Guild Wars 2

So we now get to merge with pets and be petless finally yay!!! For some battles at least.

How do you all think this is going to work?

Will bears increase our vitality and toughness making us much more tanky? Then add a f2 skill to use the pets skill ourself?

Will the panther greatly increase our dps?

Or do you think we are just going to gain certain new f skills while attuned to our pets?

Will we only be merged for x amount of time or can we can stay stay merged as long as we please?

How do all of you think this is going to work?

I think it will be F5 to meld, then pet skills will become F1-F4 and you will gain some stats or passive effect based upon the pet family type.

OMG. F5 with Porcine family is going to be interesting

From one of the videos it looks like pets get classified into a type. The one shown was an Iboga as a Deadly type. This type gives the ranger a buff when in beast mode (Deadly pets increase precision and condition damage).

The ranger also gains two pet skills (it doesn’t look like the F2 skills are given to the ranger but two other family skills currently controlled by pet AI) and a third skill which I think is determined by the type of pet (the Iboga and the Warthog both had the same third skill, so it’s definitely shared by pet family but a much broader grouping).

Unfortunately this likely means rangers won’t get panther stealth or smokescale invulnerability field. I’m not sure why we don’t get the F2 skills – they are easily the most useful pet skills and far more interesting to use (one of the warthog skills was maul – does damage and makes the foe bleed, big woop). It also means my charr won’t get to fly and breath fire like a wyvern.

It appears as though there is no limit to pet merges. Expect to see a lot of rangers that never use a pet anymore (this might be why we don’t get the F2 skill in beast mode- it’s a good reason to continue to swap back and forth to access the beast mode skills as well as the pet F2 skills). I’m guessing the most effective rangers will dance back and forth to make use of pet F2 skills and access the cooldowns of the pet AI skills. It will be interesting to see rangers begin to learn skills their pets currently use but we never pay attention to them because they are AI skills (wolf knockdown leap, wyvern wing knockdown, bear’s defy pain etc) but now we are going to access them directly in beast mode.

I hope the do a balance pass of core pet to make sure they have interesting uses rather than just forcing us into PoF pets because they were better designed to accommodate the new system.