Guild Wars 2

WARNING: Very Very Very Long Post Incoming!!!

Hello everyone,
I think we all are aware of the current situation of the ranger and so I decided to start a thread, I normally don’t start threads or post, but I do read the forums very often to know the opinion of the community, and we all kinda know the ranger profession ain’t in a good point right now, in fact, it’s never been. Therefore, I’m going to explain my vision on the Ranger profession, how it evolved and what I’d do to improve it without messing much with the AI of NPC minions.

Disclaimer:
Please, do read the entire post before responding, It’s a very long post, but I think it’s interesting for anyone who cares about the Ranger profession, showing my opinion and where I’ll be explaining all my ideas on the Ranger profession with some changes you may like or not, please keep in mind we all need to be supportive and constructive towards improving our profession, a simple “no I don’t like what you’re saying” ain’t going to bring us to a good point, instead if you have an idea or an objection, please explain it in detail in a way it’ll end up benefiting us as rangers.

Also, bear in mind I don’t play sPvP, I only play WvW and PvE in all different ways, roaming, small sniping groups, zerging, dungeons, dynamic events, farming, I do all in this game that doesn’t involve sPvP and I can tell issues with the ranger in all the different parts of the game, therefore, I acknowledge how sPvP kinda works but my main topic are flaws of the Ranger profession, what its issues are, and how I’d fix them without entirely affecting balance.

Keep in mind, this thread is not about balance, the issues with the Ranger profession are not comparing it to other professions, but internally, inside the profession. Balance is something that will come after the core design of the profession is fixed, at the moment, the Ranger can’t be balanced because the profession is not well designed due to all the flaws that, in my opinion, are brought by our mechanic.

So please, let me repeat myself, read the whole thread and keep an open mind, where we all cooperate towards an improvement of our profession.

A bit of back story of who I am (read if you want, nothing important here):
I’ve been playing Ranger since the early days of head start, and even head start. I’ve seen how our profession evolved, how we’ve been nerfed in some ways, how we’ve been buffed in some other ways. But generally, we all kinda agree that the ranger isn’t in a good position right now.
Of course there might be good builds out there, like the spirit build or in the past the good old BM Bunker. I’ve played most of those builds, and I admit while some were good in 1v1 or duelling situations, they also were very messy builds. What I mean is that those builds generally ain’t the reason we all picked Ranger when the game got released. I don’t think any of us picked up Ranger with the idea in mind of dodging and trying to survive for years while a not really great AI tries to do damage for us. Probably some people came to the game with those builds in mind, but I do believe 90% or more of us didn’t, in fact, I don’t want such kind of builds gone if people really enjoy them.

What’s currently wrong with the Ranger?:
That is a tricky question, because there are a lot of small bits that are currently wrong with the Ranger, our damage output gets scaled down because we have a pet (some people might do well with power builds, but our skills’ attack coefficients are lower compared to all other classes, that’s undeniable). Our sword’s #1 skill can be a bit messy to use regardless of activating auto attack or not (But this is not important, I don’t like the sword out of 1v1 situations, but each person is free to decide). Our pets die in seconds in WvW, our pets miss attacks a lot when an enemy is in motion (No argue on this). The responsiveness of our pet’s f2 skill is really bad (No argue on this). Our support is generally bad (Some people will might agree, some people will might not. I think Healing Spring is not an excuse to say “Ranger is fine in support”, though it’s not as terrible either, it can be improved nonetheless).

But if we focus, the main issue is the pet. Our pet mechanic is the reason our damage output is generally poor, our pet mechanic is, in my opinion, gimmicky. It offers different skills, that looks like a good idea, but then again, f2 skills don’t always activate, sometimes they activate a short cooldown because they fail at being executed and other different issues. I probably missed some issues, but as we all know, the ranger class got too many issues that it’s too easy to forget some in the way. I probably will read my own thread again later on and think “oh true, how could I miss that?”.

