Guild Wars 2

I’ll get straight to the point: ANet dropped the ball on pets and spirits. Our weapons and utilities are slowly getting there, but pets and spirits were rushed without enough thought and testing.

It comes down to pets being a liability and an overall nuisance to manage, having poor utility, and just not being fun to use. Here is one way to make pets/spirits and the ranger profession interesting.

1. When or if the pet dies, its spirit lingers giving the ranger a few options. Each pet family provides a unique active ability for the ranger to use, and a unique passive damage bonus. For example, spider spirit gives an aoe immobilize and 10% damage bonus. Boar spirit active gives a skillshot charge that can kb up to 5 people, but maybe only 7% additional dmg. Cat spirit gives 15% dmg bonus and its active 10s of quickness . Etc. Actives can have cds ranging from 15 to 30s. So why keep pets alive?

2. When pets are alive, they pulse various boons to the ranger and his party. Cats fury, bears prot, dogs aegis, etc. All at different intervals scaling with boon duration. So bear will pulse 2-3s of prot every 10s for example.

3. Scrap the swapping mechanic. It doesnt do anything for us and it’s lazy, unfinished design. Allow us to specialize by selecting one pet family depending on what we want to do.

4. Pet will autorez every 60s. This can be sped up if ranger accumulates enough ch’i by being in combat, attacking opponents, or helping teammates by healing or applying boons (fills separate bar where pet controls are on the ui)

5. Improve current pet f2 abilities. For example, drakes should have tailswipe as a ground targeted aoe on a 30s cd, giving us a second blast finisher and more on demand aoe burst.

6. Significantly nerf pet autoattack damage. No one wants anything on autopilot.

7. Consider giving pets some kind of passive aoe protection in pve and wvw. Call it primal speed. The pet dodges every third aoe attack or something along those lines.

8. Deal with spirits properly. Don’t dance around the issue of poor spirit design.

- scrap the silly boon-on-hit-rng mechanic and purge the talent tree of the traits improving this bad design
- Spirits should be wisps, orbs of light that orbit the ranger
- Wisps imbue ranger weapons passively. Spring wisp allows small aoe heal on autoattack. Summer wisp gives burning. Autumn wisp increases crit dmg some. Winter wisp gives aoe chill on autoattack every once in a while.
- wisp actives are basically ground targeted aoe fields. Spring gives aoe heal and a very short water field, summer aoe burning, autumn lightning field (drains endurance instead of aoe stunning), and winter frost. Actives have 900 casting range.

These changes would make the ranger a joy to play! The community does not want pets and spirits scrapped. We want this theme improved! Numbers can be tweaked but this rework is a start. Please add your own suggestions =)

- Ikiro

No one thinks there is anything wrong with pets and spirits =P ?

There is everything wrong with pets in my opinion..They killed ranger class by nerfing pet damage and pet leash range..That showed how much Arenanet is blind..
For pets they just have to cancel all the nerfs they did..And let some pets attack faster ( like birds..they do an attack every 5 seconds lol )

more and more players suggest something like you. like virtue or aura… i totaly like the same. nerf the pets while allive, i dont care. i play wvw mostly where pets die within 5 sec.

I always play beastmasters when possible ever since DnD back in the day. I adore the Ranger class in GW2, but given the (PvE) meta of DPS or gtfo pets feel reduntant.

I dislike most of the changes you propose, but I agree pet damage needs to be nerfed, they need to be a lot more tanky (in PvE) and could use a remake of most F2 abilities. Having an extra blast finisher is way more useful than a press and pray luck shot.

On the other hand…

Spirits are totally borked!

I don’t think we need anything too ellaborate. I’m cool with only using one pet etc etc, but the functionality of the pet is the issue.

Allow pets to hit moving targets by either increasing their attack range or increasing their attack speed. This is an obvious AI issue with GW2 as you can beat any melee oriented mob in this game simply by strafing in circles around it. I’m not confident ANet will ever get pets to hit moving targets properly in this game.

Allow F2 abilities to fire off instantly when pressed. I’m fine with the pet running through their entirely too long animation after the skill goes off, but having to wait 2+ seconds for a dog to howl, or 1.5 seconds for the cat to stomp their feet and pounce doesn’t work in a mobile pvp environment. I realize they need some kind of activation time to remain ‘balanced’, but I’m not convinced anyone is going to select the pet to interrupt anyway so who cares? If need be, give them half a second activation times. But as it is right now, ALL F2 abilities are useless offensively because they’ll never hit anything unless the target is actively beating the ranger into the ground in melee range and completely ignores the all too obvious sign that a fear is inc.

Remove the ability for targetted special moves in dungeons to hit pets (Jade Maw for example) and reduce all cleave and AE damage by 50% in PvE and WvW. The numbers in WvW will offset the AE reduction enough so players can still ignore pets and expect them to die from random AE damage just like they do today, but hopefully the pet will live long enough to actually do something for the ranger as well. In dungeons, there’s little reason for pets to be targetted by random selection instant-death mechanics like Jade Maw’s laser. If the pet actively has agro because it’s tanking, that’s one thing… but most bosses single target melee attacks would 2 shot a pet anyway.

