Guild Wars 2

I’ve just been wondering about this, these last couple of days. It’s not secret that the Ranger relies on the pet, for maximizing damage and utility options. So I thought I would bring up a discussion on the pet downtime. Mostly because this is something that ArenaNet could easily change, and balance.

• We have to wait until we are out of combat, before our pet automatically revives itself. Should there be an internal recharge time instead, that also allows the pet to be revived when in combat? Would this be unfair for opponents?
• When a defeated pet is switched out, pet swapping goes on a 60 second recharge time. Is this a fair setback, considering the pet swapping recharge time, in combat, is only 20 seconds?
• What recharge times do you feel would be fair, for both yourself as a Ranger, and to your opponent?

Please be constructive, optimistic, and fair in your replies. We already have enough complaining topics, and we aren’t going to get a pet that’s immortal.

Just to be clear:
Out of combat, pet swapping has a 1 second recharge time.
In combat, pet swapping has a 20 second recharge time, regardless of the pets health.
A defeated pet that’s swapped out, has a 60 second recharge time, before it can be swapped back in. This remains even if you go out of combat.
Pets can only revive themselves out of combat, and take around 9 seconds to revive, but can be instantly revived by the stow option.
The stow option follows the same recharge times, as pet swapping. 1 second recharge time outside of combat, and a 60 second recharge time, when a defeated pet is swapped out.

I dont think the cooldown is the problem, its how quickly it dies.
The timer is a penalty for letting your pet die, but sadly most content, say WvW, dungeons or fractles your pet can very easly be instantly killed.

The point is; if your pet is revived faster, its death is going to mean less. The fact that the pet dies is not really the problem, the problem is that you can’t use it, i.e. the pets downtime. Also, it’s much easier for ArenaNet to balance recharge times, then risk making the pet too powerful by buffing stats.

I only have a problem with the 60s recharge on death. It makes pets useless in WvW and PvE where AoE will destroy it in half a second.

Spvp is mostly ok unless you’re going up against AoE heavy classes.

I don’t know what a good recharge would be.

The internal recharge time to revive a dead pet in combat is the time it takes to switch to your other pet. Right?

The pet swap is instant so short of your pet being 1 shot, I don’t see there being an issue. Just swap and hit the normal swap timer before it dies.

I honestly have no problem with the way swaps and pet revives work. The Ranger #3 skill on downed is horribly overpowered, but I’m a Ranger so I really don’t advocate for nerfs to the class I play. Doesn’t mean I can’t admit to it being overpowered.

There is a flip side to the coin. What type of exploit or abuse would occur if pet death recharge was 30 sec. or 20 sec or zero. While pet death can occasionally not be helped In certain content. Outside of those times it’s the rangers fault.

If pets had a really low death cd rangers would just roll over all content by having pets do all the damage. To solve that they would then just lower pet damage. Making pets totally useless. While some people would like to do away with pets all together realistically we know any plan along that line is against what Anet wants.

The 60s CD would be fine IF we still had a way to Rez the pet without the swap, the 60s swap CD was balanced around that being an instant way to Rez our pet vs 3s of being vulnerable while rezzing them.

They need to either give us another way to get our pet back up, or should drop the CD to 30-40s instead.

Durzlla.6295:

The 60s CD would be fine IF we still had a way to Rez the pet without the swap, the 60s swap CD was balanced around that being an instant way to Rez our pet vs 3s of being vulnerable while rezzing them.

They need to either give us another way to get our pet back up, or should drop the CD to 30-40s instead.

I don’t really see the issue since we have a second pet. If we only had one and couldn’t swap, I’d agree. Perhaps attach a reduction in res time with commanding voice to do what you’re asking.

That said, I don’t want to say I think pets are fine. They’re absolute garbage. But this mechanic I’d be fine with if the pet actually was worth anything to begin with and I wouldn’t want to see them try and bandaid the problem by doing this kind of stuff rather than fix actual pets.

All they need to do is fix the rate at which aoe dmg/agony affects pets, give us a pure pet based heal ability attached to them and let us revive them instead of the 60 second cd timer when both are down from excessive aoe dmg.

Dasroth.9236:

All they need to do is fix the rate at which aoe dmg/agony affects pets, give us a pure pet based heal ability attached to them and let us revive them instead of the 60 second cd timer when both are down from excessive aoe dmg.

I don’t see the reason pets take AE damage at all. At the very least, they should take considerably reduced damage from AEs. I know ANet is concerned about Rangers using their pets to tank and being able to avoid AE damage could be seen as overpowered. But the bosses are still targeting things and their melee attacks are usually strong enough to down the pet in a hit or 2 as it is. If a boss is actively targeting the pet, let it die. But if it’s splash damage? Come on…

This is why I hate the MMO genre… everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel. The idea should be to improve upon it. WoW handled pets very well after a year or 2 of patches. I don’t know why GW2 would have a starting point so far below where WoW was at launch. Let alone a year later and still not having a viable pet mechanic in place.

