Guild Wars 2

If the pet couldn’t become a handicap, noone would care so much about its issues.

There are too many situations where the pet can not deliver on its promise and therefore leaves the Ranger handicapped.

Handicap:
- Ranger has less power scaling (because it has a pet to make up for it)

Situations where it’s not worth the handicap:
- PvE areas that use a lot of AoE damage (most new content)
- WvW walls preventing the pet from pathing to the target
- WvW zergs killing pets before they get anywhere
- Any area with pathing issues. Harpy fractal for example.

The handicap has to go. It has to be changed. We’ve played a year with this power scaling reduction and it’s not the proper solution. Something else needs to be done instead.

Noone would be bothered with the pet issues, if it could never handicap the player. It would just be a class mechanic: Sometimes useful, sometimes not useful.

But as it stands, the AI is expected to deliver in any situation, because the reduction in power scaling is also happening in any situation.

I’d accept every one of your issues gladly if the F2 abilities for pets actually worked… ever. That alone makes the whole mechanic 100% useless. Currently the only role the pet plays is that of a DOT that can’t be dispelled, but also can’t hit moving targets half the time and doesn’t work in the various scenarios you mentioned.

F2 abilities need to be instant.
Secondary abilities need to be controlled.
Pet names need to save.
Pets need to stay stowed if told to and not able to come out unless out of combat.

What are you implying with the ‘power scaling reduction’? As far as I know rangers are capable of delivering more than enough damage if needed, if that’s what your on about.

Pve areas with a lot of AOE are a pain for every zerker not just pets, either swap at the right moment, let it retreat (when pets low) or get a pet with more toughness(even vitality) and keep swapping if needed

Pathing issues are a constant aspect if pets being tweaked over and over just give some clear issues instead of just saying “I demand changes because it sucks!”
And you have the most extreme example, the harpy fractal. Yes pets can’t jump from in platform to another without following you, so what? Just go melee range(which is the best thing to do at harpies) or which most rangers seem the forget.. Use a RANGED pet for that jumping bit.

As for wvw.. I don’t really care that my awesome catbeardoglizard can’t reach people on walls.. Neither can a person playing melee

Generally speaking, Ranger base damage and coefficients are lower on all of their weapons and weapon abilities. It is presumed this is because the pet makes up 35-50% of the class’ damage.

Melandrus Flower.1206:

What are you implying with the ‘power scaling reduction’? As far as I know rangers are capable of delivering more than enough damage if needed, if that’s what your on about.

Pve areas with a lot of AOE are a pain for every zerker not just pets, either swap at the right moment, let it retreat (when pets low) or get a pet with more toughness(even vitality) and keep swapping if needed

Pathing issues are a constant aspect if pets being tweaked over and over just give some clear issues instead of just saying “I demand changes because it sucks!”
And you have the most extreme example, the harpy fractal. Yes pets can’t jump from in platform to another without following you, so what? Just go melee range(which is the best thing to do at harpies) or which most rangers seem the forget.. Use a RANGED pet for that jumping bit.

As for wvw.. I don’t really care that my awesome catbeardoglizard can’t reach people on walls.. Neither can a person playing melee

Our weapon skill coefficients are the lowest of any class in the game – deliberately so, to offset the 100% hitrate and uptime presumed to be had by the pet. So, in full zerker gear, with a glass cannon spec, rangers are still doing less damage than any other class with the same setup.

In general, you can sum up ranger damage as 60% from the ranger, 40% from the pet. This ratio should be far closer to 90% from the ranger, 10% from the pet, unless one specs heavily into beastmastery. The plethora of threads asking for the option to 1) play without the pet, 2) improve the pets hitrate, 3) outright change the pet mechanic should show Anet just how full of fail the pet system is. Or it would, if a dev ever actually posted in the ranger forums.

We had 1 dev – the dungeon developer – who had been posting semi-regularly back around christmas, but afaik, that’s the last time we had any interaction from the dev team. Anet’s approach to the ranger’s issues seems to be covering their eyes/ears and pretending they don’t exist. At least, until someone in PvP actually loses to a ranger – then the entire non-ranger population loses their kitten and starts calling for blanket nerfs to one of the two all round weakest classes in game.

stale.9785:

Melandrus Flower.1206:

What are you implying with the ‘power scaling reduction’? As far as I know rangers are capable of delivering more than enough damage if needed, if that’s what your on about.

