Marksmanship
[II] Malicious Training – Increases duration for conditions applied by your pets by 50%.
Given you use a pet that manages to keep up 3 stacks of bleeding constantly this will increase DPS by 60. During a 10 second fight this will haven done 600 additional damage if your pet can maintain those stacks and you enemy wont cleanse or just dodge its attacks.
Rating: 3/10
[VI] Beastmaster’s Bond – Gain fury and 3 stacks of might for 9 seconds when your pet’s health reaches 50%.
This trait doesn’t help the pet but you. In theory with the right pets you can propably trigger this on a good rate every 20 seconds. Then again it might do nothing at all in other scenarios. A bonus is that this still is an Adept trait.
Rating: 5/10
Skirmishing
[I] Pet’s Prowess – Pet do 30% more damage on critical hits.
High Precision pets like birds and feline will obviously benefit the most from this trait. With a 60%-70% chance on crits those pets will increase their overall direct DPS by atleast 20% which will easy generate numbers like +300dmg per hit. Great for an easy to get trait like this one.
Rating: 7/10
[V] Companion’s Might – Critical hits grant 1 stack of might for 1 second to your pets.
I wont do fancy calculations on this one. It is not hard to realize that no matter how high your crit rate is 1 second duration is a bad joke. Don’t get it.
Rating: 1/10
[VI] Agility Training – Pets move 30% faster.
This doesn’t stack with other speed boni which means it becomes useless whenever your pet has swiftness. Overall I find it hard to estimate what this trait does. In theory it should allow your pet to better stick to its target and thus do more damage but from practice I don’t think it helps. Would be nice if it said “Pet attacks cripple for 2 seconds.”. Right now it is hard to see any benefits of this.
Rating: 2/10
[VII] Carnivorous Appetite – Pets gain 276 + 10% of their healing power health on critical hits.
As mentioned above the values seem okay to me on a high crit rate pet. Still this will just act like some kind of regeneration and will not prevent your pet from dying while it tries to reach its target in wvw through tons of AoE. Pets don’t die over time, they die to burst so I doubt this is worth a Master slot.
Rating: 3/10
Wilderness Survival
[V] Expertise Training – Pets deal 350 extra condition damage.
This will increase condition damage (mainly bleeds and poison) by about 40%. Effectively this does the same as Malicious Training. Slightly worse but a dmg increase instead of duration which helps against cleansing. If anything these 2 traits should be merged into 1.
Rating: 3/10
Nature Magic
[II] Concentration Training – Boons applied by your pets last 50% longer while in combat.
If you go through the amount of boons your pet can apply you will realise that the durations are all very low. Arguable the best one is Red Moas Furious Screech which applies 15 seconds of AoE Fury. This will give 22.5 seconds instead if the animation doesn’t bug out so I might understand people taking this trait with Red Moa and another Boon pet.
Rating: 5/10
[X] Enlargement - Pets get enlarged when you reach 25% health giving them Stability and a 25% damage increase over 12 seconds.
The effect is very powerful. Having to drop health below 25% is not though. I actually lack date on internal cooldown and if the duration is actually 12 seconds. I guess with a burst heal you can proc this and get back a decent hp at an okay ratio. I dislike these kind of traits but maybe some people like it. It takes a Master slot though.
Rating: 4/10