Guild Wars 2

Edit: BEAR WITH ME I apparently forgot how the spoiler crap works -.- its only been a couple weeks

EDIT 2: got it

DISCLAIMER: My original plan was to take some direct quotes from the other thread. However I realized that would destroy the purpose of making this alternate thread entirely. I apologize to all posters in the original thread for going back on what I said here. I WILL include a link to the original thread so any reader can see for themselves where these ideas came from and from whom.

Hey all as I promised here is a more concise version of my previous post which can be found here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Shadelangs-Pet-Flaw-Thread/first#post6206004

Here I am going to ATTEMPT to put every ones words into a more easily read format. If I do not include your idea please check to make sure that it isn’t very similar to something someone has already posted. I won’t be attempting to copy over every specific post. If your interested in reading the sources I included a link above for that purpose. This is to give a more general view of what the forum going rangers view as the priority when it comes to our pets. What we feel is most important.

I will be putting them into a few categories for the sake of further condensing inevitable walls of text.

I will list them by Priority.

Pet Hit Reliability: The ability of a pet to consecutively land hits on a target, Whether or not that target is moving. This will include multiple factors I will get in to below.

Pet Buff Management: This includes everything from boons to auras to banners. Typically the things our pets are forced to go without unless we go out of our way to provide them despite the fact that these are integral parts of the games mechanics.

Pet Survivability: The pets ability to maintain itself. Be it from debilitation to damage. This ties into Pet Hit Reliability Somewhat.

Pet Behavior: How the pet uses what skills at what times. (Like when a bird pops aoe swiftness when you are pumping out 2 and a half minutes of it in an aoe). How the pet chooses to engage the target based on its abilities. This ties into pet hit reliability in many cases.

The spread of damage through various pet families: This is placed here because while it is an issue it is one that isn’t the biggest crippling factor in peoples eyes as far as I have read.

Pet Hit Reliability

Pet Boons, Buffs, And the management thereof

Pet Survivability

Pet Behavior: This one has the ability to be insane in length so I am keeping it very general for brevity.

Pet Damage By Family/ AKA: The rolls of pet families.

If you disagree with what you have seen here don’t be afraid to SAY SO. Just because I have made this post doesn’t mean its the end of the discussion. I am simply attempting to keep it easy to read and to give a general statement to any that are interested. If you want to continue discussion specifics feel free to do so I encourage you to.

Edit: Previous posts edited for clarity in some places.

The ability of the pet to FORCE an enemy to recognize it as a threat and to tempt said enemy to do something to actively hinder the pet.

I feel like the wording is bad here. Personnally, in my way to play ranger I prefer when the ennemy don’t see my pet as a threat (mainly in PvE). The wording here could lead to solutions that would harm a lot the ranger in PvE group content.

I think what you meant was to say that the pets skill/auto-attack lack a clear impact that would lead other players to be more warry of there existence. At the moment, except for a few exceptions, the pet’s skill are not threatening enough to make other players, in PvP, even take a glance at the ranger’s pet. Which mean that there is little to no reason for the extra long induction time of the pet’s skills.

Pet behavior : I couldn’t agree more with what you said. I’d include the pathing issue. (It cost nothing to continue to hammer it)

I do very hope that Anet actually takes this well summed up information that you have put together into careful consideration. +1

Dadnir.5038:

The ability of the pet to FORCE an enemy to recognize it as a threat and to tempt said enemy to do something to actively hinder the pet.

I feel like the wording is bad here. Personnally, in my way to play ranger I prefer when the ennemy don’t see my pet as a threat (mainly in PvE). The wording here could lead to solutions that would harm a lot the ranger in PvE group content.

I think what you meant was to say that the pets skill/auto-attack lack a clear impact that would lead other players to be more warry of there existence. At the moment, except for a few exceptions, the pet’s skill are not threatening enough to make other players, in PvP, even take a glance at the ranger’s pet. Which mean that there is little to no reason for the extra long induction time of the pet’s skills.

Pet behavior : I couldn’t agree more with what you said. I’d include the pathing issue. (It cost nothing to continue to hammer it)

This isn’t an issue for pve very much. Yes there are times where you would want the pet to have aggro over you and others you want it, but this is more for pvp wvw interactions.

