Out of combat pet swap cooldown
Why is this there? Why must I wait however many seconds to swap my pet out of combat? It should be like weapon swap…
People were abusing it to get multiple buffs up prior to a fight. ‘duh I say, why shouldn’t we be able to do that? It’s our class mechanic!
I can see why they wouldn’t want that, but it seems to me the solution would be to remove buffs on pet swap rather than nerf swapping.
There are several traits that trigger on pet swap – so my guess is they would have needed to recode all of they or just change pet swap out of combat.
You don’t remove pet buffs on swap, you retain the cooldown status of the moves when swapping back. So if a pet has a 30s cooldown for his move, when you swap pets twice (away, and back to the first pet), it’ll still be on cooldown minus the time it took to swap pets.
I’m sure this is what will be done eventually, it was probably just easier to put a cooldown on pet swaps while they dealt with more critical issues.
Swapping isn’t the issue that should be addressed regarding the buff-stack exploits. It’s not preventing all instances of the exploits and at the same time its heavily punishing regular ranger players.
Quick pet swaps should be allowed out of combat
There are multiple legitimate uses of the quick pet swap that it really hurts to have taken away from us:
1) Comparing pet stats with one another is far more difficult if we can’t rapidly swap between two pets. We are only allowed to see the stats of our currently active pet and thus removing quick swapping out-of-combat makes smart pet choice a tedious affair.
2) Bug clearing! While they are getting better all the time, pet are still not bug-free. The only reliable way to clear your pet of any accumulated behavior issues is to swap it. You should not be penalized for this.
3) Intro and finisher pets. Some pets are great to initiate combat and some are great to mop up at the end. By forcing a long cooldown on swap while out of combat, you are either taking away a ranger’s ability to have a beginning and ending pet, or you are forcing that ranger to wait the full cooldown between every single fight. This is ridiculous and greatly diminishes the usefulness of some pet families, in particular dogs and porcines.
4) Stowing forces swapping! Whether or not you want to swap pets, if you have your second pet out when you stow, you will incur the large swap cooldown when you unstow as the game will “helpfully” force you to return to your first pet. If the cooldown out of combat were returned to its short form (2 seconds?), then the interruptions caused by coming out of a stow would be greatly minimized.
Again, the biggest problem is that this “fix” doesn’t even address all instances of the exploit its meant to!
A better way to close the exploit: follow expected behavior
The issue at hand is being able to reset a pet’s F2 skill recharge time early allowing you to repeatedly use F2 buff skills back-to-back and produce unnaturally high stacks.
This could be fixed simply by enforcing what one already expects to happen. When you use an F2 skill and swap pets twice back-to-back, that first pet’s F2 skill should still be in recharge. If it is, then unwanted stacking is prevented by regular skill recharge and it doesn’t matter how many times the player repeatedly swaps pets. If not, then that is a bug that should be addressed.
Additionally, when you slot up a new pet after using the previous one’s F2 skill, the remaining recharge of the old pet’s F2 skill should be transferred in some manner to the newly equipped pet. Currently it does not. When you change which pet you have equipped no recharge information is stored at all and you have in practice reset all of your recharge timers.
This is the real issue!
The current “fix” does not address this at all while still penalizing regular non-exploiting players by taking away from us a vital tool.
Leaves and Embers - a fan written GW2 novel (complete!)
Servants of Fortuna [SoF] - We serve fortuna; may she grant us a smile.
Servants of Fortuna [SoF] - We serve fortuna; may she grant us a smile.
(edited by Jenosavel.1756)
Why is this there? Why must I wait however many seconds to swap my pet out of combat? It should be like weapon swap…
People were abusing it to get multiple buffs up prior to a fight. ‘duh I say, why shouldn’t we be able to do that? It’s our class mechanic!
Funny thing is, despite this fix, it’s still possible to spam-summon your pet and stack the buffs.
I would much prefer that the pet F2 ability cooldown just doesn’t get reset on a swap. It would make the reduction of F2 CD trait be useful as well.
Yea please fix but stacking another way. Out of combat pet swap is another nightmare for pets….
Btw. Please fix aoe f2 abilities! Why run to melee range…. Grr! Why so so so hard to just get a skill to fire off….
Arsanist X [OSA] – Necro