Guild Wars 2

First lets not let the thread get off topic about whether ascended gear was a good idea in the first place or not as we all know it wasn’t.

Now to the actual topic, as we all know pets don’t get scale with stats. Unlike most other MMOs this wasn’t actually a problem (minus possibly crit damage bonuses and pretty much anything to do with conditions being a problem) because there was a definitive top level to gear that wasn’t supposed to be improved upon and Ranger pet stats were balanced around those stats (all pet problems are down to AI, the inability to dodge in a game where nothing is supposed to just sit there an tank damage, some bugs and the decision on whether an ai controlled partner should be so incharge of such a large portion of our damage).

Now ascended gear has come in but pets will still have the same stats. This means that Rangers will get much less benefit from the gear and will be even weaker in comparison. They can’t increase their damage as much as other classes and Pets will die even faster in PvP/W3 as their toughness/health won’t increase to match the new damage levels.

Not to mention do we even know if they get benefits from agony resistance yet? Anybody tested that?

That’s a good point…I never thought of that.

I hate to say it, but after the laissez-faire way they handled the shortbow nerf, I wouldnt be surprised if they consider pet bug fixes to be compensation for scaling.

Basho.5936:

I hate to say it, but after the laissez-faire way they handled the shortbow nerf, I wouldnt be surprised if they consider pet bug fixes to be compensation for scaling.

Well spamming F2 isn’t the most fun gameplay.

i never understand why any MMO makes non-gear-scaling pets.

When complete Ascended gear gets rolled out, will PvP gear get increased to match? Because if not, then this will only be a PvE/WvW issue.

Not that that’s not important since that makes up 2/3 of the game, just pointing it out.

Pets don’t seem to get our agony resistance, they die very fast if they get agony on the upper levels (i’m on lvl 21 atm), but they still don’t die that often specially if you use devourers.

good point
pets are weak enough now if they don’t get fixed they will die when targeted
won’t be even needed to use any abilities on them

Pets do have “agony resistance” listed in their stats though. Will be very curious if that means our agony resistance applies to them.

Ursan.7846:

Pets do have “agony resistance” listed in their stats though. Will be very curious if that means our agony resistance applies to them.

I have 15 agony resistance, pet’s agony resistance still says 0.

I would imagine once they start introducing more Ascended gear into the game they’ll add some way to increase pet Agony resist as well. Maybe certain Ascended gear upgrades will apply both to pet and player or something. I don’t know the method, but putting an Agony Resist field in the pet window is pretty good evidence they intend to include some way of increasing it. They’re probably not worried about it much at this point because players don’t even have access to that much just yet.

As for pet boosts to make up for Ascended gear… that seems a little more up-in-the-air. I doubt they’ll introduce pet scaling if they didn’t have it before. They could just increase pet stat baselines to accomidate the higher player stats, though that would depend on whether they view Ascended gear as the “norm” or whether they consider it like Legendary gear, where they don’t really assume most will have it.

Most likely seems they’ll just ignore it altogether, though. Maybe they’re just taking longer to test pet-related changes or something, but thus far it seems they really don’t care about pets at all, so it wouldn’t be odd to think they’d just ignore it.

The problem with just a stat increase is that Pets share stats across PvE and PVP. Of course it would probably be possible to give them separate stats in the two.

I think the sad truth we are looking at here is that it will just be an even bigger uphill battle to get Rangers on par in dungeons/W3 and an even longer wait.

Sleepy.2647:

Ursan.7846:

Pets do have “agony resistance” listed in their stats though. Will be very curious if that means our agony resistance applies to them.

I have 15 agony resistance, pet’s agony resistance still says 0.

lol I figured as much.

Is it possible that pets already have the resistance we have, but it isn’t showing up in the menu? After playing around in the higher fractals with 5%, I feel like my pet lasts a lot longer than it did before… but it could also be that I’ve gotten better at manipulating the AI to avoid blows, or I’ve been lucky enough to heal them through it. If anyone cares to measure the numbers, I’m curious.

cozzybob.9175:

Is it possible that pets already have the resistance we have, but it isn’t showing up in the menu? After playing around in the higher fractals with 5%, I feel like my pet lasts a lot longer than it did before… but it could also be that I’ve gotten better at manipulating the AI to avoid blows, or I’ve been lucky enough to heal them through it. If anyone cares to measure the numbers, I’m curious.

Pets are immune to environmental damage… IE: Traps, certain attacks, and such. Taking into account agony is environmental damage, they SHOULD be immune