Atm it’s too easy for a foe to ignore the pet and often Cripple or immobilize it as an accident. Even just kiting the pet can effectively neutralize it. Considering no one stands still in combat with other players, this means most pets are defaultly countered.

Just like ignoring a mesmers clones are done at your peel so it should be with a pet, but even more so. Fighting a ranger should almost be like fighting 2 foes at once. Ignore either for even a moment and they will make you pay.

This is just asking that you should have to actively deal with a pet

Dadnir.5038:

The ability of the pet to FORCE an enemy to recognize it as a threat and to tempt said enemy to do something to actively hinder the pet.

I feel like the wording is bad here. Personnally, in my way to play ranger I prefer when the ennemy don’t see my pet as a threat (mainly in PvE). The wording here could lead to solutions that would harm a lot the ranger in PvE group content.

I think what you meant was to say that the pets skill/auto-attack lack a clear impact that would lead other players to be more warry of there existence. At the moment, except for a few exceptions, the pet’s skill are not threatening enough to make other players, in PvP, even take a glance at the ranger’s pet. Which mean that there is little to no reason for the extra long induction time of the pet’s skills.

Pet behavior : I couldn’t agree more with what you said. I’d include the pathing issue. (It cost nothing to continue to hammer it)

I added what you said on pet pathing to Pet Behavior. However its an issue I feel we cant count on getting fixed without the creation of new tech on arena nets part or ALOT of hard work. Mobs in gw2 aren’t designed with verticality in mind which causes a large number of issues.

On the subject of causing the pet to appear as an active threat to an enemy. Pets I believe are near the bottom of the melee range agro table. So we shouldn’t have to worry about pets being targeted abnormally. (I.E. Theirs another juicy target right next to it the mob could be hitting)

That part of the post was mostly from a WvW and TPvP perspective. Where the majority of pet families are about as dangerous as the normal mobs found in pre HoT PvE. I.E. Most players completely ignore their auto attacks because they aren’t gonna get hit anyway. Meaning those players only have to watch for the extremely rare CC, burst skills which they can dodge and then go back to ignoring the pet.

Increasing the pets base accuracy will increase the pets dps in PvP. Whatever method Arena Net uses to make it happen. An increase of the pets reliable damage causes the pet to exist as more of a threat in the other players eyes. If they ignore the pets existance they should be PUNSIHED. But in the current game mode its so easy to negate the pets damage potential that players are instead rewarded for ignoring the fact that ranger pets exist outside of 1v1s.

Well, that’s exactly what I meant. Precise that it must be a threat for player and not a a stupid thing like putting more aggro generation on npc mobs. In the end, if you just look at how you worded it, as a developper it’s :

“Yeah, let buff the invisible value “aggro” of the pet, in the end it will change almost nothing except in PvE that we don’t care since our mighty sPvP is much more important".

If you create a thread that sort out the flaw of the pet, it’s better to not create new flaws out of it. “Aggro” outside of the taunt effect do not affect players. And you can’t force player to target a pet with invisible mechanism.

What’s important is to clearly state that the pet need to have enough firepower to become a threat in the eyes of the other players so that they have to be warry of them. The pet do not need to “FORCE” anything to attack them, they just need to pose a strong enough threat so that player stop ignoring them.

At the moment, the only pets that the players are warry of are the bristleback and the smokescale, just because they have decent burst skill that can land on a target. Other pets don’t have that.

As depressive idea, I recall that as soon as there is a player that complain about a ranger pet being able to shave of a bit of it’s health pool, they imediatly nerf this pet. Well, I’ll stay on the idea that I post on the precedent thread about the rework of the pet’s utilities. It’s definetly the most balanced way to get rid of a lot of the pet’s flaw. Giving only auto attack damage to the pet’s AI and allowing player to chose 1 and only 1 pet utility skill that they can controle freely is the best way to fix the horrendous state of the current system. And since with that the pet won’t attemp numerous useless failed use of their utility skill, their attack speed can only go up and it may even be possible that in the end they will start to dish out a bit of damage. On second though, granting to their auto attack a cleave status could also help a bit.

