Guild Wars 2

Other games made me have a closer attachment to my pets via their taming system. sometimes they were rare pet finds, sometimes i had to trap them before I could tame them, and sometimes I had to find a tiny baby pet feed it over a weeks time (a new daily) and it grew into a pet I could use in combat or a mount (not expecting mounts don’t worry)

My suggestion would be try to include these types of tames in the future or even revamp the one you have now (certainly not an immediate thing) and people will love this profession moreso then they do now imo.

I think it’s been discussed before but I would like to see some type of pet customization. Maybe we could buy equip cosmetic armor or even dyes to their fur? As it stands now, my only emotional attachment to my pet is its name. That and maybe how I acquired it. The wolf had me venture into enemy wvw territory in order to tame him. With that said I believe it’s been stated that pet customization would be to tremendous of a task, but regardless, I still think it would be an awesome feature.

For start, I would love to see pet’s names remembered after pet change.

I dunno… I flip out sometimes when some guy kills my pet Owl ‘Hooters’ in WvW….

Personally, I wish they’d just make the class as dependent on the pet as we are ‘emotionally attached’ to them. I mean the way this game approaches pets is like you’re some merciless owner to a dog fighting ring in charge of throwing bait animals into the ring to get the dogs riled up.

If this is how much a Ranger cares about pets, perhaps we should lessen their use to the class.

Unless of course I’m the only one that simply throws pets in to the fray in hopes the pet can at least last the 30 seconds to cycle to the next pet?

Bohun Martell.8963:

For start, I would love to see pet’s names remembered after pet change.

Let them start here… if this is not fixed, any other type of fix or fluff wont matter.

Bohun Martell.8963:

For start, I would love to see pet’s names remembered after pet change.

Would really like that too.

This isn’t wow, thank god!

Yea, I’m torn on this.

On one hand, it was a bit disappointing to simply walk up to a pet, press a button and instantly have it as a pet. There was no struggle (aside from walking to the right zone) having an animal switch from wild to completely under your control in an instant really is a bit jarring for the sake of immersion (yes, I know, lolimmersion).

On the other hand, because I haven’t become overly attached to any one pet, I feel a lot more open to the idea of using my full artilery of pets. As a result, I’ve gained a real sense of appreciation for how much pets can contribute to so many diverse situations and builds.

I totally agree, but there I a lot about this game that feels hollow

Highvoltage.7946:

This isn’t wow, thank god!

i actually felt way more attached to my hunter’s pets. pets are the worst part of the ranger unfortunately. some of them just look terribly goofy.

Highvoltage.7946:

This isn’t wow, thank god!

it’s not and there are far more games that had taming long before WoW.

I’m not suggesting they go back to the flawed system where people could kill the pets while taming far from it they can still stay green but when all you get for the taming affect is a dialog window it’s just a little impersonal is all.

I have a emotional attachment to my black moa, because my Ranger had one in the first game and that involved a quest chain. Of my other pets not so much.

It was said originally that there would be elaborate taming process, I’m not sure where it went.

It would be more fun if we had to slowly tame a pet by feeding it or saving it from a trap or something. Maybe a quest or two. Another thing that could be done is letting us tame a creature of a high-power, such as a champion mob, by defeating it in a duel.

My favorite pet from any game, was from World of Warcraft, was a white tiger that was very dangerous to approach. Having to come up with a creative way to win him over, was good enough to make me almost cry when something killed him. Anything like that would be nice.

I feel 0 attachment to my pets. Here’s why :

• 1. I didn’t work to get them. I didn’t camp 5 hours for a rare spawn, I didn’t go through any type of process to tame it. I didn’t complete a quest line. I didn’t do anything. It was handed to me, thus I do not appreciate it.

• 2. A lot of the pets are not attractive looking or cool looking. There are no “special” pets. Everyone has access to everything. I’m not asking for awesome new pet skills for “special looking pets.” What I’m looking for is for them to be treated the same way Armor is. It’s all about the looks. (PS: I miss it when people ran up to me and said “Woah! Cool pet. Where did you tame him?”)

