchup. Our damage is low compared to other classes. If our class mechanic misses all the time we should—and do—lose. That’s the only reason these two pets are so popular. They work when needed.

I like the suggestion probably neevr happen as I’d imagine that would be pretty hard o change. But dont get wrong i would love this kind of rework OP

Swagger.1459:

With all due respect, I’m not going to micromanage crappy pets that struggle to keep up and hit moving targets, have super long f2 animations with attacks that also miss moving targets, die constantly and screw over so much of our personal damage and builds… when I’m getting blasted in the pixels by effortless 10k+ hits in wvw and spvp…

If pets were simply made to move and attack faster, kept pressure on moving targets and hit reliably, were more resilient… then I think most players would be happy.

Yep, that would work for me.

Bump this. I want most of this since launch.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Its very unlikely though that anety will improve control and mircomanagement for pets, because it seems that they want to make the game easier, not more complicated. Pets that work on “autopilot” are more likely to happen.

That is why I made sure that everything you could do with the current implementation works just as well with my suggestion, with the notable exception of having to press F1 for 3 seconds, as the easiest way to get your pet to return to you, instead of pressing F3.

Honestly, we can rework the pet system as much as we want, it will never be satisfying. The real issue is that Anet wanted to put the pet into to many box and it ended with the average balance that we got right now and the poor state that the pet are in.

Pets, from the begining, shouldn’t have been damage source. This is what hurt the most the class balance. Pets should have been an external source of utility with high resilience/survivability and should have had to be traited or had the help of skills for anything else than that.

This would have open the possibility for a real beastmaster spec.
This would have resolved dps complaints because there wouldn’t have been any reason for a dps lower than other profession.
This would have shut the rant of other professions about AI killing them.
This would have disabled the possibility for afk farm bot to exist.
This would have made QoL change regarding pet easier to pass since they wouldn’t have been a threat in any way.
There wouldn’t be any thread about changing the pet mechanism if the pets were like this.

Edited content above.