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What would you do to fix the Ranger’s Pets?:
Well, the issue is the fundamentals of the profession are bad, therefore it’d probably need a lot of rework from the base. But thinking about it deeply, and I tell you, I’ve been thinking on this matter and how to fix our class over months, many months, thinking how I would fix this profession, the one I truly love.
It’s generally acknowledged, that compared to other professions, the Ranger’s damage output is 60% from the player and 40% from the pet. While I understand, It’s cool if a Ranger wants his pet to do such amount of damage, and he should be allowed to play the game that way. I, on the other side, am being crippled as I have to rely on a poor AI to deal my damage. Also when you think about it, the pet offers a lot of damage abilities, but lacks in terms of support, mainly because we can’t control such support, we only have control over Attack/Retreat and a skill which by the way has such a long cast time in my opinion. There should be different kind of pets, some more supportive, some more aggressive, some even offering no damage output whatsoever.

My idea would be to shift those damage ratings compared to other classes to 95% damage from the ranger and 10% damage from the pet, but wait, that’s 105% damage compared to other classes! Yes it is, the idea is, since the AI is so messy missing attacks often and the fact the pet doesn’t attack that often, all that missing and clunky AI gets that small attack bonus, so at the end of the day, the damage output of the class would match the 100% of other classes.
What this will do is not only make our damage output as players better and less reliant on a bad AI mechanic, it will allow the pet mechanic to shift from what it currently does to a much more interesting role. When I think about a pet in an rpg game like this, I normally expect a pet that takes aggro from monsters while I deal damage to the monsters, or a pet that provides me with different buffs or conditions that I can receive or apply at will.

This allows ANet to make our pets more supportive and allows us to bind the different skills of a pet to use them at will. For example, the healing skill of a Moa could be our F3 and the Fury/Protection/Chill/Daze would be our F2. Anet excuses themselves saying that would involve a lot of work for the average player, nonetheless here is my solution for that, the same way players have the ability to turn on auto attack for the different skills, implement a simple checkbox system in the Pet Management screen that allows us to set skills to be casted as soon as the cooldown is over, or bind such skills to our f2 and f3 keys. Therefore this would give us complete free use over 2 of our pet attacks, or 1 or even 0 if the user so desires, while the rest of the skills are casted as soon as they are available.

Moving the damage output of the ranger up, decreasing pet’s damage output and giving us a better control over our pet’s skills is in my opinion the most important fix. But not only that, I think the way the pets work should be changed, the moment F2 or F3 are pressed, anything the pet is doing should be interrupted as soon as possible and do such skills targetting the ranger’s current target, starting the animation of those attacks. In my opinion, those are probably the three most important fixes to the Ranger’s pet mechanic.

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Now we move on to other adjustments of the pet mechanic that are probably not as important as those:

Pets are hated in dungeons, in fact, pets are useless when the enemy count reaches a number higher than 2-3 or fighting high AoE enemies, or enemies that simply hit too hard. Pets cannot dodge, and there’s been some suggestions to this, making the pet dodge when the ranger dodges, add a key to make the pet dodge or give it like a 1 second invulnerability, or simply, as the next patch is doing, increase the health pool of the pet. While this increase to the health is nice, let’s be honest, if a pet dies normally in 5 seconds in a zerg vs zerg fight in world vs world, now it’s going to take around 10 seconds. Basically we’re simply moving from not sending the pet to attack, to send the drake to attack, do the blast attack and the lightning bolts of the river drake, and then “gg drake, swap to the other drake and 60sec cd”. Increasing the health of the pet, will still make it vulnerable to all those 1hit AoEs in dungeons, the Alpha guy in CoE normally would kill the pet or any character in 2 hits, now it’ll might stand longer, but at the end of the day, the health buff is just going to make it last a bit longer.
While not bad, I think if Anet doesn’t want to mess with the pet ai, I think the only solution is to make the Ranger’s Pet immune, basically infinite health or no health pool, however you want to call it. Make dungeon enemies like the Jade Maw never target it. And now, I know this sounds pretty big, but let me explain myself please. Our pet, is our profession’s unique mechanic, what makes our pet different from ele’s elementals or necro’s minions? That we may send them to attack whenever we want or have a very unresponsive skill we may cast when we want?

