Guild Wars 2

First, let me make the distinction between what I call “disposable” and “permanent” pet classes. Simply, necros and engineers are disposable pet classes. Their pets are designed for relatively quick turnover and not much of the class’s power resides in them. In fact, they are optional. A permanent pet class like the ranger has a significant portion of classes power in them, and they should (in theory) stick around for a while.

Second, understand I love rangers. Since way back in pen and paper AD&D days, back before so many thought of them as a “pet class” – before the concept of a pet class even existed. None of this post is about putting down the ranger.

Anyway, on to the main topic – a permanent pet is inherently unbalanced. Why? Simply the AI. A significant portion (20-30%?) of the class’s effectiveness is invested in the pet. That effectiveness is under the control of the AI, unlike non-pet classes that have complete control over their effectiveness. If the AI is poor, it drags the player’s skill down. If its too good, it carries the player. Even if it is somehow perfectly matched to the player’s skill, its still carrying the player – that’s 20-30% of your effectiveness you don’t have to think about, freeing you up to focus on the remainder. This is the core of the matter.

How to get around it? Well, one way would be to give the player complete control over the pet. Make them much more like a GW1 hero. Expose the full skill bar and give movement controls to the player. In fact, with the ground targeting system, you could probably implement a pathing system (ie multiple ground targeted locations to follow) and come up with some other clever things. However, all this would require a high threshold of skill to play the class, perhaps the highest in the game. While this might a few some happy, Anet will never do this. Rangers are too popular thematically to be a high barrier to entry class.

The only other solution I see is making the ranger more like a disposable pet class. At this point, those that dearly love their pets are likely sharpening their claws. No, I’m not advocating going back to a GW1 system that totally kittened pets. But, let’s think a moment about what has really changed from GW1 to GW2?

You still only have 3 basic commands (attack, return, passive) with the addition of one player controlled pet skill. If you want your pet to be able to do anything else, you have to use up a utility slot. Gasp, just like GW1. All that GW2 has done is shifted power from your character into the pet, given you one extra button, and a pet swap. All with a pet that can only hit stationary targets and dies horribly in AoE (of which, there is a lot).

So, I think the mechanic has to change, and it not be so pet focused. Rangers are about nature, wilderness skills, and yes, some level of animal interaction. I don’t have a perfect solution, but I think looking at the Engineer toolbelt is a good inspiration – its probably one of the two most interesting class mechanics in the game (honestly, most of the mechanics are subpar). The other is ele’s attunements. I could see a combination of these two – a sort of set of pet/non-pet toolbelt-like skills which are modified by some kind of nature attunement/utility skill choices.

Eg – the type of pet is the rough equivalent of the elemental attunement, and the skills it provides on the “nature belt” are thusly modified from this and the utility skills. Wolf/canine pets would give one set, birds another, etc. And the effects would depend on whether the pet is out or not (this requires a permanent pet storage option – or at least an “empty” slot so you could switch to no-pet).

Again, that’s all rather rough, and in fact, more of an example of ways of thinking of new mechanics rather than me saying “it must be this!”.

In short – you can’t ever balance a strong pet (ie perma-pet), because the AI will either always drag you down or carry you. Anet won’t ever give full control over pets, so a new class mechanic is needed.

I personally enjoy neither doing crappy damage myself because it was all pushed onto the pet, nor beating on some moron sitting still with its back turned to me because it just wants to focus on my pet.
I feel the best solution is to make the pets much less significant. Greatly reduce their damage and return it to the actual Ranger, and reduce how frequently they tank for you. Make them more of a utility as they should be rather than the AI-controlled other half of your character.
I’m not sure how it could possibly be corrected to have them do less tanking. If that aspect were left as is, then DPS pets would be even less useful. If they were made invincible and unable to be targetted at all, though that may have been the better way to do it from the start, that would now create issues with the tanking type pets being useless on top of the Ranger being far too vulnerable since they were built around the pets being a decent portion of their mitigation similar to Thief stealth or Mesmer clones.
They already die far too easily for them to be made even less durable.

When people ask for pets to be able to hit on the run, they’re basically asking for an aimbot that won’t miss. It’s not going to happen, ever.

The flip side of that is the current dilemma, where pets don’t function or cannot be used at all in certain cases and the ranger’s DPS suffers through no fault of the player.

The only logical solution is to give the ranger a pet aura buff, so the ranger’s damage will go up when the pet is on passive mode. That way, rangers will still have to actively manage the pet and pick situations to use or not use a pet, and still allow the ranger to get the missing DPS folded back into the toon, and it actually gives people a reason to target a pet instead of them merely being AOE collateral damage.

