Guild Wars 2

So, an idea for a potential trait occurred to me. It’s that of a Grandmaster Beastmastery trait. The numbers themselves would have to be balanced, but offhand I’m thinking something along the lines your pet growing in size (to about the size of the signet of the wild buff’s size increase; large enough to be big, but not enough to truly cause clutter unless there’s, like four of them), the pet gains an additional 10% of your ranger’s stats, and deals x10 damage to siege objects in WvW, such as doors or ballistae. possibly add cleaving as well, though that may be excessive.

The siege object damage portion of this isn’t huge. where a pet may deal about 100 damage if they’re a DPS pet to a gate, a flame ram or similar will deal something along the lines of 8000 damage. players are the same, and that’s a huge gulf. x10 damage would change that to being closer to 1000 damage; a large increase, but if you want to bust down a gate, you’re still looking at needing a lot of time or a flame ram.

The 10% of stats part of the trait is to allow beast masters to have their pets keep up with their increasing gear level; as I recall, pets were balanced with exotic equipment in mind, rather than ascended, and if the gear level increases any further pets will continue to fall further behind the curve. this is also a boon to individuals who prefer a playstyle along the lines of commanding a huge warbeast; yes, they can contribute quite effectively themselves, but the real scary part of this is the fire breathing lizard the size of a horse who thinks you might be tasty.

The final consideration, the size, is essentially for cosmetic purposes. A lot of players feel their pets are simply too small; the only option for any pets we have that are larger than a human are drakes and bears, and given the effects of a fantasy setting, this feels… unreal. We fight absolutely huge beasts, and we have in-world examples of rangers who’ve tamed massive animals, from the ogres in Ascalon (there’s a quest chain where you help an ogre tame a siege devourer), to Eir’s Dire Wolf Garm, to a Sylvari in Maguuma (He has a drake broodmother! She’s huge!). It always bugged me very deeply that we couldn’t achieve anything to that effect.

What are your thoughts? Are the numbers I presented realistic, or would they need to be adjusted?

15 war pets//////////

Would totally break WvW. Pets attack a lot faster than rams. Even if you drastically reduced your numbers, just a few rangers could tear down a gate without using any supply or being vulnerable to the typical tower defense. Siege can’t be healed, isn’t mobile, and requires significant effort to get supplied.

Numbers aside, WvW completely revolves around supply.

Fluffball.8307:

or being vulnerable to the typical tower defense.

Actually, it would, in fact, be easier to take down most ranger pets than normal, simply because the AI is stupid and doesn’t move out of AoEs. Burning oil would suddenly be actually useful to have above gates, and that’d be one of the only serious changes to keep defense, rather than just having everybody spam arrow carts and cannons.

I totally disagree. If a roaming group of three sees a tower they want, they have to first take out the oil, then put down the ram and run some more supply, then do the ramming, and all of their supply is used so their options from this point on are very limited. If there is a single tower defender, the entire attack is thwarted. Someone mans a treb or arrow cart and it’s game over. The tower rightfully wins against a small highly mobile havoc team.

In your situation, 3 rangers find a tower and immediately start doing ram-level damage to the gate before anyone even sees white swords. If one defender arrives, he can’t do anything at all to stop the attackers. Even if he hops on the oil, they swap to ranged pets and kill him with AoE. He certainly can’t kill the the players by himself, even with an AC. Defending towers and keeps would take unreasonable amounts of resources,. Imagine you had one or a few group of rangers dedicated to just running around doing damage to keeps and towers and moving on if anything presents any challenge at all. It would be way too hard to keep up with their havoc.

Also in regard to your “Actually, it would, in fact, be easier to take down most ranger pets than normal”, that accomplishes effectively nothing since the pets can be rezzed and healed so easily. Even if you kill all 3 pets, theyre right back at it a few seconds later.

Fair enough. Then what would you recommend to make the suggestion more viable? All you offered here so far is criticism of the idea, but not provided any constructive feedback.

My feedback is that you’re breaking the fundamental, single most important aspect of WvW (again, ignoring player numbers) and it’s completely impossible for your idea to work without a complete rework of the game mode. Everything in WvW is balanced around supply.

You’re missing my point: How would you make it work? Would you decrease the damage multiplier for the siege damage? Take it out entirely? Adjust the idea, don’t simply complain about it.

I’m not complaining about it, I’m saying siege on pets can’t work at all. The only way it would be possible is if you made it such a small bonus it wouldn’t matter anyway and no one wanted the trait.

To give pets a siege like ability, it would require a change in the WvW mechanic and balance, not a single suggestion on how a pet siege system would fix that.

No class should have WvW focused skills/traits, unless it is available for every class.