We’re the only profession whose mechanic can die and leave us “mechanicless”, plus we are moving a lot of damage away from the pet, we make no enemies target the pet over us, unless that’s the pet mechanic. For example, the bears could have a “roar skill” that makes them drag the ranger’s current target monster’s attention (not enemy players, of course), and therefore dragging the aggro towards them. As I said at the beginning, make pets something that is not simply attack, attack, attack and do damage for me.

I know removing the health from the pet sounds quite big, but now that I’ve explained it, I don’t think it’s that crazy really, it fixes our WvW and AoE problems, now that our pet’s leash range is very limited, they are not targeted by any enemy, their damage output is way lower (let’s say around 100-300 damage per hit depending on the pet by default with crits up to 400-600), bear in mind they attack like every 2-3 seconds and often, they miss. We are also bringing utility to them, which I think it’s perfect, the Ranger lacks utility, this way, boom, we kinda kill 2 issues with a single shot, what about that?

In the case of this being considered big, and the fact we would have a different array of support skills in our pets compared to other professions like guardians who provide healing, burning and aegis. I think a good balance, would be only allowing one pet at a time, that may be swapped while out of combat in the Pet Management screen. Therefore leaving the F1 as our “attack”, F2 as “an attack to be bound or nothing”, F3 as “an attack to be bound or nothing” and F4 as our “come back”.

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Different trait considerations over such a change to Ranger’s Pets:
Ok, you convinced me, I like your ideas exposed above. But what if I want to keep using my pets as my main damage dealer?

Well, I’ve been thinking about this, of course, because I don’t want any of us to not have access to our preferred way to play the game, as most of us like me, are being crippled right now for having to deal with such a bad profession’s mechanic.

The solution is what I call, dynamic trait lines. What the hell is that? Well, let’s say as one specs into different trait lines, different parts of our pets change, for example. As one invest into beastmastery to increase the pet’s damage and pet’s different utility. The ranger’s damage output gets reduced at the following rate: -1% ranger = +1.33% pet. Of course, I know there is not a magic number that determines the different skills’ base damage like, 50 pet and 50 ranger, but what I mean with those percentages is adjust the different skills of both ranger and pet using those coefficients. Up to a maximum of 65% player and 50% pet. Talking about how to implement this into the code, let’s say for every point invested into beastmastery, if Swoop’s base damage is 1800, we reduce that value by 1% and if our pet is a canine, bite’s damage gets increased by 1.33%.

Ok, not a bad idea, but what If I want to spec into healing power via traits, healing power is allocated in the beastmastery traitline, Am I screwed if I want to do a healing power, toughness, regeneration build?

No, you’re not screwed, my Idea would be to move Boon Duration from Nature Magic to Beastmastery, and Healing Power from Beastmastery to Nature Magic. Why? Well, most of our boons will be coming from our pets, due to them being now our support backbone, despite having some skills like RaO, or the swiftness in shortbow #3 or similar, but most of our boons are not really massive. Probably our best would be Healing Spring, with the pulse of regeneration every 2 seconds with this new patch. Still, we got an adept trait in Nature’s Magic that gives +33% regeneration duration, given that line now provides healing power and let’s say dwayna runes, I think we get a regeneration uptime that is kinda sexy.

This would involve a rework of the beastmastery line to have all the different traits that affect pets, and none that affect the ranger but maybe those related to shouts, and in no way a ranger that doesn’t want to cripple his damage should be forced to trait into beastmastery for non-pet related traits.

On the bright side, some traits that give extra condition duration for pets or pets pulling conditions from us, now completely removing them as they would have no health should be kept in non-beastmastery lines, to allow rangers to trait for some of the different support options of their pets, condition removal, etc.

With this trait change, and dynamic Beastmastery trait line as I exposed before, a ranger will be able to spec into bunker, condition damage, glass cannon or pet damage (this last one while crippling himself).

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Last considerations over such a change to Ranger’s Pets:
I know all I’ve exposed before involves a lot of change, but when you consider it deeply, it doesn’t change the pet mechanic that much. One will still be able to use the pet as a big damage dealer if he so wants and traits for it, even improving it further with the different traits in Beastmastery.

People who doesn’t like pets, will find in them different support abilities that will tweak their gameplay while not crippling their damage output in a high way. Pet’s issues with dodge and instant killing AoEs won’t be an issue anymore. People will get more control over their pets under their own consideration, what skills they want to have access from each pet, different pets with different roles and support abilities.