Our weapon skill coefficients are the lowest of any class in the game – deliberately so, to offset the 100% hitrate and uptime presumed to be had by the pet. So, in full zerker gear, with a glass cannon spec, rangers are still doing less damage than any other class with the same setup.

The skill coefficients on this page are a bit out of date, but they’re close to the ones I’ve found in my own testing.
http://pvx.gw2buildcraft.com/Damage_Calculations

Ranger is pretty normal. Not the best, not the worst. Of course skill coefficient is only half the story. Weapon attack speed is the other half. I initially believed the “ranger weapon damage is pathetic” line that’s popular here, but then I ran some tests and found that under idealized unbuffed conditions (i.e. weapon damage vs weapon damage), my ranger without a pet killed about as fast as a warrior. Add the pet and the ranger wins handily.

At this point, my best guess as to why ranger seems weaker (I do find it feels easier to kill stuff with my warrior) is availability of buffs. Might in particular. Unless you give up a master Marksmanship trait for Beastmaster’s Might, you can pretty much only get might from:

• the elite RaO (one stack of might for 8 sec per pet attack)
• blast finisher (flame trap + Call of the Wild = 3 stacks for 20 sec)
• (I don’t include Call of the Wild because one stack of might is pathetic)

Or from a pet:

• jungle stalker F2 (5 stacks of might for 10 sc)
• drake blast finisher (flame trap + tail swipe = 3 stacks for 20 sec)

Compare this to other classes which seem to generate might stacks almost at will, with some of specialized builds being able to hit 25 might stacks solo.

Lack of self might stacking is part of it,

Our power based weapons have very slow auto attacks (longbow, greatsword, I’m looking at you) and one is punished for enemies closing range on you.

Our single highest DPS weapon is the one handed sword – and it’s only direct damage is from the auto attack chain – and it suffers from the lower (comparatively) coefficient punishment. remember, a 0.2 difference gets large, when the formula is multiplicative.

Quick example, guardian sword vs ranger sword, assuming 2000 power against 2000 armour, and 1000 damage as base for sword (easier number to work with in my head than 952.5):

Guardian:

(weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor) = Damage
1000 * 2000 * (.8)/(2000) = 800
1000 * 2000 * (.8)/(2000) = 800
1000 * 2000 * (1.5)/(2000) = 1500

so there’s 3100 damage from one cycle of the guardian’s attack chain on mainhand sword.

Ranger:

1000 * 2000 * (.6)/(2000) = 600
1000 * 2000 * (.6)/(2000) = 600
1000 * 2000 * (.7)/(2000) = 700

Which, for those who don’t want to add for themselves, is a whopping 1900 damage! That’s more than a 50% reduction from our guardian test.

for laughs, thief – who should be close to identical to us (medium armour skirmisher)

1000 * 2000 * (.8)/(2000) = 800
1000 * 2000 * (.8)/(2000) = 800
1000 * 2000 * (1.3)/(2000) = 1300

For a nice 2900 damage from the attack chain. Or 1.52 times the damage of a ranger.

Remember, this chain happens (theoretically) in under two seconds. (1.5 seconds for thief and guardian, 1.75 for ranger) In 60 seconds, a ranger can (theoretically) fit in 34.3 chains. The other classes get in a (theoretical) 40 chains in that 60 seconds.

Now, imagine combat taking an amazing 5 seconds on any of our three examples. Guardian and thief getting in 3.33 attack chains, ranger getting 2.85;

Guardian (3.33 * 3100) = 10323
Thief (3.33 * 2900) = 9657
Ranger (2.85 * 2000) = 5700

At 60 seconds, we’ll have the 5 second damage numbers, multiplied by 12:

Guardian: 123876
Thief: 115884
Ranger: 68400

The same problem applies to all of our power weapons when compared to other classes’ power based weaponry.

If you go through and replace the power and armor values with actual in game numbers, using the coefficients, you’ll get different end numbers, but the fact remains that the ranger’s damage (not including the pet) is terribad.

I agree on F2 pet skill. It works, but the timing is super unpredictable. And sometimes it doesn’t work at all.#

But if you now would buff my weapon dmg. I would feel slightly overpowered.