Guild Wars 2

I just made a Ranger character.

Now for some backround I mained Ranger for the entirety of my time playing GW1 (I played that game since it’s initial release) and in GW2 I mained a Guardian. This character will be a testament to my time in GW1.

These new Ranger pets are so weird compared to GW1, they actually have stats and skills and such, and so my question is; what pets should I be using?

Currently I have been enjoying using an axe/warhorn combo and a greatsword for melee engagements. I like to be mobile and I like to focus on my pets ability to fight.

Can someone suggest some good pet types that work well with this playstyle?

Some common pets are ursines(bears), canines, felines, birds, and devourers. Bears are tanky but don’t hold aggro really well. Canines are great for both melee and ranged; they can tank a little, and they do decent damage, on top of that, drakehound and wolf have great CC abilities to immobilize/fear your enemies. Felines and birds hit hard compare to others but die a lot faster, if you can hold the aggro of mobs, they could do some really good damage. Devourers are ranged while being a bit tanky, same goes for spiders. Moas are also something you could look into, red gives fury and blue gives protection, both are helpful.

I suggest you using a DD pet and a tanky pet as secondary while leveling. It also depends on where you invest your trait points (15 points into BM is godly for PvE).
But if I were you, I would use jaguar/bear or jaguar/devourer. The reason is simple, felines make the highest DPS but they are squishy and jaguar has stealth on F2 which also boost its crit chance, so when your jaguar is about to die you switch to your tanky pet which has enough survivality to survive 15-20 seconds until your next swap.

Either way, the key is to swap your pet before it dies, do that and you’ll be fine with almost every pet…but some will be better DD/tanks than others.