Do rangers need their pets?
The Cats and Birds are amazing DPS in their own right. And when coupled with a Ranger who is specced into DPS, the figures that said Ranger can put out combined with its pet rival those of a Warrior in straight DPS gear. However, with that said, this combination of high DPS on both the pet and the Ranger leaves the character severely lacking in defensive capabilities.
If the Ranger wanted to go with high DPS on either the Pet or the Ranger, while forgoing high DPS in favor of some survivability on the other indivdual on the group, preferably the Pet seeing as how Pets do tend to die fairly frequently as it is. Then perhaps the DPS up time can be increased while giving you a fairly reliable tank pet.
I personally have found that Drake’s serve this function extremely admirably. I have rarely at the moment run into the problem of a Drake whose ended up dead before I was able to swap him out for his counterpart, and then was unable to do a similar switch after the 9 second cooldown.
Now this might change once I start participating in much higher end game content. But it seemed to work relatively consistently in the Tower of Nightmares which I participated in recently. So I am not complaining ATM.
Ranger 80 | Elementalist 30 | Guardian 29 | Necromancer 21
That doesn’t really answer my questions. If we get targeted instead of our pets, how well could we survive. I’ve had quite a few monsters targeting me instead of a pet but I always just managed to get out of it.
We have pet in GW1 , but GW1 ranger is better than GW2 ranger… GW2 ranger is a hibrid between Beastmaster and marksman.
If both of your pets die, its like a minute before you can bring it out again. You have to figure out how to survive until then, and many, many other players have done it, the ranger is not helpless without their pet.
If you are fully specced out in DPS gear and you don’t know how to use your skills properly, almost anything will destroy you, pet or not, it doesn’t matter. If you still suck at using ranger’s currently, You can actually prevent most of your deaths in PvE by using Devourer pets until your skills improve. Their total toughness is greater than your combined toughness and armor defense at this point, and therefore will draw the enemy’s attention.
If you invest any into defensive gear, then enemy’s will almost always attack you because your combined toughness and defense value is higher than any of your pets’s toughness. BUT, its kind of difficult to die in PvE if you know how to use the skills and pets given to you. You have to purposly screw up to die in that case.
Wow, no one able to answer a simple question…
Depends on your gear, as a full zerker or mix’n’mash with offensive stats while leveling it’s gonna be hard. In downscaled areas it’s no problem at all, even with full offensive stats.
If you build with relatively high toughness this will happen everytime for the high dps pets like cat and bird, what I mean is you will have aggro over them all the time basically shifting roles as you tank for your dps pet instead of otherwise.
Ranger with 2dead pets is fine too as far as survivability goes it’s just a bigger or smaller drop in dmg output depending on build.
Yes, rangers need their pets.
No, you won’t typically die if a PvE mob decides you’re more interesting. Unless you spec full glass or something. Then maybe.
Ranger is much more durable then a mesmer. Rangers don’t typically “need” their pets to survive encounters like a mesmer needs their clones or else they’re a smear.
(Rangers do need their pet alive and on the field if you want 40% or so of your DPS intact though. It’s not a good idea to ignore or neglect your pet in general.)
Pvp/Wvw is a different beast and mesmer is just amazing there because of their clone tomfoolery, even if they are made of glass. Stupid sexy mesmers.
I assume we are talking PVE only?
No, rangers don’t need their admitted by Jon Peters “broken” pets.
Depends on your build (gear/traits) and how you play. If you suck at the game you aren’t going to last long in melee no matter what class you play. Of course, if you are just using bears and SB/LB then yeah, you’ll last, but doing crap damage. Bears are the “tank” which is why their damage sucks.
Whether you would survive of not depends on two variables:
1) What pet you use and
2) What spec you use.
In PvE, rangers tend to simply stay alive because we have some incredibly good tanking pets. This allows the ranger to set themselves up for maximum damage.
Tank pets are bears followed by drakes (and a number of others are tier 2 as well).
This approach generally has the ranger do damage at range with the pet holding agro. A key is learning when to swap pets and how to have the pet regain agro. If you are using the longbow, Skill 3 Hunter’s shot will give you a 3 second stealth on a 12 sec cooldown. Save it and that tends to get the mob refocused on the pet.
On the other hand, you can rely on your pet to do a lot of damage. Then you need to focus the ranger on being a bit more defensive as you level up.
While you can make it work, when you are first starting a ranger it is difficult to make both the ranger and pet defensive or both the ranger and pet offensive and really do well.
I’m assuming from your post we are talking about leveling. Once you get to PvP or WvW how you use your pet changes quite a bit. The pet tends to be about utility then damage.
You might have some issues dying in the earlier levels, but everyone does. The no.1 thing that will keep you alive in this game, regardless of class or build, is knowledge.
Learn monster attack behaviour, attack patterns, when to dodge or evade, and using your interrupts when needed.
And yes, you need your pets, because they’re like 20-30% of your total damage output and provide excellent utility when needed.
Full zerk ranger, 2 cats, sword/warhorn & GS (because lol bowbear DPS) tearing it up in Tyria for 500h+.
(edited by Khas.6859)