Guild Wars 2

This is a thing I’ve always wondered about. Spotter currently affects five targets, which if you’re in a full party is your party… But then it doesn’t affect your pet. Spotter should always affect you and your pet, no matter what, and then 4 other targets beyond that.

Actually, this is a bigger issue with ranger balance in general.

• Either the ranger and pet are considered to be one entity for balance purposes (e.g. ranger skill damage is lower than other professions’ to compensate for the pet contributing damage), and the ranger and pet should both get a copy of all buffs (i.e. Fortifying Bond should be a default ability, not something you have to trait for) and armor and weapon bonuses should also affect the ranger as well as the pet. If other professions found that they randomly only got 70% of the benefit of one of their buff skills/traits/armor and weapon bonuses, they’d be livid. But that’s precisely what happens to rangers.

• Or the ranger and pet are considered to be separate entities for buffing purposes, and ranger skill damage should be balanced without taking into consideration the pet.

Previously we had some weird hybrid where rangers got the worst of both worlds. They were balanced as if they were one entity so their skills did less damage, but received buffs as if they were separate entities.

I advocated fixing rangers by moving towards the former. But the latest changes seem to be shifting to the latter in terms of ranger damage. Either way works, it’s just the mixed approach which unnecessarily crippled rangers. If the latter is their true intent, I’m ok with the pet being treated as a separate entity for buffing purposes.