Guild Wars 2

At least 4 of the 5 new pets have all these cool abilities and new functionalities, and I can’t help but notice that the base pets have very boring abilities. What makes me wonder is now that rangers have access to fire fields and what is considered to be a very tanky pet, will there be buffs or changes to the base pets and pet families? Looking at various drakes and the lynx, they have their incredibly slow pet skill (1.5-3 seconds takes an eternity), and drakes don’t have an on demand blast finisher, it’s AI controlled.

Drakes are fine. They will still be one of the best pets simply because they are the only ones with a cleave. They also have a blast that is predictable, decent DPS, good durability (like wyverns) and river drake has a very nice F2. I suspect there will be times where drakes will be better than all the new pets.

Devourers, murrellows, snow wolf, fern hound, pigs and even birds all have considerable issues that could use some work. It’s not simply a case of HoT pets being better, but some core pets simply need a second pass. Devourers will benefit greatly from base condition damage, but the issues with other pets really deserves a rebalance. Some F2 skills are significantly worse than others in the family (snow wolf, fern hound, murrellow etc), some pets have a terrible skill holding back their DPS due to a long animation you can’t control (all birds) and some birds have what looks like a good tool kit on paper but in practice it works really poorly (pigs) and honestly their F2 is very unpopular.

The best part about new pets is the smoke field from the smokescale (easily a very strong pet design that’s above the power level of core pets) and the fact that three new pets come with desirable combo fields (lightning, fire and smoke) which is a huge step up from core pets (where all we get is poison field briefly).

Smokescale and fire wyvern also comes with evade skills which is a great addition while making core pets less desirable at the same time….

They mentioned they will be looking into the ranger so this could mean the pets to.

Wyvern AA’s are horrible, they are slow (2 sec CD and 2 hits!) and stational so they will never ever hit moving targets and just be good for their f2’s