Guild Wars 2

TRAITS FOR PETS

• See the attachment for the general idea.

The reason why this is necessary is because, at the moment, all ANet has to work with regarding how pets react to damage are the pets’ vitality and toughness. It’s a pretty poor design. However, if pets had their own traits, they could gain the ability to react to damage in unique ways or even just speed up fights by tacking on new pet skills/abilities to already existing pet commands or even player skills. Pet traits would be bare-bone versions of player trait trees composed respectively of two fixed minor traits and 1 “grandmaster” major trait that provides the player with 3 or so options from which to choose. Each pet would have 35 trait points to spend respectively.

Abilities that would help pets deal with their clunky combat responsiveness would be scattered throughout these trait trees. Options such as “gain Aegis if you take more than 10% of your hp from a single hit” or “gain ¾ seconds of evasion whenever your master dodges” would probably make it as the Grace minor traits.

Feel free to throw out some trait ideas in this thread, because adding skills to ranger pets is honestly the only way that they will become something more than sluggish meat-puppets on the battlefield.

Furthermore and best of all, a buff like this would warrant pets being reduced back down to their original hp and armor levels prior to the April 30th update. A straight hp-pool buff like that is just more evidence that ranger pets are absolute garbage. Allowing a ranger to trait a pet in order to make up for its shortcomings would grant the ranger pet mechanic more consistency and responsiveness in combat and allow it to behave more like a player or an extension of the Ranger depending on the abilities that a ranger chose to give it via its traits.

PET COMMAND UTILITY KITS
This once again goes in line with the above post on the topic of giving pets more skills. Let’s think of it this way: how does a ranger pet actively contribute to battle on command of its master?

The answer is one single button. A single skill is all a ranger gets when it comes to a direct attack with his or her pet. Everything else is made on the pet’s terms. Furthermore, when it comes to fine control of the pet, the ranger has either an “attack” or “return to me” button. Not only do these two buttons constitute the entire fine control mechanism of a ranger pet, but the “return to me” button—which is supposed to allow a ranger to re-position a pet—takes a pet entirely of out battle for the duration that it spends running back to the ranger (this also opens it up to any attack under the sun).

This sort of shallow design is what lead ranger pets to become the often nigh unkillable (due to vitality and toughness buffs) but often entirely ignored (since they don’t really do anything) meat-puppets that roam the battlefields of WvW and sPvP.

Once again, the root of the problem lies in the lack of skills available to the ranger that allows for direct control of the pet. Giving the ranger more pet-specific skills would not only allow the ranger to better steer the pet in and out of danger, but also allow the pet to directly contribute to a battle in close conjunction with the ranger. One solution would be to introduce what would effectively ranger pet versions of the engineer Weapon Kit utility skill. Such a utility skill would swap the ranger’s weapon skills with 5 skills (with the ability to flip in and out of them on a non-existent cool-down as is the case with engineer Weapon Kits) that are each pet-oriented command skills. Each skill would queue itself for the pet to perform as soon as it could. This sort of delay could allow the ranger to swap back to his/her weapon skills to perform timed attacks with a pet or also open the possibility for chain skills in the Pet Command Utility Kits that start with a pet-specific command and then chain into an attack that the ranger would perform.

The goal would be to promote more synergy between the ranger and his/her pet while also giving the ranger more control of his/her pet’s positioning and contribution in a battle by providing the ranger’s pet with movement, evasion and damage on command.

reserved for future posts

reserved for future posts

Bump because update to second post. I might get around to putting down some concrete ideas for things like a pet utility kit later.

Hehe I like these Ideas. What I like about the pet trait is that you can actually have more condition dmg for your pet. This is one of my bigggest problem with ranger. There are some really cool pets that actually deal about 8 bleeding or fire or confusion but only on base dmg. All you have is 1 trait point which is give your pet+350 condi dmg which is bull…

The other Idea to give more command ability is interesting. What I would like to see is to controll all of the pets ability from f1-f3 (didn’t count his auto attack) and f4 remain for change pet. ALso you can have the attack target, the avoid/aggressive combat mode, but only by clicking them.

So I think the weakest point of ranger really is the pet I don’t mind if it became really hard to use, cos even engineer is hard to use with all of his kits, but ppl can learn it.