Honestly that’s all it would take to make the pet a somewhat dependable addition to this class. 3 simple little things that should have been done a year ago but for some reason seems out of ANet’s ability to do.

If these 3 little things turn out not to be enough, then we can worry about more ellaborate things like what’s in the OP. But as it is right now, these 3 things are pretty much mandatory if the pet mechanic is going to stay in the game at all.

Now as for Spirits (and Signets imo)… the problem with Spirits (and Signets imo) is they require 30 point traits to be useful. While a case could be made that you don’t need the 30pt trait in sPvP because fights are all focused around objectives, WvW is far too fluid. There’s no reason a class should have so many of their skills be useless without first investing 30 pts into a tree. Just allowing spirits to move and signets to affect the ranger and needing a low level trait to make them all affect the pet is all that’s needed.

I like most of what you said, but I think that it doesn’t address the problem with the sloppy AI of the pet itself. It has trouble tracking players – especially around uneven terrain – and it is easily confusable. For pets to work:

1 – They need to be able to follow and stick right on a target.

2 – Some cheating has to be built into the AI to make it more forgiving. Melee attacks and channeled skills have to be able to be performed while moving and the range has to be increased. It needs to be able to ignore elevation differences to a certain extent and also path up and down small inclines that are jumpable without going around them. They should also warp directly to the master when following off a cliff, or directly to their target when the target jumps off a cliff.

3 – We need an actual pet interface as in all other games with pet classes, not just a couple of F buttons to control it’s basic function. Saying it creates a steep learning curve is a total cop out. Did anyone ever quit playing pet classes in any other game because they had to learn a few more buttons? No. People who want to play a pet class WANT an involved gameplay style, that’s why they choose it. If it has been OK in all of the most successful MMO’s to date, I don’t see why GW2 can hide behind that logic.

4 – Pets need to do what we tell them to do immediately with no exceptions. Queued attacks and attacks in progress need to be interrupted and abandoned in favor of our commands. We know how they should be used, the AI doesn’t.

edit why is this message board so terrible at formatting? Come on ANet, can’t you even get a web forum right?

Atherakhia.4086:

I don’t think we need anything too ellaborate. I’m cool with only using one pet etc etc, but the functionality of the pet is the issue.

I agree that making f2’s instant and responsive would go a long way. Imagine, instant prot on demand from moa, or instant aoe chill from wolf.

Sadly this just isnt enough. The pet mechanic itself is…uninteresting and lacking. I am not attached to my pet in any way. F2’s and pet swaps arent ever game changing. In fact, in wvw I often just get my pet out for the f2 and forget about him. And I only use the f2’s because theyre there….not because I need to.

Atherakhia.4086:

Now as for Spirits (and Signets imo)… the problem with Spirits (and Signets imo) is they require 30 point traits to be useful. While a case could be made that you don’t need the 30pt trait in sPvP because fights are all focused around objectives, WvW is far too fluid. There’s no reason a class should have so many of their skills be useless without first investing 30 pts into a tree. Just allowing spirits to move and signets to affect the ranger and needing a low level trait to make them all affect the pet is all that’s needed.

I had to come in on this one spirits should never be made to automatically follow the ranger, as someone who plays a lot of pve I want my spirits to stay still where I put them out of AoEs in fact the way I see it spirits are in a pretty good place. You only really need two out of three traits for them to be effective the third nature’s vengeance is pretty optional.

What annoys me most about spirits is the actives, they’re only useful with spirits unbound active and even then they’re kinda dodgy because of the long activation time and the need to get the spirit into position which is not as simple as it should be due to AI following.

What I would like to see is the actives re-worked to be completely different or be channelled through the ranger himself to always be useful.

Khayoss.2019:

3 – We need an actual pet interface as in all other games with pet classes, not just a couple of F buttons to control it’s basic function. Saying it creates a steep learning curve is a total cop out. Did anyone ever quit playing pet classes in any other game because they had to learn a few more buttons? No. People who want to play a pet class WANT an involved gameplay style, that’s why they choose it. If it has been OK in all of the most successful MMO’s to date, I don’t see why GW2 can hide behind that logic.

What I really want is an interface where I can see which boons and conditions my pet has. Right now it is nearly impossible to know while in combat.

I’m fairly certain that Anet will never introduce something that rewards the player for getting their pet killed

Tywele.7812:

What I really want is an interface where I can see which boons and conditions my pet has. Right now it is nearly impossible to know while in combat.

Their failure to provide proper interfaces is like a running joke in this game. The party interface is very primitive as well, and the fact that commanders have no raid or multi-party interface is downright archaic. Going back to games in the late 90’s we already had the ability to see multiple parties organized in proper fashion… I’d expect that to be a baseline of functionality for something that costs 100 gold. But I digress. The same games also had pet interfaces to see buffs, full control over pet actions and, you know, pets that could actually follow and hit their target without being confused by basic terrain…