You may also spec into Condition Damage, Glass Cannon or Bunker while using the pets as support or even get some more damage out of the pets by speccing fully or not into Beastmastery.

Summing up the changes to Ranger’s Pet I’m suggesting here:
For those that got lost during the thread:

• Shift the balance of damage output between pet and ranger from 60%-40% to a 95%-10%.
• Remove the pet swap, in favour of 1 pet for aquatic combat and 1 pet for terrestrial combat.
• Remove pet’s health, no other class mechanic can be defeated. Why ours? This will improve the use of pets in WvW, Dungeons and World Events.
• Enemy monsters can not target the pet unless provoked by the pet with a special skill that drags the attention towards them for a period of time (A “Roar” skill from the Bear, just an idea).
• Redesign pet’s skills from a support perspective. Not all pets need to do combat, or be that focused on combat, at the moment, our support pets are really gimmicky and unresponsive.
• Make pet’s skills to be more responsive to the player’s input. Interrupt whatever animation the pet is doing, like when a character swaps weapon while casting an ability. The maximum amount of time between we press F2 or F3 and the ability starts being casted should be around ¼ seconds.
• Either allow pets to move while casting their skills or reduce the cast time from most of them (at the moment they’re really hard to land, and they should be as easy to land as any other skill from our class).
• Allow players to bind any skill available to our pets (but auto attack skill for obvious reasons) to the F2 or F3 keys from the Pet Management screen.
• Skills that are not bound to F2 or F3 are casted or queued to be casted as soon as they get out of cooldown.
• Binding pet’s skills to F2 or F3 is NOT a requirement, players may decide if they want to bind 1, 2 or 0 skills.

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• Move Boon Duration from Nature Magic trait line to Beastmastery.
• Move Healing Power from Beastmastery to Nature Magic.
• The ranger’s skills’ damage coefficients get reduced by 1% for every point into Beastmastery.
• The pet’s skills’ damage coefficients get increased by 1.33% for every point into Beastmastery.
• Remove any trait from Beastmastery that doesn’t modify pets or shouts in any way.
• Add traits to the Beastmastery line that change pets and NOT us, for example, pets cause bleeding on critical hits. This means not to remove traits like Empathic Bond.

Ending:
I’m open to suggestions or different considerations over my post and suggestions, but please keep it polite and express your point in a proper way. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and developing my ideas to create this post, I expect proper feedback, not “Ranger is fine” excuses. If my ideas appeal you, I’d like to know it. If my ideas happen to be confusing for you, I’ll take my time further explaining them if needed. If you disagree with my ideas, I’d like to know why and what solution would you take to fix the current issues with the Ranger profession.

I’d like to thank everyone who has readed this whole thread as it’s such a long one, but I think, we need to give out some ideas, not from a balance point, but in terms of mechanics, as I’m sure that’s what’s making the ranger such a mess right now, our pet mechanic.

If people like these ideas, I’d like to know Anet opinion on it, because I think I brought some interesting points that in fact don’t affect class balance, but how our profession internally works without affecting the balance towards other professions.

Nonetheless, some of our traits and skills are a bit broken by nature, we are forced to trait 30 points into a single trait line to make our signets affect ourselves. We are forced to trait 30 points into a single trait line to have some acceptable condition removal that is not through healing. Plus different solutions, adding a 1 second knockdown the moment you cast Entangle (not the rest of the ticks) would be an awesome idea to make the Ranger survive in the current zerg vs zerg metagame where you just pop stability, healing (after blobbing) and go through a ball of people swinging a hammer/greatsword and spamming cc skills.
But as I said at the beginning of the post, I’m not focusing on balance at the moment, I’m analyzing our pet mechanic.

Thanks once again for reading all this, I really appreciate it, and I’m awaiting your feedback. We all can improve our profession and bring it to something that appeals and pleases us all.

Take.

I agree on parts of this. My suggestions combined with some of yours would make pets work similar to a warriors banner crossed with a signet.

