Guild Wars 2

This is just a reformatting of a response I made in a different post the I feel probably deserves its own merit.
Note that I am not saying this is the direction the game needs to go, it is more of just a “bring ideas to the table” type philosophy, where even my own opinion does not entirely reflect ideas I am going to mention. But suggestion have to start somewhere, and I would hope that it sparks a good constructive debate and maybe something a dev can take to the table about pets as a whole for rangers.

I understand and am prepared for an immediate boo/hiss kneejerk response from people in the community, which is totally understandable. But just be aware that I am only making the suggestions to put ideas on the table that concepts can be derived from and potentially discussed.

Idea:
-make ranger pets entirely passive and untargetable
-Change the F1, F2, F3 utilities into Attack(with long but fair cooldown), Utility, Passive, and F4 can remain switch.
-F1, pet does some sort of attack for some sort of damage. Whether it is attack from stealth, basic burst, boon removal, a channeled attack, a condition, AoE, etc. With an appropriate cooldown time.
-F2, just a rehashing of the random abilities pets already used randomly in their attack cycle, mixed in with the utility F2s pets currently have. Moa heal, gain might, regen, condition removal, etc
-F3, some sort of passive, like certain pets already have, that happens on an internal cooldown that should occur less frequently the more powerful the effect is. The best example I can give here is the bird swiftness, or even the pigs forage skill could be this passive (although with the pig thing I am aware of other issues that could cause if the pig is foraging when you want it to do something else, but it is just an idea up for discussion).

Now I realize this goes against a lot of what the ranger community likes about the pet in the class, including some of the things I enjoy. But at the same time, it would seem that this concise implementation would remove a lot of the variables that have to be considered when balancing that would make balancing across the multiple game types (PVE, pvp, WvW, dungeons, etc) easier to manage while not overall changing the intention of how the ranger interacts with the pet.
The only thing that would really change is the pets ability to draw and hold aggro. Admittedly that is one of the things I enjoy, and it isn’t a small change. However, the class philosophy of the ranger and pet working together is still in place, as well as the utility the pet provides and the necessity to micromanage a pet, similar to what is currently implemented.

Now, I don’t expect this to happen or anything. I just feel that it is a starting point that might head discussions about pets in a potentially positive direction.

So, thoughts/feelings?

To add to this I would have to say that idealistically if any of these concepts could be intertwined into the current functionality of pets I would personally feel it to be amazing.
I like a lot of the discussions going on in Hrouda’s dungeon suggestion post, but the only real thing that seems like a solid suggestion is adding yet another button to make the pets dodge.
While that would be an improvement, it seems like just a band-aid fix that affects only dungeons (which is to be expected since he is a dungeon dev) which is why even if my ideas in this thread seem impossible or they are not agreeable concepts, it is still a conversation worth having about potential improvements for the pet system that doesn’t involve people arguing back and forth about perma-stow and/or balance changes that would break the game in the rangers favor.