There is normally one boss and two or more players. If pets only took damage when bosses targeted them the would almost never take damage. If player are so concerned with pets taking aoe damage they would use the damage reduction skill available to them.

Is the cd on death balance, I would have to say no, However going the other way with the cd isn’t balance either and would be OP. Its the lesser of two evils. I don’t see a perfect solution to this.

Atherakhia.4086:

I don’t really see the issue since we have a second pet. If we only had one and couldn’t swap, I’d agree.

What happens is you send in one pet, it gets beat down, you swap, and the second pet gets beat down before the 20 sec cooldown is up.

What you should be able to do in this case is call the pet back to you and baby it until the cooldown is up. What usually happens though is I call it back, and it runs right through a red AOE circle and dies.

Overall I’m ok with the 60 sec timer. I do wish though that you could switch your swapped-out pet while in combat. A lot of times when I’m roaming or trying to get ready for combat, I will pop up the pet selection window to switch to a more appropriate pet for what I’m expecting to fight. While I’m blinded by the window, something will wander close and attack the pet (usually), preventing me from switching pets.

The current mechanic mirrors the way weapons work and prevents you from swapping while in combat. Unfortunately, swapping pets isn’t as easy as swapping weapons. With weapons, you just hit H and double-click the weapon you want. With pets you have to open the selection window, then click a tiny up-arrow next to the pet’s picture (which is hidden in the cat portraits), then you can select the replacement pet. It’s too cumbersome an interface in a high-aggro situation.

Someone suggested letting us pre-set weapon pairs so we could quickly switch weapon pairs, not just a single weapon. I’d extend that to pets as well, so we could quickly switch pet pairs without having to try to hit that accursed tiny arrow.

Perhaps attach a reduction in res time with commanding voice to do what you’re asking.

Res time decreases to 48 sec with Loud Whistle (15 BM trait).

1% death penalty (or on death recharge reduction, whatever you want to call it) recharge per point of Beastmastery.

Beastmastery is already one of the worse mechanic boosting traits in the game (it needs an overhaul similar to what Sleight of Hand did for thief builds), so it may as well get some love that actually makes pets have better functionality (as opposed to just being a pet stat increase).

It is not balanced.

Pet death penalty on downed, especially double downs, is way too long. I’d say cut the death penalty in half if not get rid of it altogether. Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme. I think cutting it in half is fair. Ten or fifteen additional seconds is AGES in a battle.

A few other observations/opinions about rangers:

• stability training should work for dogs and devourers (or more species) and should be an adept trait. Ok maybe not dogs haha, the idea is to allow players more reliable access to pet skill activation—I’m sure everyone has a different opinion about every pet so I’m sort of on the fence about specifics here
• if ranger Downed skills are OP, guardian’s downed skills are OP too lol
• Spirit ranger is not any more “OP” than phantasm mesmer
• Wellomancer / power necro is easier to play than spirit ranger IMHO. I know nothing NOTHING about necros and PWN with that build all day
• Rangers are in a good place in PVE mainly due to “vigorous spirits” combined trait patch and increased spirit health, as well as spotter
• I think spirits should have a .25 s reduction in cast time—might be a controversial opinion for a variety of reasons
• I do not think spirits need a nerf to anything except perhaps 5 to 7% less health, if anything at all.
• I’m trying to be fair here and just go off experience—just guesses
• Don’t tinker too much with the core mechanics of the game and profession anymore, right? Or no?

• these are just my opinions :p

That’s all for now.

Kasama.8941:

Pets can only revive themselves out of combat, and take around 9 seconds to revive.

The moment you can stow your pet, stow it.. It’s insta-rezzed when getting in combat again

Just wanted to add..

Serraphin Storm.2369:

There is a flip side to the coin. What type of exploit or abuse would occur if pet death recharge was 30 sec. or 20 sec or zero. While pet death can occasionally not be helped In certain content. Outside of those times it’s the rangers fault.

If pets had a really low death cd rangers would just roll over all content by having pets do all the damage. To solve that they would then just lower pet damage. Making pets totally useless. While some people would like to do away with pets all together realistically we know any plan along that line is against what Anet wants.

There is a method to pretty much always have a pet out regardless of the 60s death timer. I wont go into the details of that but it doesn’t feel op at all, you still have to worry about keeping yourself alive during difficult content, you can’t really make your pets faceroll anything you or another professions couldn’t faceroll anyway.

