I have a pretty ridiculous and in-depth suggestion for fixing the ranger class. I have zero expectation of implementation, because it is probably more work than Anet will want to do. My thesis stems from the idea that rangers are inherintly flawed because their mechanic takes away player agency, and my overhaul aims to restore agency while retaining the thematic core of the class. Thanks for reading, if you dare:
Problem: Ranger attempts to provide players with a companion-class archetype; the core idea being that the player and their pet work together to overcome their foes. However, the ranger fails at this due to the ineptitude of the pets.
In any given situation the worst a class mechanic should be is irrelevant. It doesn’t help, but neither does it hinder you. Profession mechanics might be considered poor when they are irrelevant to the content being faced.
This is frequently the case with pets. They have horrible skill animations that make timely activation nearly impossible (including terrible primary attacks which root them), they encounter pathing bugs, they have incredibly poor self preservation and very awkward active mitigation from the ranger, not to mention the obvious fact that they can die and render half the profession mechanic useless; these and other minor issues make them difficult to use.
However, on occasion pets are more than just a poor mechanic. They are occasionally an outright liability for rangers, something which cannot be said of any other class. Other classes will complain that their abilities are weak, but at least they are not actively working against them. Pets can put rangers into combat in jumping puzzles, draw bad aggro in dungeons, proc bonus effects in encounters that add difficulty, and automatically use CC when it shouldn’t be used.
Instead of having perfect synergy with a precision-trained companion, rangers are stuck babysitting brain-damaged animals. It’s a huge chore. This is not the experience which the ranger class aspires to provide, and now that three years have passed since release, it has become obvious that tacking on additional pet effects and making minor improvements to skill activation and AI will not remedy the situation.
Let’s not pretend there is no problem. Ranger mechanics are bad. They are inherently bad, and can’t be fixed. They must be rebuilt form the ground up.
Solution: Since aforementioned limitations will prevent pets from being capable, independent members of the team as they are currently intended, the solution is to entirely remove pet AI and simply convert them into being an extension of the ranger.
Step 1: Glue the pet to the ranger. It ceases to be an individual creature, and becomes a fancy visual effect that moves 1:1 alongside the ranger in all respects. Thus pets can no longer die, they are just an animation playing around the ranger executing their bonus effects. They can no longer act independently in any way.
They still have stats separate from the ranger, and can still benefit from boons and conditions from AoE (though many will be superfluous).
Step 2: Tie pet swap to weapon swap. This might seem like a downgrade for flexibility, but it must be done so that we can ensure that you use range pets only for ranged weapons and melee for melee (more on that later). It also streamlines gameplay, and allows rangers to augment their primary weapon attack with a specific synergistic pet attack.
I would recommend reworking some pets into ranged attackers to provide balanced options (for instance, I would recommend birds be considered ranged, as they themselves are a projectile).
Step 3: Rework pet skills. Pet actions should operate with synchronicity to player action, via direct player input, or via concrete automation that does not interrupt player agency. For example, I’ll use Alpine Wolf skills to help paint a more concrete picture of this system.
- Pet skill 1 stays the same and autoattacks alongside the ranger’s autoattack. When a ranger presses 1, two basic attacks go off (though they may have separate attack times), the end result is a passive bonus attack. Hence why weapon swap and pet swap merge, weapon and pet combine to be a single offensive option.
Ex: Bite –As long as the ranger is auto-casting their 1 skill, the wolf continues to bite the ranger’s target whenever it is near the ranger.
- Rework skill 2 to be an instant skill which auto-activates under a stated condition (similar to many rune abilities and traits). This preserves the idea of pet autonomy, but generally prevents pet AI from being a liability by limiting activation to a specific circumstance. Instant cast time is important so as not to interrupt or delay pet actions that are specifically activated by the player.
Ex: Crippling Leap, this single target cripple could proc on a nearby target when Bite crits, keeping the ICD of 20 seconds.
- Rework skill 3 to activate when the ranger casts their heal. By putting it on the heal you add further augmentation of ranger’s built-in abilities, which provides a nice sense of natural teamwork—pet and ranger skills combine to create a unique effect.
Ex: Brutal Charge, when the Ranger activates their heal, the wolf leaps forward knocking down nearby targets in front of the ranger. Leap finisher removed.
- Change current f2 to activate with f1. This preserves the concept of the ranger providing direct commands to the pet and gives the player a distinct utility skill to use at their own discretion.
Ex: Chilling Howl: No change, except the wolf is not rooted while casting and continues to move alongside the ranger.
[note: downed skills will also need some tweaking, but not much. Ranger downed state will be weaker without pets able to attack and execute F2, but that’s probably for the best anyway.]
Thus we can remove most of the convoluted pet UI that is currently in-game. The active/passive toggle, attack, and recall commands disappear because the pet is tied directly to the ranger. We can keep the ability to stow the pet visually when out of combat, but it is mechanically superfluous.
An argument could be made to simply have skills 2-4 apply to the f1, f2, f3 buttons, but I feel that this would not strongly differentiate the ranger pets from the engineer’s utility belt. The implementation laid out above provides a unique class experience that embraces pet-rangeer synergy, rather than simply providing bonus skills tacked onto the ranger kit.
Result: No more dead pets, no more annoying pet problems, pets become pure synergy working side by side with their master. They can’t screw with anything because they don’t actually exist, they are simply bonus skills and effects which are painted to look like a buddy that is always at your side.
The downside to this solution is that pets will lose a few bits of flexibility from autonomy, for instance being able to attack a different target from the ranger. Mainly this means pets will no longer provide free tanking services to the ranger. I personally view this as a net positive, as pet tanking is a pretty bland and skill-free tactic that shouldn’t be encouraged, though I’m open to other arguments.
Hurdles: Of course, such an overhaul would come with serious costs and difficulties.
- Animations will need to be totally overhauled (this is by far the largest hurdle for implementation of this plan). For this reason alone, it is understandable that this idea would be overlooked. It would be a lot of work.
- Traits can largely continue to work as they do, though some will need minor tweaks and a few will need major changes.
- Pet skills would need to be reworked and rebalanced. However, since we can largely reuse assets from existing pet skills, this should mostly be a numbers-tweaking exercise.
- Ranger skills will need changes. The shouts “guard” and “Search and Rescue” especially will not work with this revamp (though Search and Rescue could work like a Gyro, for instance).
- Player reactions might be a challenge to manage. This would be a major revamp of an existing class, and although it is a net improvement, there will always be those kittenist change.
So the question is: is all of this effort worthwhile? It depends on whether you want all ten of your profession options to be competitive, fun, and uniquely satisfying to play. If you are content leaving one a bit broken and frustrating, then no this isn’t worthwhile. Leave things be.