I don’t see why pets can’t attack on the move as long as their damage, attack or movement speed is reduced to compensate…

I also don’t want to see something like your pet aura implemented because that is pretty close to just stowing your pet for a stat buff.

Instead of taking the easy way out of swapping your pet for buffs, Anet should man up and start fixing bugs, instead balancing and promoting the game as an esport.

Slow down the pet to compensate? Slow enough that even someone on swiftness can just out run your pet? I use the trait that gives pets extra 30% run speed and they have a hard time chasing down targets to even get into striking range and you want to slow them down some more?

What you’re indirectly asking for is for pets to ignore range because it’s physically impossible to chase down something like a thief if you nerf run speed and also for a different set of numbers for the pet’s DPS. Instead of getting 2k, miss, miss, miss, you’ll get 200, 200, 200, 200, 200 etc while the pet damage it’s not really going up.

What the OP said cannot be avoided. You have a bot as part of your class and you want the bot to never miss. It’s not going to happen.

How come other pet-based classes in other games don’t show this “inherently unbalanceable” problem?

Aridia.3042:

What the OP said cannot be avoided. You have a bot as part of your class and you want the bot to never miss. It’s not going to happen.

First of all, you tend to speak like you’re one of the devs – are you? Since you say “it’s not going to happen” a couple of times in your posts. Care to share the inside info you apparently got which makes you able to state your opinions as facts?

Secondly, I don’t think people are asking for an aimbot that never will miss with its attacks, rather most are asking for a pet that can land at least the majority of its attacks vs moving targets.

As it is now, the pet can be completely kited indefinitely. A core mechanic of our class, that for the most part (except for stationary targets in pve) can be totally ignored by other players if they just keep moving = a huge damage loss for us.

GW1 in many respects had the very same issues with pets, I would’ve hoped they would get it right this time. Personally, I’ve played pet-based classes in many mmo’s, and I’ve yet to see these issues in those other games – makes you wonder what the real reasons for the lackluster performance of pets in GW really are all about.

Since pets are no longer optional to the ranger in this game, they need some serious improvements when it comes to a) being able to hit moving targets, and b) being able to survive better (sine we don’t have complete control over placement and such, this is crucial).

I don’t see the solution being to be able to get rid of the pets and buff the ranger, that would be the easy way out solving this. Solving the issues with pets would be the right thing to do, and I have very high hopes Anet will do just that.

Change the trait from 30% pet speed into “Pets can attack while moving”…. problem solved?

You could still outrun/kite pets if you where specifically trying to…. not simply by moving 5 feet every other second.

Trait in BM should reduce aoe damage pets take. Pets should deal slightly less damage, and have more health/toughness. Or worse case scenario… just take away to 60second cd penalty for if they die.

And I really like the idea of being able to stow the pet permanently for a self buff. Could even be a trait, Marksman, probably.

And omg, make spirits tougher for the love of all that’s holy…. or let them also get BM pet benefits or something. Maybe having 300 extra toughness/vitality would make a difference. (after hp doubling, that’d be 6k extra hp) And if pet aoe damage reduction talent in BM is implemented, they’d take less aoe too… might make them actually function and creates inter trait line synergies open up.

Weird kitten would happen, though. Rangers could be…like, you know, viable in support roles. Their pets would function more often and whatnot, oh…and a ranger could instead focus on itself if it wanted. Oh the humanity, there would actually be different flavors of ranger!!

“How come other pet-based classes in other games don’t show this “inherently unbalanceable” problem?”

Imo they do. while turrets/minions have a high turnover rate, the CD does not start till after they die. Meaning if the AI or AoE hits your turrets, you just lost all the utility/things you traited for, for nothing basicly.

I played a MM in gw1, and I will never be able to play one in this game imo, simply because I dont like the fact that I need to be level 60ish to even remotely try to use minions. Without traits, the “optional” pets just die, and have long recharges, meaning you put all your ability and “potential” into pets that are dead as soon as the fight starts.

ive partied with good MM, and seen decent turret use, but its REALLY painful to make work imo, and generally not worth the time.

I have seen pet classes be either kitten broken, or dead weight, the game I came from had a class called “summoner” well, some of the end game dungeons required you to do VERY specific things, like “dont attack” or “friendly fire” and since you couldnt control your summons, this meant that your summons would set off bombs, kill party mates, or kitten over gimmicks getting you killed. So you were forced to have no summons out in those parts, basicly being dead weight.