1. Pets take no damage ever
2. Pets have a passive group buff and an active skill
3. Pets have no inherent damage outside of the active skill
4. Ranger damage would be increased to offset the loss of direct pet damage
5. Spirits would work like pets

Beast Master would obviously be reworked. BTW, I speed read and that was still REALLY long post.

There is one big rule which should not be broken concerning pets:
pets should never be able to handicap the player

This means:
100% of power scaling should go to the ranger by default.
pets should never cause the Ranger to go and/or stay in combat mode.
(and maybe pets should never be able to die)

Pets should be toned down appropriately to allow for this to happen. Also, a Beastmaster trait should be added that handicaps the player, but makes the pet powerful.

It seems to me like the pet was originally designed to be a formidable opponent. I’ve heard and accepted the reasoning behind the long cast times on the pet F2 abilities. With that in consideration it makes sense that the pet should be able to be killed. However, in practice, the pet isn’t a factor in any fight. Nobody even pays attention to them as they are easily kited and therefor ignored by most opponents. (Has anybody ever purposefully interrupted the wolf howl?) Also, the pets attacks are to unreliable for ranger CC/pet burst to be effective. These problems have persisted, so I agree, another solution is necessary.

Generally, I would support these changes. I also agree that these changes really wouldn’t be that major. I don’t think they would affect the way that I play at all. There would definitely be some kinks to work out: Would they still pull conditions to them through empathic bond? Would your pet be invulnerable while rezzing in the downed state? But, I think these can be worked out.

Thanks for all your replies guys. I’m really happy my ideas are generally accepted in some way.

The reason I suggest removing the health from pets is because, pets will never be in danger of death in the situations the pet performs accordingly like overworld, roaming or small scale fighting in WvW. The situations where my pet is in risk of danger like zerging or world events, my pet’s health is gonna melt like an ice block at the sun. So now, I ask you guys, what’s the point of pet’s health then?

Has anyone tried Tequatl after patch? How long does your pet survive as you try to get close with those AoEs dealing around 3k damage per tick everywhere?

My drakes barely got enough time to spam some lighting bolts and tail swipe for 3 seconds, pet almost dies, I swap pet, repeat the same moves, pet dies, swap to the original drake, most of its skills are on cooldown so it basically just does some bites around, after 3 more seconds it dies, now I’m stuck with two dead pets and a 50ish seconds cooldown for my pet to come back to life. They were useless, brought literally nothing to my gameplay, barely around 5k damage over those 10 seconds, and now I deal less damage cause my profession’s damage is shared with my pet.
Now, let’s add 71.43% more HP as it’s been told to happen for the next balance patch. My pets will last alive around x1.7 to x2 more time. My pet is dying on Tequatl event after 3 seconds, this means with this “buff”, my pet will now be most likely dead in less than 10 seconds (the swap cooldown is 20, 15 if traited, by the way). What did we get achieved from the buff considering the pet attacks like once every 1 or 2 seconds? Barely 3 more bites from my drakes, canines, etc.

A very simple change that would satisfy most of my problems with pets:
If your current pet is dead or stowed, scale the ranger’s damage up to 100%.
Then I could just jungle stalker, f2 for might, stow pet, attack.

Also, points in BM should increase pet stats way more so that if you want to play a pet-centered build, you still can, and it’s more effective.

100% power should be given to ranger by default, pets stay the same but allow us to hotkey their other utilities to f5,f6,f7,f8 (allowing a remap of course for example: naga users) . if we want go BM, each 5 points you go into BM drops the ranger’s damage by 5% , totalling out to a 30% dmg loss if we were to go full BM w/ 30% dmg added to pets (or however the scaling could be, maybe some other suggestions on this would be helpful because that could be really overpowered w/ a sic em and skirmish trait for 30% crit dmg combo). and last but not least really needed ai improvements to our pet especially for classes that continually go in and out of stealth, it takes our pet 1-2 seconds to even register the person is out of stealth before an action occurs, this is a huge detriment to us. felines have to stop and hit to deal dmg , maybe make them continue this but increase the range of the attack itself so they dont have to be completely on the player to hit them, as it is right now cats lack alot of dps simply because of this.

this would give full control to pet micro , full dmg back to the ranger allowing more build diversity SPECIFICALLY power builds and i would even suggest one more condition removal in the marksman / skirmish line (20/30 deep) to help not having to go 30 deep into WS for empathic bond for our only traited condi removal.

no need to write an dissertation about this.

what pets need:
- responsive movement
- instant F2’s
- more HP
- more utility

what we’re getting:
- support pets revamped
- 75% more HP
- “have programmer working on f2’s”

also i think rangers need to have the option to spec their pets for utility + survivability, OR DPS via the beastmastery tree. maybe a grandmaster trait that gives ranger more dps, enhances F2’s, and gives pets the ability to generate boons at the expense of doing little to no damage.

