Guild Wars 2

I very recently migrated from WoW and I am looking for a pet class which is friendly with respect to leveling/questing etc.

Can someone tell me which pet is considered super friendly for leveling ?.

I am kinda looking for a pet that keep the mobs away from me while allowing me to stay at range while the pet can keep the mob’s attention.

I really don’t care about my dps or something…just wanna relax and enjoy slowly while absorbing the ambience

PS:

Before someone screams “baddie baddie gtfo out gw2”…don’t you worry i will not join in any LFG or Battlegrounds etc.

Basically I am just a very old player who at the end a super hectic workday wants to spend an hour or so in this game relaxing

Welcome to GW2

I main as ranger, and have been sticking to Juvenile Jungle Stalker (sometimes Juvenile Snow Owl) and Juvenile Jaguar as my main two pets. The Jungle Stalker was at lower levels and the Jaguar at higher levels (and am what I am currently using).

I can safely say that for PvE, I rarely take aggro away from my pets, and at times, I use it as a sort of 2nd kill, meaning my pets are able to kill mobs by itself, this also goes for protecting me when other mobs attack me as I am afk or busy messaging ppl (they will pull aggro onto themselves after 1-2 hits).

In terms of pet DPS, Jaguar is one of the highest DPS pet you can get. By switching out pets constantly (you can switch between two), I am able to solo champions (mobs which are meant for groups) – proves how ‘tanky’ the pets are. If, for some reason, later on, you find that the health pool of these two pets aren’t enough for you, then Bears have the most health pools – however, I suggest using Bears as a second pet in this case.

Best of luck!

Appreciate the response Clumsy..tx

You can tank champs easily with bears (especially Brown Bear) and Drakes. I prefer high DPS like Jaguar but if you just want to relax bears are great for not taking aggro.

A good middle ground are drakes: they are quite tanky and do good damage in PvE (especially River Drake).

Very good advice posted above. I agree with a lot of it.

I am a solo player that mostly plays rangers as I roam around the open world taking it easy and doing whatever (even going for a walk in the woods for a few hours, literally). I personally find myself using the Arctodus much of the time. It can also be used underwater as well as on land and is classified as a ‘bear’ pet.

You can acquire it in a cave in Wayfarer Foothills (Norn starter zone) in the side of the mountain wall, as well as in other areas.

Here is more detailed information on ranger pets if you want to dig into the details on all of them and where to find them all.

As the others said, cats will deal big damage, bears will tank, and drakes are somewhere in-between.

I’d advise to give a serious try at drakes as they’re very solid, hit multiple targets in melee, do some big hitting crits and have a blast finisher. And with the condition damage update, fire/marsh drakes just got better too. They’re excellent all-rounder pets imho.

Drakes are probably the best general PVE pet. Decent damage, decent survivability and they are (I think) the only pet with a cleave attack to hit multiple mobs. also a lot of their f2 skills will hit multiple targets. cats are probably the best pet once you get to dungeons, I usually have a cat and a drake on swap in dungeons for some of the harder content.

For a new player i would strongly suggest taking 2 bears… Brown Bear, and pop on over to the Norn Capital city and grab the Polar Bear. I suggest this because they have a very good survival rate and seem to hold aggro from most creatures. A big bonus to bears is that they are considered amphibious, this help when you are near shallow water transitions, the bears and other amphibious pets will not stow during a transition.

Once you get a good feel for pet behaviors you can then start trading off for high DPS, or trick pets that have other effects. Canines are great cause of there knockdowns. Fern Hound is nice with its heal plus the trait that adds healing when F2 is used.

You will also notice at the top of the available pets, the first five are all the new expansion pets.

Best of luck, Welcome to GW2 and please keep asking us all questions we love to support Rangers of all experience types.

vpy.6183:

I very recently migrated from WoW and I am looking for a pet class which is friendly with respect to leveling/questing etc.

Can someone tell me which pet is considered super friendly for leveling ?.

I am kinda looking for a pet that keep the mobs away from me while allowing me to stay at range while the pet can keep the mob’s attention.

I really don’t care about my dps or something…just wanna relax and enjoy slowly while absorbing the ambience

PS:

Before someone screams “baddie baddie gtfo out gw2”…don’t you worry i will not join in any LFG or Battlegrounds etc.