But then on the flip side, any setting you COULD use summons, you were litterally the strongest class in the game.

The sad part is really that this is how it feels for alot of pet classes, the times your pet works, its overbearing and to strong, and the times they dont, you are dead weight. They need to balance this, so your pets are not OP in simple tasks, but are not weak in complicated ones.

As it stands right now, Anything that your pet can tank makes the game easy, but when you lose your pet due to areas of the game that punish “mindless” minions, you lose alot of your potential you are forced into. My ranger can solo overworld group events sometimes if the champion does not have extreme damage, but in dungeons my pet is massive dead weight. So its the case of, im either op as crap, or garbage, and thats just not fun :’c

I was more talking about Rangers and Warlocks in WoW, Shadow Knights and Necros in EQ1, Necromancers, Sorcerers, Druids, Enchanters, Bonedancers in DAoC.

DaoC is actually not a bad example.
They also had F&F pet classes (Theurgist, Animist). While these were massively powerful for both PvE and PvP, they were for a very different reason than their pets or their general class power. They were required due to an arbitrary mechanic in PvE (they had to later add Call of a Thousand Storms to make midgard able to keep up in PvE). In contrast the general permanent pet classes were the pinnacle of PvE kill speed (due to focus pet reflection shield damage to facilitate AE grinding of targets), and had superior defence in RvR (this was more noticeable on the Necro than any other petclass), since they never had to expose themselves long enough for a target to become dangerous to them.

So yes, currently, Rangers have some issues.
The concept of a permanent pet, nope, that’s perfectly viable and balanceable.

Carighan.6758:

How come other pet-based classes in other games don’t show this “inherently unbalanceable” problem?

Carighan.6758:

I was more talking about Rangers and Warlocks in WoW, Shadow Knights and Necros in EQ1, Necromancers, Sorcerers, Druids, Enchanters, Bonedancers in DAoC.

DaoC is actually not a bad example.
They also had F&F pet classes (Theurgist, Animist). While these were massively powerful for both PvE and PvP, they were for a very different reason than their pets or their general class power. They were required due to an arbitrary mechanic in PvE (they had to later add Call of a Thousand Storms to make midgard able to keep up in PvE). In contrast the general permanent pet classes were the pinnacle of PvE kill speed (due to focus pet reflection shield damage to facilitate AE grinding of targets), and had superior defence in RvR (this was more noticeable on the Necro than any other petclass), since they never had to expose themselves long enough for a target to become dangerous to them.

So yes, currently, Rangers have some issues.
The concept of a permanent pet, nope, that’s perfectly viable and balanceable.

First, the two disposable pet classes have a bit of the issue, but since they have little of their “power” invested in the pets, its less of an issue. Each pet is essentially one utility slot worth of the classes effectiveness. Those utility slots can be used or not used for disposable pets. The ranger, however, has the entire class balanced around the permanent pet – thus all skills, damage, etc have the pet out and functioning as an implicit assumption.

Second, I’m not seeing how any of your examples show that permanent pet classes are balanceable. You basically site a bunch of examples of the pet classes being, sounds like, overpowered. Which really proves my point.

Above a good example was made – the pet is an aimbot. Sure, not a true aimbot like in an FPS, but basically the same concept. However much of a classes power is invested in the aimbot, its that much non-player skill being used. Whether the aimbot is good or not is another issue. But its clear, the more power in a pet, the less player skills comes into the equation. Be that the pet dragging the player down or carrying the player to victory.

The best thing that can be done is to depower the ranger pet, return more of it to the player. The pets don’t have to be as weak as necro or engineer pets, and a new class mechanic could actually breath some life into the concept of a pet. I mean, is anyone really satisfied with “attack”, “return”, “passive/agressive” and the F2 ability? Its barely anything different than GW1, except when your pet goes, you’ve lost a good chunk of your effectiveness.

A pet is inherently no different than a DoT. It cannot be dispelled, in return it can be dispatched by attacks.
Balancing these two (vulnerability to damage vs availability of dispelling measures) is where pets balance out versus “just” DoTs).

The fact that pets also add utility abilities is second, because ultimately there is no functional difference between this and the Ranger having them (on a separate command system so that it never interferes with his normal skill use). The F2 skills are commanded, anyhow.

The problem with Ranger pets is simply:
They are bugged.

Look at WoW Hunter pets for an implementation which very closely mirrors an actual living DoT.