• 3. Only a few pets are viable because the rest die so easily. Even if I’m attached to my Feline type pet, it wouldn’t matter because he will die too quickly.

• 4. It’s encouraged to change pets. Every 30 seconds, I’m swapping my pets. Why become emotionally attached to something when I can’t even use him on a regular basis?

• 5. Pets feel more like a burden than a companion. I have no way to heal him, I have no way to utilize all of his pet bar skills (who’s idea was that?), I have no way of naming him, I have no way of training him past Juvenile. He’s just there. By my side for 30 seconds. No name, no significant value, no place in my virtual Ranger’s heart.

I’d much rather play GW2 then play Tomagachi thanks, I do feel attached to my Fern Hound Evergreen though.

I couldn’t agree more with this. I feel nothing for my pets. Actually a little hatred when they don’t attack or pull some stupid mob when I’m trying to be sneaky.

No name, no level, no abilities I pick, no stats that I pick etc. All I did was press F on a green name and boom, I can make him go die for me so I can swap him out and put him back in his dungeon in my…. in my…. my bag?

I feel more like an unloving necromancer that just summons dead spirits, make them fight for me, and don’t really care when it dies because I will just switch to another one.

Give us a challenge to level them, lets us pick stats and abilities, give them levels or emotions so we can feed them/interact with them. Maybe I want a feline but I want to make him tanky.

Also would be nice if pets followed armor/weapon tiers as in there are common white name pets, all the way up to stronger pets of exotic level. Some of you will probably disagree with that one (I definitely DO NOT want them to be sold on TP), but I think the rest most of us would like.

Nurse.1085:

I feel 0 attachment to my pets. Here’s why :

• 1. I didn’t work to get them. I didn’t camp 5 hours for a rare spawn, I didn’t go through any type of process to tame it. I didn’t complete a quest line. I didn’t do anything. It was handed to me, thus I do not appreciate it.

• 2. A lot of the pets are not attractive looking or cool looking. There are no “special” pets. Everyone has access to everything. I’m not asking for awesome new pet skills for “special looking pets.” What I’m looking for is for them to be treated the same way Armor is. It’s all about the looks. (PS: I miss it when people ran up to me and said “Woah! Cool pet. Where did you tame him?”)

• 3. Only a few pets are viable because the rest die so easily. Even if I’m attached to my Feline type pet, it wouldn’t matter because he will die too quickly.

• 4. It’s encouraged to change pets. Every 30 seconds, I’m swapping my pets. Why become emotionally attached to something when I can’t even use him on a regular basis?

• 5. Pets feel more like a burden than a companion. I have no way to heal him, I have no way to utilize all of his pet bar skills (who’s idea was that?), I have no way of naming him, I have no way of training him past Juvenile. He’s just there. By my side for 30 seconds. No name, no significant value, no place in my virtual Ranger’s heart.

I can understand what you mean here, but sadly, this is why pets were so imbalanced in other games. In other games that did this, you either had a very special pet that would require a ton of grind/luck to get or you had a pretty looking pet with crappy mechanics.

I mean, the example that most people will follow goes back to WoW where you had rare and diverse pets that you weren’t constantly changing. However, this is also why everyone would end up using a ravager/wind serpent/OP pet of the month. This also was why it was sad to have an awesome looking pet that was just all around inferior.

Don’t get me wrong, the pet system in GW2 isn’t perfectly balanced and there are some pets that are all around inferior (I’m looking at you hynas!), but most pets are completely viable in the right setting, which is something that’s rare for an MMO.

I’ve always liked it when pets physically grew as you spent more time with them.

It’s such a simple stupid little scaling trick, but somehow seeing my bigger beastie tower over his untamed cousins or somebody else’s lesser used pet feels like progress somehow.

It’s probably easier on the technical front to shrink newly obtained pets and eventually allow them to grow just a bit larger than currently, than to just start scaling them up from where they are now. But, having new pets be smaller ends up making perfect sense. They are juveniles, afterall.