NB.: looking a second time at your reply, I think, it would be sufficient to just change the word enemy in the sentence by player. It’s a small semantic change but it mean a whole lot.

Edit: I reworded my OP to more accurately reflect the target of that specific portion of the thread and the location where pets have the biggest issue with that subject.

Please remember that this thread is not about any one specific game mode. Nor is it a rework thread. At the moment atleast its a place where I have gathered the vocal portion of the ranger forums ideas on what the biggest issues with ranger pets are across the game as a whole.

So you should expect general wording that reflects that.

dadnir if its the pet i am thinking about it was a cat. and mostly i think it was becuase people like me made builds that in wvw let us be well out of range have our cat go running in stealthed, burst a lot of damage on a yak(even escorted at the time) and kill it and then swap pets before the stealth fully fell away. We would also use a couple rangers to use these ninja cats to assassinate enemy commanders if we could identify them before the two sides clashed.

if you did it right the one shot damage was crazy. you were useless for much else but that cat could out damage the player with that move.

Pet Hit reliability: I still think the easiest and fastest way to make pets more reliable is to increase AA range to 300 all around. birds hit extremely reliably on AA, they just die to everything. 300 or more range on AA would fix this with little effort on the part of the devs.

Teraphas.6210:

dadnir if its the pet i am thinking about it was a cat. and mostly i think it was becuase people like me made builds that in wvw let us be well out of range have our cat go running in stealthed, burst a lot of damage on a yak(even escorted at the time) and kill it and then swap pets before the stealth fully fell away. We would also use a couple rangers to use these ninja cats to assassinate enemy commanders if we could identify them before the two sides clashed.

if you did it right the one shot damage was crazy. you were useless for much else but that cat could out damage the player with that move.

Well, age ago, before they butchered pet’s damage and though that giving pets more toughness and vitality was what’s needed to allow pets survive without breaking the game… I indeed liked to use the cat’s stealth ambush as well.

But, even before that, they nerfed Guard!. And yes, I truly enjoyed wrecking the guys that were defending tower or castle by sending a bird on the wall to one shot those poor glass canon thieves.

Well, in reality, I’ve already got pass those 2 event (maybe not but…) and I’m thinking more specifically about how fast they took care of the bristleback and the smokscale.

And I don’t even talk about the leash lengh nerf.

We can agree that core pet are not OP (in any game mode). They brough them down less than a year after launch. Any ability that made pets usefull (like guard!) were nerfed as soon as it annoyed other professions. New pets came with their share of pretty fast nerf… etc. I find that each little buff to pet are even harder to come with than buff to the core ranger. If you look at the new shouts, in no way do they favor the pets.

Simply put, the pet is a thorn on the side of the ranger due to it’s state of uselessness. It’s also a thorn on the side of the developpers because it’s an easy rant source for other professions that will point out that an AI shouldn’t be threatening in a PvP environment. And this is most likely why we are in the stalemate that make the pets as they are right now.

The only way for this stalemate to not be broken should be to smoothen how the pet behave And that’s mainly why I think that removing the AI utilities should be a good way to remove some of the unneeded action that cripple the behavior of the pet. After that, allowing the pet to still move while performing it’s non-threatening auto attack should also be a good thing. (and honnestly nobody care about the fact that it could be awkward to see, In this game we are killing dragon with weapons that are not even long/large enough for the dragon to be a toothpick.)

In the end, there is also the terrible inbalance of the pet between each other. Some pets are smoother due to short induction time (the panther and it’s instant stealth being one of them) while we got the awfull induction time shout of the melandru cat for a short lasting number of might stack. There is also the fact that short CD [F2] work way better with a lot of the rangers trait… etc.

In the end, ther is a need to :
- look at the behavior of the pet (pathing, uncontroled use of utility skill… etc.)
- balance their [F2]
- and balance their utilities skills
What’s worse is that it’s a needed first step in the right direction to make the special ability of the ranger something really usefull.

Prophet.1584:

Pet Hit reliability: I still think the easiest and fastest way to make pets more reliable is to increase AA range to 300 all around. birds hit extremely reliably on AA, they just die to everything. 300 or more range on AA would fix this with little effort on the part of the devs.