Now you could argue: Yes, but aren’t Necro and Mesmer pets even more like living DoTs?
Well, yes and no. Both are. Hunter (or rather, permanent pets) have no DoT-ramp up. They are comparable to classes which have the lion share of their power bound in a single, powerful DoT. Any class which has an autoattack in a MMO (one which runs parallel to the triggered attacks) mirror exactly this concept.
Mesmers especially have living DoTs with a ramp-up time. They are more comparable to classes which need a few attacks to get their DoT damage fully engaged, but then can replace them individually. Affliction Warlocks in WoW work like this, as do most DoT classes in DAoC, and a fair few setups in Rift.

Independent of this, Pets are ultimately external DoTs, however.
Even permanent pets.

As such, their actual damage is trivial to balance – you balance it just like you balance any other DoT.

The only real balance problem is survivability, since it needs to be matched against the “survivability” of a dispellable DoT. Even that is easy, in GW2’s case the complicating factor is the utility in pets (hence their survivability needs to be slightly better).

But, given all that, the big issue is pets simply not attacking or not finding a route to the target. All problems which were solved in other MMOs (which incidentally managed to balance their permanent-pet classes) before.
The design isn’t a problem, the bugs are. Let the pet attack 100% of the time except for when actually physically crossing distance, and we are 10 steps closer to the balance we’re only 8 steps away from.

Wow, where to start?

Claiming pets just reduce to a DoT is silly. Its like saying everything is made of atoms, so we shouldn’t really bother with the difference between a rock, a tree and a glass of water. You already going in that direction by saying how an auto-attack is just another DoT. Sure, but you just reducing everything to damage, that occurs over time. Creating definitions like that is pointless.

Pets are more complex than DoTs. They move, they die, they get snared, etc. They can take aggro, they have utilities, etc. And mesmer illusions are really more than DoTs as well, though I wouldn’t really call them pets either. Clones don’t do any significant damage – they are there to distract and be shattered.

I’d take issue that other games “balance” their pets well. You may be able to roflstomp with them, but that’s not balance.

Furthermore, you totally ignore the fundamental argument I make. Pets are not player skill, they are AI skill. The skill is either lower to yours, or equal and greater. In the first case, its dragging down your performance, in the second its carrying you. And whatever percentage of the class’s power/effectiveness is placed in the pet, that’s the percentage to which your performance has nothing to do with you, the player.

“Balance” is generally viewed as the player’s skill determined an outcome, not the mechanics or AI of the game determined the outcome. You can’t get around that.

I agree with all of you that the ranger’s pet is not what it should be. I love playing classes with pets, going all the way back to star wars galaxies. That game, in my opinion, had the best player-pet combination. Im not a computer programmer and I dont know anything about code, so I have no idea how hard it is to program an mmo, but I was very satisfied with the way the pet system worked with Swg.

One thing, is that each pet had around 4 different abilities, and you had to select which 3 you wanted to use if you went with a full beast master build. If you only had half a build, you could only have 1-2 abilities and your pet wasnt as strong. However that gave you more points to put into your profession. The one thing that bothers me and that I wish Anet would change, is that back in swg, the pet commands functioned immediately. That is, now, with one of my lizards, it took 5 seconds for the fire breath or the electric breath to hit, from when the lizard first started the animation. My target often moves away by then. Poor design. The f2 pet attack should be immediate. I believe as players, we dont really care how “cool” the animation is.

Lastly, I wish Anet would let us choose which skill would be player controlled.

Aridia.3042:

When people ask for pets to be able to hit on the run, they’re basically asking for an aimbot that won’t miss. It’s not going to happen, ever.

You mean like how players can move while attacking but can still be kited, blocked, dodged and mitigated?

Aridia.3042:

Slow down the pet to compensate? Slow enough that even someone on swiftness can just out run your pet? I use the trait that gives pets extra 30% run speed and they have a hard time chasing down targets to even get into striking range and you want to slow them down some more?

What you’re indirectly asking for is for pets to ignore range because it’s physically impossible to chase down something like a thief if you nerf run speed and also for a different set of numbers for the pet’s DPS. Instead of getting 2k, miss, miss, miss, you’ll get 200, 200, 200, 200, 200 etc while the pet damage it’s not really going up.

What the OP said cannot be avoided. You have a bot as part of your class and you want the bot to never miss. It’s not going to happen.

You make a fair point, I forgot that the other professions have very easy access to speed buffs. However, using your numbers, going from a 1/4 chance for 2k dmg to a guaranteed chance to get 200 dmg is 60% drop in raw attack power over a given amount of time.

