I debated with myself for quite a while whether to actually write this – in the end, seeing the descriptions of the Queen’s Jubilee with “bosses designed to punish zerg groupings” tipped the balance.
There is a serious conflict-of-design between challenging content designed to punish poor/unskilled play, and the Ranger’s primary mechanic.
We’ve seen over the last several months a general trend to make more interesting fights by requiring skilled play by the player (which I think is a very good thing overall). Fights requiring awareness of surroundings (mines, the electricity walls, dodging cannon fire), constant repositioning, tactics for “trick the enemy into eating their own companion’s fire to weaken them”, etc have been making for much more interesting fights. Players that don’t learn to dodge, that don’t learn to move, that don’t learn to watch what is happening around them start being introduced into situations where they have to start learning – which ends up making for better players in the end. It also turns the fights from more static “tank-and-spank” into things that need more awareness of what’s going on.
I actually don’t see any other way to create interesting and challenging fights – and I don’t think these are a bad thing…
The problem is that the Ranger’s pet represents everything that this type of combat is designed to punish.
The pet does not dodge. It is not aware of aoe circles, and just stands blindly in them. It has no pathing ability to recognise a mine, so explodes every kitten one. It can’t jump on boxes to avoid electricity walls. It’s too kitten slow to respond to a Ranger’s commands for the Ranger to compensate for this most of the time, it doesn’t heel properly (preferring to run around the ranger at about 2m range away) so the Ranger can’t path it through “a minefield” themselves, and even when called back it’ll take ages to actually start moving and then path back in a straight line through every single bit of aoe along the way (there’s no ability for the Ranger to say “scatter/move” instead of “come to me”). Even when calling on it to actually use a skill, the 2-5 second activation delay makes that skill pretty useless (as most of the time it’ll miss). And in some of these fights, there was actually nothing the ranger could do to keep a pet alive and functioning – the limitations of the AI couldn’t be worked around at all (e.g. the electric walls fight).
Pets work well enough in open world combat, because there’s more leeway for “unskilled” type play – the lack of situational awareness in the Pet’s AI has less impact. I’m not skilled in PvP, so I can’t comment on their capabilities there.
In “challenging & interesting PvE combat” such as we’ve seen over the last few months, the Ranger’s primary mechanic is to have their damage nerfed by 20% or more for the duration of the fight.
Whether that nerf is due to pet death, to calling them out of combat to prevent death, or simply just due to them not being able to hit a moving target doesn’t really matter – the end result is that the Ranger was balanced around an NPC AI that is incapable of reacting to the challenges that players can, and the mechanic itself is in direct conflict with the desire to be able to provide interesting & challenging content.
A primary mechanic that makes you automatically (and sometimes unavoidably) weakened by AI failures you can’t control right when you need all your skill and capability is a failed mechanic.
Pet AI awful. Sword root+Aussie latency unmanagable. Lost playstyle, lost legendary, given up.
Mell: 80 Asura Guardian (+7 other 80s) | Aus Serenity [AUS] | Jade Quarry
(edited by Melana.8345)
