Guild Wars 2

Just some thoughts for pets, better targeting/AI may help with PvP, but won’t really make a difference in dungeons where they also tend to be less useful.

• AoE Damage Resistance – Been mentioned before, but worth bringing up again since it works well in other games, should not be too high, just enough to take the edge off.
• Shared Evade – Whenever your character is evading, invulnerable or blocking your pet is as well. Only works for character -> pet not pet -> character. This would significantly improve pet survival against dungeon bosses and the like where a token amount of resistance would not help much.
• Faster Recovery – Whenever your pet is downed it gains a small amount of passive regen and becomes invulnerable to damage. If the pet is the ranger’s core mechanic they should never be permanently without them for a fight (big boss characters whose AoEs keep pets out of action the entire fight if they get downed).

Some or all of these would go a long way to keeping pets up and useful during meaningful dungeon fights rather than leaving us missing a sizable chunk of our damage after the first or second big AoE.

You have something to the effect of #2 in Companion’s Defense.

It is some pretty nice gameplay if you get around to playing with it. It’s interesting finding the dodge rhythm of some of the more clockwork bosses, there’s a decent skill ceiling, and it’s fairly challenging to manage both your own dodging needs and your pet’s protection needs. (Though, being next in line right after Natural Vigor and Vigorous Renewal surely does help). It was really the edge I needed to make my beastmaster build work in dungeons because the things that once one-shotted my pet and seemed to do damage I could never hope to surmount…simply didn’t anymore.

If it’s not feasible to make that gameplay available to everybody. At least I’d want that trait looked at, even if it’s just manipulating the pet portion. 2 seconds sounds like alot but in practice it’s really pushing my old FPS sniper reflexes sometimes, so I can only imagine how that feels to other people. You can get it up to 4 seconds with fortifying bond which feels better, but it’s sort of just too much trait point investment and there isn’t anything worth synergizing with in Tier 1 nature magic. 3 seconds would really be the magic number, in my opinion.