I also think the visual language isn’t doing enough to reinforce the idea persistency of a pet during the switching process.

Take pokeballs in the pokemon franchise. There could have been any number of ways to satisfy the same ‘switch’ mechanics visually, any flavor of magic could have adequately explained it, or they could have gone without explaination entirely; but they chose to have a ball. A ball that we get to see our pokemon spring out from every single time we call it out, we get to see in the hands of our enemies, in the hands of the player character, and as a visual on-screen representation of remaining pokemon. When they’re not being used in battle; where does a pokemon go? It goes in that ball. Even before they made an effort to visually display the ball at the start of every fight’s intro animation and instead used scaling and some smoke visual effects, you knew that those visuals were trying to represent a pokemon coming out a pokeball, because in the back of your head you always knew where your pokemon was. It persisted in the world.

But our pets? They just suddenly pop into and out of existence without explanation, so there’s nothing that persists them. There’s no such thing as the absence of a visual cue, and we’ve seen that exact visual cue a thousand times, in every monster we’ve encountered in videogames for years. They’re effectively dissapearing and appearing like monsters do. And we’ve been trained to think of a monster that suddenly appears as a ‘new thing’, even if it has the same name, same model, in the same place. The fact their cooldowns are reset and their previously established aggro is seemingly wiped only further reinforces the idea that what springs from the nameless void isn’t really MY Juvenile Warthog, it’s just a new spawn of A Juvenile Warthog.

If there were visual or mechanical distinctions between rangers’ pets of the same species, I bet I wouldn’t have any trouble thinking of it as Mine and I wouldn’t be giving this sort of thing a second thought. But there aren’t, so I do.

Definately agree, taming in this game is very lackluster. There’s nothing to the actual taming process, just “click button, get pet”. Instantly combat-ready, no growth or training involved. And there’s no sense of having to actually hunt for potential pets either, since they’re always in the exact same spot without fail.

Even most of the taming spots are just “there” for no apparent reason. I would expect with static spots that at least they’d be in interesting locations. There are a few nice taming spots like the Jungle Spider haven in Caledon Forest at the top of Morgan’s Spiral, but for the most part they’re just placed in random locations, not hard to get to, not hard to find, and no real reasoning behind them. I keep going into random little caves and animal dens hoping to find juveniles there (the main instance of this being a fairly well-hidden Salamander Drake den underwater in Plains of Ashford), but there are rarely juveniles in places like that, they’ll just be out in the middle of nowhere.

The main MMO I played before this game was Star Wars Galaxies (way back in the day before the 8 “iconic” class crap) and I thoroughly enjoyed the way pets were handled in that game. They were random spawns across the entire planet, so you actually had to hunt for them. Then once you found them you’d have to mask your scent, slowly approach the pet (while hoping none of the adults noticed you), and attempt to tame the pet. The taming process would take around 10 seconds and success would be determined by your progress in the profession / skill, and if it failed the pet might attack you, in which case you’d have to run off a distance and let the pet calm down, then try again.

Once you tamed your baby, you’d have to wait for it to grow to full size and power. You could technically still use it as a baby, but its stats were quite low so it was risky. You’d also have to train it to recognize commands, which was always a nice touch and made it feel a bit more organic. And you could teach them tricks as well. There were also a lot more pets (probably 90% of the species and sub-species of animals in the game were tamable) and even pets of the same species and subspecies could have slight variations in color.

Now, Ranger in this game is WAY better than Creature Handler in SWG mechanically. Pets have unique special attacks (SWG it was just debuffs, not even different animations) and in combat they’re infinately more useful, they did paltry damage and only really accelled at tanking in SWG, and players could still tank much better once the good armor started being made. Creature Handler was by and large a purely “fun” profession, pets couldn’t really contribute anything to your combat effectiveness.

But there’s certainly something missing from the pets here in GW2 as far as feeling organic, actually feeling like real pets.

