Guild Wars 2

I’m sorry if this comes off as complain worthy & whiny.

I posted in another thread about ranger pets asking for more, which clearly we will possibly be getting with the upcoming expansion.
Picture if you will: Other pets that are just as useful as the HoT pets!
Pet progression as well, from pup wolf to dire bad*ss with GW1 style growth.
Right now, having all of the tamable pets in your invisible menagerie is literally an aesthetic. I see it as there shouldn’t be tamable animals if there is no point to have it other than to look cool. (but that is just me) Heck, why even tame a shark? Underwater combat doesn’t seem to be ever getting love.
NOTE: I’m not saying pre HoT pets have 0 worth.

Having only 4-5 pets out of 20+ being combat worthy is quite a loss, wouldn’t you say?
I’m not suggesting that ALL of the pets get a damage buff but maybe a rework? So rangers can happily have more selection instead of a smokescale and bristleback or a wolf. Maybe there is something I’m not covering here, I know there is someone who can shed better ideas on this topic.

TD;LR what is the point of even taming more than HoT pets since no others have any real usefulness as far as utility goes.

More useful, sure, but I hated the growth progression for pets in gw1.

There is without doubt a problem with pet balancing – there are too many pets that don’t contribute anything useful to many builds, and some don’t contribute to any at all. When was the last time you saw anyone use a boar pet, for example?

Ben K.6238:

There is without doubt a problem with pet balancing – there are too many pets that don’t contribute anything useful to many builds, and some don’t contribute to any at all. When was the last time you saw anyone use a boar pet, for example?

I suspect the answer to that question is comparable to “when is the last time you saw someone wearing armor with defensive stats”, eg, maybe in pvp, most likely in wvw.

Chasind.3128:

Picture if you will: Other pets that are just as useful as the HoT pets!
Pet progression as well, from pup wolf to dire bad*ss with GW1 style growth.

I would so love that! My favorite pet (as per looks and animation) is the wolf, but its skills are pretty useless 99% of the time, hence it’s nowhere to be found in any efficient ranger build. That is a pity.

A large variety of selectable, user-controlled skills that were mostly on short cooldowns made the GW1 pet feel less like a ball-and-chain and more like an actual animal companion. Above all else, I’d like an actual pet UI that gave more options than eat, stop eating, and use your SINGLE special skill.

It is discouraging that the pet system is the only profession-specific mechanic that a notable number of players want to have as an on-off toggle.

(But seriously, I loved me some beast master ranger in GW1 and the GW2 system just feels like squandered potential.)

/makepetsgreatagain

Major Domo.9250:

A large variety of selectable, user-controlled skills that were mostly on short cooldowns made the GW1 pet feel less like a ball-and-chain and more like an actual animal companion. Above all else, I’d like an actual pet UI that gave more options than eat, stop eating, and use your SINGLE special skill.

It is discouraging that the pet system is the only profession-specific mechanic that a notable number of players want to have as an on-off toggle.

WoW had the exact same thing; I think the simple answer is that people want a pet AI that can read their mind and react based on what they know, not what the pet AI can know. When they don’t get that, they curse and wish that it went away, without the rest of the class following.

I’ll also note that WoW had four skills, where GW2 has one, per pet, and also had exactly identical damage from every pet, and still got this sort of limited selection going on, which was sad.

I think the ideal solution is to make pet damage identically equal, or limit it to a very small number of cases (eg: X single target damage, X*.66 to three targets cleave), and then reshuffle the special skills across families.

Nearly all the pets are ‘useful’. The issue is that if one pet is more useful than the others for meta builds or meta comps, it will get used much more often. That’s the same reason revenants suffer today — they dish out decent buffs & damage, but lack the potential of the meta. Consequently, revs aren’t used as often — that’s not the same as being useless.

So before asking for more pets to be useful, you have to identify what is it about current setup that makes people want to choose 5-6 pets over all the others. What could those other pets offer (fitting their theme) that would make them more competitive?

And then ANet would have to be very careful when buffing/changing not to make the new versions too good, lest the formerly useful pets be overtaken by a new meta.

tl;dr if balancing skills (and pets) was easy, ANet would release balance patches every month.

Ashen.2907:

More useful, sure, but I hated the growth progression for pets in gw1.

Yeah, one of the best things about GW2 is that you don’t have to level your pets manually any more.

Ashen.2907:

More useful, sure, but I hated the growth progression for pets in gw1.

We could definitely use for a better system, maybe Add elite pets that have better stats than juveniles?

I used to love using my birds but they die do fast, it’s like, why even?

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Major Domo.9250:

A large variety of selectable, user-controlled skills that were mostly on short cooldowns made the GW1 pet feel less like a ball-and-chain and more like an actual animal companion. Above all else, I’d like an actual pet UI that gave more options than eat, stop eating, and use your SINGLE special skill.

It is discouraging that the pet system is the only profession-specific mechanic that a notable number of players want to have as an on-off toggle.

WoW had the exact same thing; I think the simple answer is that people want a pet AI that can read their mind and react based on what they know, not what the pet AI can know. When they don’t get that, they curse and wish that it went away, without the rest of the class following.

Except you quoted a post praising the GW1 system for pets.