Guild Wars 2

lol
Im sure this has been brought up before, but Ive been pouring through videos and forums trying to come up with a creative build that my ranger can use…which actually incorporates pet abilities into it to some degree.
Ive read repeatedly that PVE bosses of all types are basically the same “dead-pet” syndrome, but for this post Im speaking in terms of WvW.

What Ive found in GW2 concerning pets is that they are actually helpful in world roaming or in PVP to some extent.
Meaning that in those situations, pets are about as helpful as they “should” be in all situations across the game.
Problem is… they just aren’t.

Bigger problem is that when the devs created the ranger prof they nerfed ranger abilities to account for the abilities of the ranger pet.. and that’s exactly how it should have been done so that the ranger class wasn’t OP.
Great. Fine. Wonderful.

However, there seems to have been no accounting for situations (such as WvW) where the ranger pet is subjected to siege, and zerg AOE damage etc… and the ranger pet is F4’d (swapped) every time the swap CD is up.

This results in 2 things, as follows:

Rangers as a prof are literally operating at a disadvantage (whatever % advantage the devs decided that the pet gave the ranger) when their pet is continuously dead.

So if the devs decided that overall a ranger with an active pet had a 7% advantage over other profs… then they logically nerfed ranger by that same 7% in the name of prof balance.
OK.. but there seems to have been little to no accounting for scenarios where pets are continually dead due to their lack of survivability (in WvW and perhaps boss fights).
Thats a pretty big disadvantage for a ranger to operate under.

The 2nd result is that this disadvantage severely limits the builds (types of builds) available to rangers.
Why? …because rangers (in WvW) simply have to consider their pets useless.
Thats right.
When planning the build a ranger has to disregard the pet with the understanding that when the rubber meets the road and you’re taking a defended tower or pushing against an enemy zerg… when the pet is needed most (not so much against a tower lol), that pet will be dead. Thus useless.

Is this true for every single scenario in WvW? No.
5 man roaming is OK. Solo roaming is OK.

So, my suggestion is that the devs simply add some of the benefits available in WvW rank to pets survivability… such as siege bunker. So that (for example) when a pet is running around in a hail of AC fire they aren’t dead before the ranger can pull them out of it. That would be a great start!

So this post is simply about pet survivability when its in conditions that it would not normally encounter in “the world”.

Not getting into more numbers, stats, and math speculation.
We understand that the wheel is round and that it rolls… without the need to explore geometry. :>

Thanks

About 50% of the reason that Rangers are crap in large scale wvw fights.

The other half comes from the fact that we have very subpar team utility. The best you can do is a spirit build but you then sacrifice pretty much all chance of skills that help you stay alive in the big zerg fights you are there to help in. Never mind the fact that spirits still have a hilariously low health pool and even with their much lower cooldowns, they will still have a hard time keeping the buffs on the zerg while staying out of harm’s way.

The ideal method is for anet to give pets some kind of scaling armor/health value that is determined by the number of enemy players in a specific radius around it. The more baddies near you, the beefier the pet becomes. It will stay alive in zerg fights long enough to do something without us having to take away attention needed to keep ourselves alive and won’t break small scale pvp and dueling.

It’s not ideal, but if you really stick on the commander and are ready to swap pets, you can keep your pet alive reasonably well. I mean like if you are on your commander’s kitten . There is the AoE limit, so the better you stick to the zerg center, the better your pet will fare.

Roaming, obviously pets are insanely good.

Keep your pets on passive when in large scale fights and hang to the outer rim. Works for me every time and I often run with a spider.

This is how mutch care can we take about our pets in group fights:
F1: Go and die.
F2: Go and die, but try to do something at least
F3: I bet a precursor that you can’t even return alive
F4: Hey, you have to die too
Traits: Please try act at least.

I have to say I think it would be a great help if we had some more / better ranged pets.

I know spiders are really handy for the CC, but damage wise they are pretty lame and it’s certainly not helped by their super slow-mo projectiles.

I just always found it odd how on the one had they say they want rangers to have the best ranged DPS, but have 40% of their damage come from pets, and then make 90% of the pets melee so that they arent really of any use when fighting at 1200+ range, especially when your target is in a zerg.

If they gave us a cat/bird type pet with 900-1200 range it would really help the LB “sniper” style playstyle which is what I think Anet intends rangers to be in large scale combat. Maybe a Wind Rider pet with its awesome laz0r eye

Our pets may could give us buffs of other classes.
Like if you have a Wind Rider, that could do mesmerish things of your choice, a bear goes warrior, but raven helps you make a thief move. Some special diversity
One is sure, I don’t want them to steal my dmg…

RoyalPredator.9163:

Our pets may could give us buffs of other classes.
Like if you have a Wind Rider, that could do mesmerish things of your choice, a bear goes warrior, but raven helps you make a thief move. Some special diversity
One is sure, I don’t want them to steal my dmg…

Your ideas made me soo excited inside… but will it ever happen?

StickerHappy.8052:

Your ideas made me soo excited inside… but will it ever happen?

That depens on AN – if they want to really make uniquely working combat or not

Pets take 50% normal AOE damage. Fixed.