They need to just make all pets do the same damage.
Reduce that damage to the point where Ranger weapon and skill coefficients can be increased to normal levels.
Make all F2 abilities stop what is going on and activate immediately.
All F2 abilities will be given a .5 second cast and they can continue the animation after.
Engage and recall put on the same button via a basic if-then-else script.
F3 changed to activate secondary pet skills in the same fashion as F2 above.
F3 set to auto-cast so pets don’t change in functionality at all so new players aren’t overwhelmed.
When the Ranger dodges or uses a skill to evade, the pet gains aegis for 5 seconds.

This isn’t complicated, requires next to no real effort, and would solve the vast majority of problems with the pets. I’ve given up on them ever actually hitting a moving target as simple circle strafing is enough to beat most PvE content in this game. Can’t expect pets to be different without an engine revamp.

Atherakhia.4086:

They need to just make all pets do the same damage.
Reduce that damage to the point where Ranger weapon and skill coefficients can be increased to normal levels.
Make all F2 abilities stop what is going on and activate immediately.
All F2 abilities will be given a .5 second cast and they can continue the animation after.
Engage and recall put on the same button via a basic if-then-else script.
F3 changed to activate secondary pet skills in the same fashion as F2 above.
F3 set to auto-cast so pets don’t change in functionality at all so new players aren’t overwhelmed.
When the Ranger dodges or uses a skill to evade, the pet gains aegis for 5 seconds.

This isn’t complicated, requires next to no real effort, and would solve the vast majority of problems with the pets. I’ve given up on them ever actually hitting a moving target as simple circle strafing is enough to beat most PvE content in this game. Can’t expect pets to be different without an engine revamp.

yep this ^
i think theyre aware, JSharp said they were tweaking our “numbers”. GS is getting another serious buff. i think it’s gonna be a great weapon with another maul buff.

LB, SB and sword require further tweaking. our off hands are in a great shape with the exception of whirling defense. it needs something more.

Atherakhia.4086:

They need to just make all pets do the same damage.
Reduce that damage to the point where Ranger weapon and skill coefficients can be increased to normal levels.
Make all F2 abilities stop what is going on and activate immediately.
All F2 abilities will be given a .5 second cast and they can continue the animation after.
Engage and recall put on the same button via a basic if-then-else script.
F3 changed to activate secondary pet skills in the same fashion as F2 above.
F3 set to auto-cast so pets don’t change in functionality at all so new players aren’t overwhelmed.
When the Ranger dodges or uses a skill to evade, the pet gains aegis for 5 seconds.

This isn’t complicated, requires next to no real effort, and would solve the vast majority of problems with the pets. I’ve given up on them ever actually hitting a moving target as simple circle strafing is enough to beat most PvE content in this game. Can’t expect pets to be different without an engine revamp.

Good suggestions actually , especially on the F3 functionality overall.

exactly, if they think it’s too much to manage, set the second pet skill to autocast but give us the option to manage it. i would love to have drake’s tail swipe and the dog’s tackle on the f3.

we can dream.

I would accept not being able to perma-stow my pet if it was a 95%-10% balance I damage. Your suggestions I don’t totally agree with but I would prefer them
Over what we have now because I would at least be able to play how I want, and that is without a pet.

I like the concept. My problem with the crap pet AI is how much power and utility we lose to something that doesn’t know what to do with what it’s given. I also very much agree that as a core mechanic, it shouldn’t be able to die and leave us mechanic-less. Taking away health and targeting of pet is a great move if you ask me. Make it accent and compliment us instead of the miserable attempt to be the other half of us that it is right now.