Unfortunately, I don’t see anything about the pet system changing at this point. The only thing they could do is maybe make pets grow up and get stronger (maybe that could be the way to make up for Ascended gear) but as far as the charming and such goes, I don’t realistically see it being improved. And with the way the players in this game are, always pointing fingers at anything other professions get and going “OOOH, unfair attention!” I think there would be a huge outrage from all the non-Rangers if they spent the amount of time they’d need to make any large changes.

my moa is named lawn moa, i love him

No name, no lvling, no permanent death, no attachment.

Very true. It feels more like a moving skill machine than an actuall pet. It’s crazy that, if I would not name my pet, I wouldn’t even be able to say which one is mine and which one belongs to the other ranger when I’m in a large group.. I really would love to see some attachment here, or please some customization like dyes or armor… I don’t care what but please give us anything..

Aridia.3042:

No name, no lvling, no permanent death, no attachment.

There is a name isn’t there?

If Anet introduces leveling or permanent death to GW2 pets, they better get ready for the kittenstorm thats coming their way from the forums! (OMG GRIND, OMG Ranger class is broken!)

Even most of the taming spots are just “there” for no apparent reason.

iirc, juveniles are usually found among other animals of their own species.

Also, leveling pets seperately was a huge pain in GW1 and I do not miss it.

Danielle Mesmorie.7864:

Aridia.3042:

No name, no lvling, no permanent death, no attachment.

There is a name isn’t there?

If Anet introduces leveling or permanent death to GW2 pets, they better get ready for the kittenstorm thats coming their way from the forums! (OMG GRIND, OMG Ranger class is broken!)

You’re not naming pets in this game; you’re naming slots.

Pets have as much attachment lvl as a toothbrush ATM because they feel completely disposable.

I cared more about my wolf in L2 than I do all my pets here. I had to quest for him, lvl him, feed him, arm him and if I don’t res him after after a certain period, he dies permanently.

I actually prefer the discardability design of the pets in GW2, just tools to be sent to their bloody death rather than “companions”, because I’m just not a fan of pet classes in mmo’s. Just never sits right with me having a class benefit from having AI fight his battles for him in PvP.

That said though I actually rerolled from a warrior TO a ranger because I love their melee abilities far better and with the right trait setup I am a far more durable and skill based melee warrior with a sword than any sword warrior build out there.

Are pets going to get dance emotes anytime soon?!

While we’re throwing out stupid ideas about pets, why niot have the ability to wear armor, yea thats right, I want to see my Yogi bear in plate gear! :P

Braxxus, that’s why I said in the other thread that pets in this game have more in common with some sinister owner to a dog fighting ring where you throw puppies into the pit to get the dogs started. It’s exactly how Rangers use their pets in this game. It’s almost like they were planning to make Rangers in this game like Rangers in GW1 until they said ‘Oh noes! We forgot about the ranger’s focus skill’

I dont like the design/look of the pets. Every animal looks like a regular animal. This is a fantasy world. Make the look more awesome. Let us change their look. Make them bigger in scale compared to their real life counter part. All I do with my pet is put it on passive and use their F2 ability for a buff, and switch them out for a quickness buff for 2 seconds ever 20 seconds.

For starts, today if they cant fix “stow away”, i mean the wording is right there, then thats sad, im already starting a new class because of the failed problems

Let us Dye pet fur/skin. Then we’ll see about feeling any emotional attachment.

The encouragement of swapping pets (which is almost forced) really hurts. I’ve been playing FFXI again lately since GW2 has been such a disappointment and I really feel more attached to my Puppetmaster’s Automaton than I ever did to any pets in GW2. He’s customizable, he remembers his name, he (mostly) listens to commands, and he (sadly) puts in more work than me. Sure, everyone hates on PUP almost more so than Ranger in GW2, but at least, as a pet class, the pet feels right.

Master’s Bond would be the easiest way to fix this. It needs a HUGE buff, it needs bugfixed (going into water shouldn’t reset it) along with pet AI and bugs, and it needs to not be removed upon defeat (which encourages swapping, which is what the trait is trying to avoid). This single trait should honestly be the deciding factor whether or not the pet itself is the highlight of the class or just something to abuse for buffs. Right now its near useless.