I dont think the cooldown is the problem, its how quickly it dies.
The timer is a penalty for letting your pet die, but sadly most content, say WvW, dungeons or fractles your pet can very easly be instantly killed.

Once you call your pet back to you, or set it on passive, it should become invulnerable.

Tribio.8531:

Kasama.8941:

Pets can only revive themselves out of combat, and take around 9 seconds to revive.

The moment you can stow your pet, stow it.. It’s insta-rezzed when getting in combat again

Just wanted to add..

Oh, I forgot to add stow option to the list. Will do that later. Thanks.

XelNigma.6315:

I dont think the cooldown is the problem, its how quickly it dies.
The timer is a penalty for letting your pet die, but sadly most content, say WvW, dungeons or fractles your pet can very easly be instantly killed.

The point is; if your pet is revived faster, its death is going to mean less. The fact that the pet dies is not really the problem, the problem is that you can’t use it, i.e. the pets downtime. Also, it’s much easier for ArenaNet to balance recharge times, then risk making the pet too powerful by buffing stats.

Agreed that the cool downs on swap are too long right now, especially since we don’t have the ability to manually rez the pet. In a boss fight with lots of AoE, it is a very common situation for both pets to be down.

Either pets need a lot more AoE resistance, or else the pet swap cool downs need to be decreased.

Look at it this way. Many months ago Anet saw that rangers were spending too much time reviving their pets. They didn’t say “Gee, pets sure are dead an awful lot, maybe we need to take a look at their survivability.”

Instead we get, “Pets can no longer be revived using the “F” prompt. This is because you can either use F4 to swap pets which will bring that pet back alive or you can wait until you are out of combat at which point you pet will revive automatically. We felt it was doing a disservice to Ranger players to incentivize them to spend a long time reviving their pet when it was a very inefficient thing to do and happened after combat anyway. This will also help clear up “F” to interact functionality.”

They don’t try to find problems at Anet. They see behavior they don’t like and remove that behavior without ever trying to figure out what caused it in the first place.

rangers do have a way to revive there dead pet, if intended or not i am unsure……run signet of the wild and let your pet die, stay in combat and watch your pets health…

The cooldown is over kill on an already weak mechanic. It is near impossible to keep your pet alive in a lot of scenarios. The 60 cooldown when swapping a dead pet is silly when the new pet is going to go down just as fast. You are being punished for something you have no control over and losing a chunk of your DPS for it. No other class can just have a chunk taken out of their DPS for a reason out of their control.

I’d have to go looking but it has been stated by a dev that the ranger is balanced based on 100% pet up time. The fact that 100% is pretty much impossible in situations where it would matter most, Rangers are not balanced when balance is needed most. Play as a ranger and you play with a handicap.

It’s been over a year. Do you guys honestly think this is going to change? For 12 months pets have been insta downed in WvW and several dungeon encounters (the same for spirits) and they’ve not fixed it.

Does anyone honestly think after all this time it’s going to get better?

Shiren.9532:

It’s been over a year. Do you guys honestly think this is going to change? For 12 months pets have been insta downed in WvW and several dungeon encounters (the same for spirits) and they’ve not fixed it.

Does anyone honestly think after all this time it’s going to get better?

It’s actually getting worse lately, in the way that the class is completely ignored when new content is being designed.

Aetherblade, Liadri, soon Tequatl = guarantee dead pets.

And to add to the conversation, no, pet downtime is not balanced.

If you tell me it’s part of the class and that my weapon damage modifier is affected by it, it should have 100 percent uptime. Otherwise it’s just double dipping the penalty when combined with downtime, and lack of scaling now with ascending weapons.

Give people the means to call multiple pairs of pets via macro so there’s always a pet up, the penalty being if your pet dies, you don’t get to use the pet that you want while it’s on cool down.

Randomize the first attack so people can’t chain canines leaps one after another.

Would people be open to the idea of pets rallying from a Ranger kill and maybe add death penalty to prevent the abuse? Or would this lead to other problems?

Like for example, your pet goes down, and after 3 seconds you kill something, then the pet rallies. The next time the pet goes down and you make another kill, it rallies with lower HP due to the death penalty.

I guess it kinda makes sense because we can rally off our pet’s kill.

Sarision.6347:

Would people be open to the idea of pets rallying from a Ranger kill and maybe add death penalty to prevent the abuse? Or would this lead to other problems?

Like for example, your pet goes down, and after 3 seconds you kill something, then the pet rallies. The next time the pet goes down and you make another kill, it rallies with lower HP due to the death penalty.

I guess it kinda makes sense because we can rally off our pet’s kill.

If this was to be added, the pet should just rally off any kill, at any time. But it’s easier for ArenaNet to simply just change the revive time, so the pet will automatically revive itself in combat, after 20 seconds. Then just call it “pet rally”.