My point is that, like the SB fiasco, total dps is controlled by many factors, so heavy handed changes like Anet and your proposed changes have to be taken with care.

Also if you’re playing melee, for example great sword, you can use pet swapping to bypass the movement issues. Combine a canine’s knockdown or a spider’s stun , along with your own skills, lets you snare most opponents long enough to do some dmg

If pets out putted more damage, by being able to apply consistent dmg on the move, then our weapons wouldn’t be in such need for a dmg buff because our pets pick up the slack.

If anyone still thinks giving rangers a partial aim bot would boost rangers from the depths of the underpowered to the peaks of the FOTM, then how about a rng system where pet accuracy is determined by their precision stat?

And onto the topic of “bots,” can other summons attack on the move? For example: illusions, undead, or spirit weapons? If they can, then why aren’t rangers the same?
To be honest,I have yet to play any class other than ranger extensively, but is the damage of other summons comparable to a pet? What about their attack speed? What I am saying is if the disposable pets of other professions are so effective, why aren’t the permanent pets, in which rangers have a fair portion of their dmg delegated to, comparable if not better?

AI isn’t that horrible.

In fact people would find pets 100% better if all Anet did was increase the range of each attack by 50%.

People choose wolves for CC wolf 1 is what 140 range. make it 280 wolf auto hits when chasing reliably.

Simply increasing the range of the pet auto attack skills and in some cases f2 (Wolf again has a ranged f2 500 we find it functional as a result).

Attack speed of the pet is another factor however changing that increases DPS on stationary targets why I think expanding range is the best solution.

Birds auto attack should be a 600 range leap(non finisher) to enable obstacle flyover. Always anoyed when they go around. So I use a leopards f2 to ignore verticle terrain transit limitations instead of a bird.

Alot could really be fixed by range of pet attacks mode of pet attacks.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Aridia.3042:

What the OP said cannot be avoided. You have a bot as part of your class and you want the bot to never miss. It’s not going to happen.

First of all, you tend to speak like you’re one of the devs – are you? Since you say “it’s not going to happen” a couple of times in your posts. Care to share the inside info you apparently got which makes you able to state your opinions as facts?

It’s common sense. They’re making the game for e-sport so you can’t expect a bot to play half of your class. If anything, I’m starting to think pets are probably working as intended. I don’t like it, but when you look at the game that’s the conclusion I’m coming to.

Let’s follow the premise to its logical conclusion. Your opponents have basically a finite number of evades in a fight before it’s over, whether it be rolls, gap close, or utilities. The default base build is 2 evasive rolls. And you want pets to be able to hit on the move, so what it really boils down to is that you expect your enemies to soak up that extra pet damage and/or your ranger damage with no recourse since now he has to consistently try to dodge you and your pet with the same set of evades that they had before. You can’t make that argument that my attacks don’t miss a lot, so therefore it’s ok for pets do the same, because you’re asking for a second source of attack to increase without increasing the opponent’s chance to dodge it.

The result is basically an aimbot that don’t miss, even if you don’t call it as such because every fight against a ranger becomes a real 2 vs 1. If you don’t know why that’s overpowered in a competitive pvp game, then there’s no point to talk about balancing this class.

The focus should be buffing the ranger itself with the pets as being tools that’s to be managed, not to make it into an autopilot class where a bot can chase down your target with a button.

Good articulation Joiry, everything you brought up rings true in my spirit.

Arrys.7145:

AI isn’t that horrible.

In fact people would find pets 100% better if all Anet did was increase the range of each attack by 50%.

People choose wolves for CC wolf 1 is what 140 range. make it 280 wolf auto hits when chasing reliably.

Simply increasing the range of the pet auto attack skills and in some cases f2 (Wolf again has a ranged f2 500 we find it functional as a result).

Attack speed of the pet is another factor however changing that increases DPS on stationary targets why I think expanding range is the best solution.

Birds auto attack should be a 600 range leap(non finisher) to enable obstacle flyover. Always anoyed when they go around. So I use a leopards f2 to ignore verticle terrain transit limitations instead of a bird.

Alot could really be fixed by range of pet attacks mode of pet attacks.

i could get behind this

I agree with the open post.

Pets were part of a ranger concept from the beta.
It did work since the Ranger once was powerful enough to do his job even with an unreliable pet.
Pet was a roulette- extra source of damage (like Engineer’s pots).
At the moment pets are no extra but base damage-part of the Ranger kit.

The Ranger either has to be set back into his beta-state
or
The whole system needs an overhaul.