It would have been nicer to tame pets when they are younger than juveniles and have them grow as you grow. (Like bears cubs, wolf pups) Including them into emotes and adding them into idle animations would have been great too. For example, when you cheer, your pet joins you in joy and barks/howls/etc. It’s a lot of work, but I think it would help with giving us emotional attachment towards our little animal friends. Right now, pets feel like objects that you just switch between, not like real companions that you truly share a bond with. When the pet dies you basically throw it away for a new one by swapping.

I absolutely hate using the switching mechanic. I feel like garbage every time I swap my dead pet for a new one. XD

I always thought that it would be cool if the two pets you had in your load-out were always out and with you, but only one was active and the other just followed nearby but couldn’t attack and couldn’t die, but granted the ranger a passive boon or benefit of some kind. Then switching pets would reverse it so that the other pet granted a different passive while the other one was active. Would make it seam more like a team instead of disposable switch-outs.

And this is why I loved the white lion in warhammer online. The lion with its armor, so proud and fierce felt like a protector, my equal. In GW2 I go through pets like underwear. That’s no insult to GW2, but being a pet class, it just doesn’t have the same, feel…

i really want this. more customization with pets. its the staple of rangers. and they do need to grow, bond with you, and take away the swapping upon downed. also give them a meager talent tree. id like to love my hawk i have named Frightful.

tigirius.9014:

Other games made me have a closer attachment to my pets via their taming system. sometimes they were rare pet finds, sometimes i had to trap them before I could tame them, and sometimes I had to find a tiny baby pet feed it over a weeks time (a new daily) and it grew into a pet I could use in combat or a mount (not expecting mounts don’t worry)

My suggestion would be try to include these types of tames in the future or even revamp the one you have now (certainly not an immediate thing) and people will love this profession moreso then they do now imo.

Did you play SWG? because that seems like a very very similar system… I personally have nothing against how we tame pets atm, just go up and hit F it’s the total lack of them growing up that bugs me to no end!!

I want my little fern hound who has been by my side since lv 1 to grow up to be big and strong! I mean kitten, he has 30 points in him lol, and he helped kill Zhaitan, you’d think he’d at least be older then a Juvenile by now…

It would be cool that to tame a pet you had to earn its trust, and help its relatives, this could be done using the F1-4 keys while no pet is equipped. and gives us new skills to tame pets and makes the whole process a more rewarding one than pressing F.

in wow, the pet would attack you until you tamed it, maybe we could use a similar system however using the F1-4 keys we could add more interactivity and make it a challenge to tame them and maybe add rare pats which are hard to tame.

I hold no emotional value to my pet, purely because it dies almost all the time. I’m not sure if I am doing something majorly wrong, as I am new to Guild Wars, but my pet dies within a few seconds every fight…

Atherakhia.4086:

… I mean the way this game approaches pets is like you’re some merciless owner to a dog fighting ring in charge of throwing bait animals into the ring to get the dogs riled up.

If this is how much a Ranger cares about pets, perhaps we should lessen their use to the class.

Unless of course I’m the only one that simply throws pets in to the fray in hopes the pet can at least last the 30 seconds to cycle to the next pet?

LOL. I laugh because this is soooo true. The dog fighting analogy is perfect and now I think about it every time my Norn huntress swaps out her pets and bellows “NEXT!”

Deleven.7508:

my moa is named lawn moa, i love him

Logged in just to say that that is a brilliant name.

ChristianV.7514:

Atherakhia.4086:

… I mean the way this game approaches pets is like you’re some merciless owner to a dog fighting ring in charge of throwing bait animals into the ring to get the dogs riled up.

If this is how much a Ranger cares about pets, perhaps we should lessen their use to the class.

Unless of course I’m the only one that simply throws pets in to the fray in hopes the pet can at least last the 30 seconds to cycle to the next pet?

LOL. I laugh because this is soooo true. The dog fighting analogy is perfect and now I think about it every time my Norn huntress swaps out her pets and bellows “NEXT!”

hysterical! I love the scene of that playing in my head.