Basically I am just a very old player who at the end a super hectic workday wants to spend an hour or so in this game relaxing

What you have described is text book Bearbow play. It has a pretty bad name in this game. Not only is it boring (imo) it is really counter productive to learning how to play Ranger.

PvE is easy mode and with a LB and bear, its even easier. It basically prevents you from learning the games main mechanics and you learn to rely on the bear to do the tanking while you do the DPSing, this is not how anything in GW2 works, except for solo open world PvE. Anything works there.

I would encourage you to not use a bear, except for niche things where a tanky pet is needed and use any of the felines (Jaguar/Stalker) or River/Marsh Drakes, actually, the Jaguar/River Drake is a great combo for that.

Learn your pet swaps and management and do not neglect GS, S/A, S/WH etc learn them all.

Unless you totally will never do group content at all and will spend 100% of your time solo in open world, Bearbow is not the way to go, even then its nowhere near a good way to play LB Ranger.

Oh, and Point Blank Shot is not there for fun, its an interrupt, burst setup and kiting tool, its not part of a rotation that must be used. One thing to remember with Ranger, there are no real damage rotations for skills, our skills are opportunistic and should be used at the appropriate time, not spammed.

Welcome to Ranger, GLHF!

And here’s the playstyle lecture you tried to avoid…

Soloing almost everything in open world PvE is quite possible with DPS pets. So swap in drakes or bears only if you want to take out some really nasty champion. Most of the time I just run with 2 cats, or a cat and a drake and it’s totally fine whatever I run into.

Yeah get the cats, people shouldn’t advice you to go Bearbow as we don’t need any more of those.

cafard.8953:

And here’s the playstyle lecture you tried to avoid…

Welcome to GW2 and no one will criticise you for playing wow.

For people advising you not to use bears, just ignore them. But to clarify why they are saying this it’s because the current end game PvE is 100% dps, no defence needed, you can just dodge roll and mitigate all damage. As such, one of the highest/ fastest dps animals are the cats.

However… that’s not what you wanted. You wanted something that is fun and you can dps from far whilst your pet tanks. As mentioned, bears are the best tank. Whilst drakes are a very good hybrid, they cleave (i.e. hit up to 3 targets) with decent dps and are pretty tanky.

My personal recommendation for levelling is to use a longbow and either sword/warhorn or GS. Sword has slightly more dps but can be tricky to use because if you kill your target you could leap past it and strike another or worse fall to your death (because the auto attack chain has a leap a part of it). The reason I like war horn is because of swiftness and some boons to me and my pet. You’ll want a sword/ GS because you’ll want to cleave enemies from time to time.

As for the pets, I found having a bear/ drake and then a dps pet like a cat to be a good balance. Use the cat (which will hold aggro for the most part but can be zerged by too many mobs) for quick kills. Use the bear/ drake when things get hairy.

If you encounter a champion you want to solo, switch out the cat for another bear, then simply pew pew from 1500 range whilst bear tanks.

Like I said, bears are frowned upon in end game PvE because their dps is so bad, but for levelling/ having fun at the end of a hard day’s work, they seem like a good fit for your dps from a far tactics.

Any pet can tank the non veteran and veteran mobs in open world PvE. And drakes can tank all champions that come to mind, maybe if there’s a champ you can’t solo with drakes, swap in a bear. You’re just gimping yourself for no reason having bears all the time.

The only real advice is opening Beastmastery traits whenever that option becomes available (I think it’s level 20 or so in the new leveling system).

For bear easy mode I’d suggest the Murellow. It’s a bear that looks more like a hideous, fur-less dog. It has a nice AE poison attack (F2) and I don’t think mine has ever died.

You’ll get bored pretty quick with easy mode – when you do I’d switch to the cats. You’ll be surprised how much faster they help you kill (not like WoW). Or, you could stick with the bear and just grab several mobs at once. I like to do this with an Axe / Torch combo – I trait for my Winters bite (axe 3) to be AE, drop constant fire fields (torch / trap) and it’s a little more interesting. You could absolutely do this with a cat too – just keep an eye on it’s health or split the difference with a drake.

Honestly, it’s more fun to just mix it up. I think there’s enough consensus in this thread that you know what to fall back to when you run into a Champ – otherwise, you can play around and really not be in any kind of trouble.