I personally do like the following solution:

There were several topic which suggested pets as constant companions which dont fight but grant you an extra skill (current F2)and a base stat buff.
Example:
A.) Hawk grants you 15% speed; 10% condition damage; F2: Calls a Hawk who applies bleeding to your target (like the horn’s hunters Call)
B.) A Drakehound grants you 10% toughness; 10% power; F2: Immobilizes your target (range starts at your current position)
C.) A Brown Bear grants you 20%vitality; F2: removes a condition.
D.) A Devourer grants 5% range F2: Adds poison damage

Basically:
*Pets are untargetable “Minipets”
*Pets don’t attack anymore
*Each pet grants your several stat buffs though.
-It can be either one-strong buff, or smaller buffs to several stats.
*The F2 ability remains the same, but it’s range starts at your character.
—————————————————————————————————————-

The permanent companion concept still is part of the class.
Anet advertised Ranger as a class which was able to adept to many situations, switchable skills and stat-boni perfectly fulfill this concept
—————————————————————————————
Sidenote:
Ranger; Greatsword; Maul-animation: fits perfectly into this concept!

Sdric.8526:

---

I personally do like the following solution:

There were several topic which suggested pets as constant companions which dont fight but grant you an extra skill (current F2)and a base stat buff.
Example:
A.) Hawk grants you 15% speed; 10% condition damage; F2: Calls a Hawk who applies bleeding to your target (like the horn’s hunters Call)
B.) A Drakehound grants you 10% toughness; 10% power; F2: Immobilizes your target (range starts at your current position)
C.) A Brown Bear grants you 20%vitality; F2: removes a condition.
D.) A Devourer grants 5% range F2: Adds poison damage

Basically:
*Pets are untargetable “Minipets”
*Pets don’t attack anymore
*Each pet grants your several stat buffs though.
-It can be either one-strong buff, or smaller buffs to several stats.
*The F2 ability remains the same, but it’s range starts at your character.
—————————————————————————————————————-

The permanent companion concept still is part of the class.
Anet advertised Ranger as a class which was able to adept to many situations, switchable skills and stat-boni perfectly fulfill this concept
—————————————————————————————
Sidenote:
Ranger; Greatsword; Maul-animation: fits perfectly into this concept!

I love this. I really have no words to describe how much I love this.

I think they could improve the pet not by allowing it to hit moving targets in general, but by allowing its F2 skill to apply to moving targets. That way a pet isn’t an aimbot that never misses, but it can still do considerable damage to enemy players periodically. It would be like making the pet F2 similar to the warrior’s killshot. A once in awhile powerful skill that can hit moving targets, but can be dodged or interrupted by skilled opponents.

It still wouldn’t be overpowered because we can’t use the F2 if our pet is dead. Making the stow pet feature permanent would be critical for this to work. That way we could tactically stow the pet in certain scenarios, trading the normal pet damage to keep it alive so it can be deployed for the F2 ability. Cooldowns on both the F2 and stow would be necessary to prevent it from being overpowered. Actually, just leave the cooldowns as they are now.

Or like Lotro’s hunter not have a pet, up the dps, traps etc. Or give us a choice dps and traps or pet, I know what I would choose

Lwio.7942:

Or like Lotro’s hunter not have a pet, up the dps, traps etc. Or give us a choice dps and traps or pet, I know what I would choose

We have pets that have CC in addition to damage, with no cooldowns or set durations. Just think of your wolf as a mobile trap that’s active for as long as your skill and circumstances allow. If your mobile wolf trap expires, click F4 to instantly summon your mobile drakehound trap. Etc…

If your mobile traps don’t behave like you want, put them on passive so they only attack when you target something and press F1 or F2.

Imo pets shouldn’t deal damage at all. They should provide support/healing/CC and perhaps tanking in PvE… Oh wait, we already have that – they called spirits and are kinda suckish too.

I think the ranger pets need to be more like the guardian spirit weapons. If the players traits into the spirit weapons they can be very viable, with great utility and dmg. But if players want they can completely ignore that part of the class and still be 100% viable.

This thread makes me think they should either….

A) Split the Ranger profession into a “Shaman” class and a “Beastmaster” class. The former could be the “I want to be good without my pet and just have my pet throw in a supplemental attack here and there” profession utilizing that whole “pet follows you and provides passive buffs but can’t deal normal damage or be killed” idea that keeps popping up and keeping most or all of the Ranger’s current abilities. They’d utilize animal spirits instead of actual animals, though they’d still acquire different animals in the same way that Ranger does with Juveniles, except they’d “commune with their spirit” or whatever rather than actually taming the creature. Spirit theme would fit well with the spirit utilities and the spirit visual attacks on stuff like the Greatsword and Warhorn. The latter would be a class with new weapon sets, new utilities (other than Shouts) ect. that would focus almost entirely on the pet, with the player mostly acting as supplemental damage and offering various boosts to the pet, a greater degree of control over the pet itself, ect. They’d be the ones using the actual tamed animals in combat.

