Guild Wars 2

Just thinking out loud, but would our pets be massively overpowered if they had this boon on permanently?

To clarify, let’s say it was a ~20s boon applied every ~20s. This way the boon could be removed and for a max time of ~20s and pets would revert to being as squishy as they are now. Otherwise, they’d be alive be able to take a few hits.

I don’t think this would really increase their effectiveness as they aren’t hitting harder or more often, nor are their abilities any more useful. The only change would be that our profession mechanic would be usable more often, since you know, according to the devs rangers were balanced with 100% pet uptime.

• Guard gives your pet 10s of Protection on a 30s cooldown.
• Increase your boon duration to 50% with trait points and food and that is now 15s of Protection.
• Reduce Guard cooldown to 24s with Shout Mastery.
• Then fill in the remaining 9s with protection from fortifying bond, dodge rolling, and/or stone spirit.

The build I’ve been using solo in dungeons can not only maintain permanent protection on pets, but stack up a 30s+ reserve supply.

think the Op is suggesting that pets should have a permanent 33% dmg mitigation to improve their durability without needing to resort to gimmick skills and barely useful traitlines, i believe i mentioned in another post that pets in gw1 came with a 33% mitigation to aoe (it is in fact against all dmg) so i dont see why this shouldnt come as standard for all pets in gw2, considering pets are “supposedly” responsible for 50% of our dmg output they should atleast have alot more then 2700 toughness (devourers)

I don’t think anybody ever offers up these kinds of suggestions because Ranger is lacking in pet survivability options, Mister. They’re offering up suggestions to improve the baseline performance, because a pet only really panning out with heavy investment for harder content is a terribly unfair caveat.

To answer OP, massively overpowered in Open-world PvE, which they’re way too powerful for already. Whatever survivability solutions you’re considering, it has to somehow be context sensitive.

Like, say, something Nature’s Protection-esque. Anytime your pet gets hit for more than X% of it’s HP in a single strike, it receives a protection buff. That’s context sensitive defense in an obvious way. Or like, giving pets the capacity to Rally. That’s context sensitive defense in a less obvious way, insomuch that it’s more likely to get used in a dungeon or WvW situation with multiple adds everywhere, than solo’ing a champion in the open world or 1v1’ing in sPvP. I don’t think either of those really hit the mark, exactly, but something along those general lines.

• Wilderness Survival 10-point trait
  Vigorous Renewal (permanent vigor while Healing Spring is active)

• Wilderness Survival 15-point trait
  Companion’s Defense (2 seconds of protection on dodge)

• Nature Magic 15-point trait
  Fortifying Bond (grants your pet a total of 4 seconds of protection)

Thats 100% uptime of protection on your pet.

To address some of the answers, I originally thought of this as being a persistent passive buff for pets.

And a question to others, how would this be overpowered in the open world? I mostly ran dungeons, but I think the bunker guardian is a good analogy. Yeah it can’t be killed, but it can’t kill you(quickly).

I’m not sure I grab your meaning.
Do you mean “Only offense has value, so who cares how much we increase Defense”?

Vox Hollow.2736:

I’m not sure I grab your meaning.
Do you mean “Only offense has value, so who cares how much we increase Defense”?

Sort of, in the context of pve,which is where this might get out of hand, damage, in my opinion is much more valuable than defense. Within damage itself, burst over sustained.

Since this change would alter neither of those things, I think it’d be okay.

Even if you’ve got a bias to value offense over defense in a general sense, in open world PvE doesn’t where ranger’s defenses currently rest at now seem rather high when you start comparing classes directly to eachother? Regardless of spec, I mean.

Too tired to read,too boring..
But ill say. Ranger pets need base defense. More Hp more Damage reduction. It wouldnt be op even if you built it tanky(thats what it would be for kitten . But having it die in almost one hit is kinda stupid…

Vox Hollow.2736:

Even if you’ve got a bias to value offense over defense in a general sense, in open world PvE doesn’t where ranger’s defenses currently rest at now seem rather high when you start comparing classes directly to eachother? Regardless of spec, I mean.

Rangers have plenty of survivability. I’m not arguing that. Our pet however, does not, hence my suggestion.