Guild Wars 2

When I try to activate the F2 pet ability I usually hammer F2 because more often than not it doesn’t activate because the pet was interrupted or something. However, there is no feedback so I am left clueless. Is the ability going to activate? That is why I think the F2 abilities should be instant and thus more reliable.
One weakness of the pet mechanic is that it is unreliable.

Welcome to dodgy pet A.I Mechanics, sir. What gets me the most is pet ai tracking. Did you know birds can’t really fly in GW2? All bird pets are tied to the terrain by an invisible leash. It’s kinda funny when you jump off a 2 ft. ledge and your pet bird has to walk the long way.

LoneDeranger.5963:

When I try to activate the F2 pet ability I usually hammer F2 because more often than not it doesn’t activate because the pet was interrupted or something. However, there is no feedback so I am left clueless. Is the ability going to activate? That is why I think the F2 abilities should be instant and thus more reliable.
One weakness of the pet mechanic is that it is unreliable.

Part of it is your pet trying to get in range to use that attack, or that pet is doing something else.

I always notice on my Jellyfish pet, when I use F2. It doesn’t use it immediately. However, it does start moving towards my target, and it activates when it reaches it.

Also for the Devourer pet. Sometimes, I’ll press F2, but it’s in the middle of burrowing away from something. Again, it just takes a while, then it starts charging up and uses it.

Shark’s one of the exceptions. It’s F2 is a self-buff, so it happens instantaneously. But many times, the Shark’s actually not attacking my target and some of the buff is wasted.

But anyways, instant F2, I don’t think is a very good idea. Imagine the complaints of “My pet just used his F2 skill and it didn’t hit anything because it didn’t bother to get in range.” I think a better idea is a good indicator that the command has been received by the pet, and the pet is trying to do it, within whatever limits it has.

Try using the brown bear’s “shake it off”. You can have no one targeted and your pet on passive and mash the hell out of f2 and he still won’t cast it or by the time he gets around to casting it you’re either dead from conditions or the condition ran its course.

This has in fact been brought up countless times in the past. They have tweaked it some but it is pretty bad. A lot of it revolves around pet animations. This game can’t do ANYTHING until the current animation has completed. Players and pets. You can’t even jump and while in mid air do an instant skill ability. If you hit F2, the skill gets queued up. Your pet gets interrupted during it’s current animation skill attack then your queued up F2 will fail. You need to mash the button some more.

The reason the F2 abilities are slow to come out sometimes is because commanding your pets F2 doesn’t force it to immedietly use that action, it just adds it to the end of the que of what the pet is already doing.

Someone posted a useful trick to get them to work more reliably in another thread that I’ll go ahead and mention here as well. Use F3 first to call your pet back (which clears the pets’ action que) and then immedietly use F2.

Ironically, mashing the button makes the problem worse. If you hit f2 as your pet is queuing it up, it essentially orders your pet to cancel the action. What you need to do is learn the range/activation time of your pet’s f2 vs its attack animations/current position.

Does this make pet AI suddenly acceptable? No, but understanding how the AI is currently functioning will allow you to utilize it more effectively for the time being. For instance, there is a period of about 1-2 seconds after swapping where your pet will instantly use its f2 if ordered because it literally has no other actions queued up. As an example, say you are running from a warrior and you know he is swapping to greatsword to charge you down, and your wolf is waiting to be swapped into play. You can swap and immediately hit f2, and your wolf will unleash a quickness enhanced (traits providing) howl that will send the warrior running away from you. If you miss this window, the pet’s movement will override the f2 function because it has not locked onto the warrior as a target yet. This particular part of pet AI can be a hindrance however, like in the case of birds (raven, eagle, etc), where they will use their f2 on nothing even if you are attacking a target, because they have not locked onto it yet and just think they’re supposed to attack the space in front of their current position.

Agreed, and a lot of pet attacks on top of having a delay in response have charge up times such as the “howls” or “screeches” …so u press F2…wait 2-3 seconds, then 2-3 seconds on charge up…and mobs dead before ur pet casts or player has dodged outta range lol…as is pet skills are near useless and is one issue i hope theyre working on

F2 functions should be revamped to work like this:

Pressing F2 should cause a runic orb to fade in above the pet (irrespective of what the pet is doing, so it would appear immediately) , which would gain intensity (essentially a cast time, some abilities would have a slow cast time, others fast) and explode with an effect, which could be an AoE effect or something that only affects the current pet’s target.

This kind of change would address ALL of the F2 issues, and since the attack is both telegraphed to you and the enemy, room to buff F2 abilities is available as well. The only loss would be the F2 attack animations tied to the pets.

What’s stupid is that the F2 pet skill is the only skill in the game that would cancel if you press it more than once. Why did they do this?

Vinhoney.4517:

What’s stupid is that the F2 pet skill is the only skill in the game that would cancel if you press it more than once. Why did they do this?

It is an easy way to cancel an action rather than having to bind it to another one when the action is performed by AI and not you. If responsiveness of your first f2 press was improved, this would probably not be an issue.