B.) Start doing some major PvP / PvE seperation balancing for Ranger, because it seems like the stuff needed to make Ranger good in PvE is going to make Ranger broken in PvP, while balancing with PvP in mind will make the Ranger useless in PvE.

Sdric.8526:

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I personally do like the following solution:

There were several topic which suggested pets as constant companions which dont fight but grant you an extra skill (current F2)and a base stat buff.
Example:
A.) Hawk grants you 15% speed; 10% condition damage; F2: Calls a Hawk who applies bleeding to your target (like the horn’s hunters Call)
B.) A Drakehound grants you 10% toughness; 10% power; F2: Immobilizes your target (range starts at your current position)
C.) A Brown Bear grants you 20%vitality; F2: removes a condition.
D.) A Devourer grants 5% range F2: Adds poison damage

Basically:
*Pets are untargetable “Minipets”
*Pets don’t attack anymore
*Each pet grants your several stat buffs though.
-It can be either one-strong buff, or smaller buffs to several stats.
*The F2 ability remains the same, but it’s range starts at your character.
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The permanent companion concept still is part of the class.
Anet advertised Ranger as a class which was able to adept to many situations, switchable skills and stat-boni perfectly fulfill this concept
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Sidenote:
Ranger; Greatsword; Maul-animation: fits perfectly into this concept!

I like this idea a lot. It’s kind of like a fighter switching stance or a shooter switching guns for different forms of attack for different situations. It encourages active management and actually playing the class instead of falling back on an autopilot crutch.

And I agree with you that they over nerfed the ranger, so the unreliability of the pet really came to the forefront. Pets were just a supportive form of damage; it was the cherry on top and not the sundae, and that’s how it should be. But once they nerfed the LB, GS, Axe and SB, pets couldn’t pull their weight to compensate.

There has to be more pet slots for the passive pet buff to work though. I’m thinking at least 4 on land and 4 in water. Power/Crit/Condition/Defense/ and I ideally want some kind of support function in there also. 2 different “stances”, isn’t enough to compensate for the kind of nerf this class has gone through. I’m not sure even if adding those passive pet buffs is enough without adding a 2 to 3% damage buff across the board.

I don’t agree with pets being not targetable though. I think there should be some kind of checks and balance. If the pet buffs are actually substantial and useful, there should be a way to disable them, especially if you can switch to 4 or 5 different stances.

I welcome the day when someone will look at my toon and thinks: I need to kill that pet or I’m in big trouble. That it itself is a form of a buff to your toon already since you’re indirectly increasing your survivability if someone will actually focus on your pet.

I strongly oppose any suggestion which require hefty amounts of micro-management in order to use a pet effectively. I understand wanting to put more emphasis on player skill rather than a computer controlled pet, but making the player control the pet in addition to their character would be too intensive and put a large emphasis on micro-management skill which would kill the class for me.

I like Sdric’s suggestion, but still think pets being able to attack and be attacked should remain. Many players enjoy the pet being able to fight along with you and it would be a disappointment to see them just following you around, standing there.

Perhaps pets should deal a very small amount of damage when attacking but give some sort of buff to you or nearby allies whenever it uses its auto-attack, much like how rampage as one gives 1 might every time your pet attacks, but that’s all they should do on their own. Each pet should also give its own buff for auto-attacking.

In addition, all passive benefits, along with access to the F2 skill, should be disabled upon your pet getting knocked out. This would make pets a strategically important target if you are fighting a ranger.

If we add both of these to Sdric’s suggestion I’d be perfectly content with it.

i do not like sdrics idea at all it amounts to basically making the pet one more cosmetic P.O.S. when all they need to do is make the pets hit more often . extend there range or allow them to hit on the run i dont care but the current functionality is fine, just do not reduce the pet to a garbage extra buff bar. i personally like to see a Grandmaster trait that would allow any boons your pet receives you receive as well, pretty much the opposite of the trait that allows the pet to receive the buffs you get. this would allow for higher DPS to put us on par with other DPS classes, maybe even enable us to achieve some tankiness if specced for it. instead of having me buff the pet all the time allow it to be a symbiotic relation ship where we both need to buff each other. so we care about the pet and its abilities outside the F2.

Bri.8354:

Perhaps pets should deal a very small amount of damage when attacking but give some sort of buff to you or nearby allies whenever it uses its auto-attack, much like how rampage as one gives 1 might every time your pet attacks, but that’s all they should do on their own. Each pet should also give its own buff for auto-attacking.

In addition, all passive benefits, along with access to the F2 skill, should be disabled upon your pet getting knocked out. This would make pets a strategically important target if you are fighting a ranger.

If we add both of these to Sdric’s suggestion I’d be perfectly content with it.

Really nice suggestion. Just as a sampler, Drakes give their master a chance to cause a condition aligned with their element, Bears might give 1s of Proteciton, Birds fury….etc. Really, interesting idea. In addition, I think that more, if not all of our weapon skills be designed to work in conjunction with our pets like Hilt Bash and Pounce.

I think the ranger pets need to be more like the guardian spirit weapons. If the players traits into the spirit weapons they can be very viable, with great utility and dmg. But if players want they can completely ignore that part of the class and still be 100% viable.

100% Agree. Pets should be ‘disposable’ and the Ranger just like Necros or Guardians.

Also, like many have said…having a class where part of it is controlled by the AI sucks.

There shouldn’t be just ONE class that is reliant on pet mechanics where Necros or Guardians train into theirs.

I could see if they had 2-3 classes based around pets, like say in WoW with Hunters & Warlocks or even Frost Mages…but right now, from what I’ve seen and played some…this class is just too reliant on a broken mechanic and it won’t be fixed due to the ‘battle mechanics’ unlike you have in say WoW.

The best thing to do is like you said is make the pets basically some sort of spell or ability that is summoned…like the Hunters Call ability with the Warhorn but make these UTILITY skills…with certain types of animals…cats, wolves, avian, tank like etc. You could do a bunch of utility skills also like say…

Pack of Wolves: Summon a pack of wolves to do XXX (like Guild of Thieves)

etc…

do not like sdrics idea at all it amounts to basically making the pet one more cosmetic P.O.S. when all they need to do is make the pets hit more often . extend there range or allow them to hit on the run i dont care but the current functionality is fine, just do not reduce the pet to a garbage extra buff bar.

The issue there when you increase the range is you basically remove dodging and rolling out of the game against rangers and that isn’t fair to other classes.

Moving away out of the melee range and still getting hit by a pet because you increased their hit box would just be asinine honestly.

Pets aren’t working and honestly, I don’t think they will. It’s time to ‘fix’ the Ranger class and do some serious changing to it to get it in line with other classes and without the pet mechanic that is built into it’s core abilities and damage.

all of these suggesstions are all with the assumption that Arena net will not fix pets. i really hope they do because i am really liking my ranger right now and if they fixed the pets it would be so much more viable for tournaments. I would rather not have any of the ideas here implemented. i would rather just like the current system fixed.

So many of the traits all geared towards our pets that it leaves very little left for player himself to trait. Separating the playing styles of each ranger isnt happening . I’ve played other classes which were a half dozen to a dozen different ways to trait your player for your style of play even the smallest changed could make a huge difference in how you play. Which is the reason so many players are upset over SB nerf it was one of a few playable styles or the only . I much rather have the traits for myself with a option to adding a "FEW " to my pet if that what I choice to do like the other classes.

Lwio.7942:

Or like Lotro’s hunter not have a pet, up the dps, traps etc. Or give us a choice dps and traps or pet, I know what I would choose

Here’s an interesting experiment I bet Anet will never do.

Take whatever Anet internally uses.measures the split of the “power” or effectiveness of rangers and their pets: ie 80%/20% or 70/30 or whatever. Allow a petless option for rangers, which gives a buff to abilities equal to only half of the “power” Anet thinks a pet represents. Do it for a month, data mine the heck out of ranger player behavior, and see the result. (note, this is not a solution to the pet issue, rather a way to measure how much players actually feel their pets are effective)

I’m willing to bet a significant, if not majority, of players choose the petless option, even tho in terms of “balance” they should be underpowered, only getting half back of what their pets would provide. And I bet in PvP and WvW the skew would be even higher towards petless.

And just to keep beating my drum, classes should be about player skill, not AI skill.

And just to keep beating my drum, classes should be about player skill, not AI skill.

Yep…I agree.

I don’t know why game developers insist on pet classes.

Hopefully there is a re-design of the ranger class incoming soon, otherwise it’s #s are going to just keep dropping.