This might not work. If you do this – pets will simply stay at that 300 range, most probably. That way, absolutely nothing might change except pets holding their distance against their targets with the same unreliable hit pattern.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Prophet.1584:

Pet Hit reliability: I still think the easiest and fastest way to make pets more reliable is to increase AA range to 300 all around. birds hit extremely reliably on AA, they just die to everything. 300 or more range on AA would fix this with little effort on the part of the devs.

This might not work. If you do this – pets will simply stay at that 300 range, most probably. That way, absolutely nothing might change except pets holding their distance against their targets with the same unreliable hit pattern.

They are more asking for the skill to continue at its current range but extend the affected area to 300 to compensate for the pet stopping to a track vs attacking while moving

Teraphas.6210:

They are more asking for the skill to continue at its current range but extend the affected area to 300 to compensate for the pet stopping to a track vs attacking while moving

Yea, I do believe I know how they meant it – but how they word it implies the wrong functionality.
And we can’t just trust the ones in charge to be able to read our minds when we already know they can’t read our complaints properly to begin with.

Teraphas.6210:

Tragic Positive.9356:

Prophet.1584:

Pet Hit reliability: I still think the easiest and fastest way to make pets more reliable is to increase AA range to 300 all around. birds hit extremely reliably on AA, they just die to everything. 300 or more range on AA would fix this with little effort on the part of the devs.

This might not work. If you do this – pets will simply stay at that 300 range, most probably. That way, absolutely nothing might change except pets holding their distance against their targets with the same unreliable hit pattern.

They are more asking for the skill to continue at its current range but extend the affected area to 300 to compensate for the pet stopping to a track vs attacking while moving

You’d still need to increase their base speed since their pathing is garbage (seriously… why the hell do they like to run past players before turning to attack?) and they can’t attack while moving.

Jim Hunter.6821:

You’d still need to increase their base speed since their pathing is garbage (seriously… why the hell do they like to run past players before turning to attack?) and they can’t attack while moving.

Yes, this mostly.

Dadnir.5038:

/snip

I agree with what you said. Ranger themselves have NEVER been compensated for the numerous nerfs to our pets. Never.

Think about that for a bit. They’ve nerfed our pets time and time again, from damage dealt to leash range to functionality through skills like guard.

Never, ever, have we been compensated for the, in many cases, huge nerfs they did.

Maybe the day for ranger pets will come, but I’m pretty sure by then it will be to late.
Exactly what happened in GW1 – they buffed pets when 90% of the player base already had abandoned ship.

For wvw I think pets need health scaling with the amount of enemies nearby. Pets best used in these fights would be support/aoe.

As far as reliability of hits goes, I think adding an f1 skill that uses the pets secondary attack is a good option while also reducing the cast time of their f2 skills. Being able to kite the pets auto attacks is good. No one wants to spend half the fight trying to take down a pet only to be killed by the ranger.

I think thats really all it needs to be relevent, plus a few reworks of f2 skills.

FrownyClown.8402:

For wvw I think pets need health scaling with the amount of enemies nearby. Pets best used in these fights would be support/aoe.

As far as reliability of hits goes, I think adding an f1 skill that uses the pets secondary attack is a good option while also reducing the cast time of their f2 skills. Being able to kite the pets auto attacks is good. No one wants to spend half the fight trying to take down a pet only to be killed by the ranger.

I think thats really all it needs to be relevent, plus a few reworks of f2 skills.

If they want to kite the pet they should use a cc ability. The pets are a part of our damage, being able to avoid 90% of that damage just by moving is broken.

Jim Hunter.6821:

FrownyClown.8402:

For wvw I think pets need health scaling with the amount of enemies nearby. Pets best used in these fights would be support/aoe.

As far as reliability of hits goes, I think adding an f1 skill that uses the pets secondary attack is a good option while also reducing the cast time of their f2 skills. Being able to kite the pets auto attacks is good. No one wants to spend half the fight trying to take down a pet only to be killed by the ranger.

I think thats really all it needs to be relevent, plus a few reworks of f2 skills.

If they want to kite the pet they should use a cc ability. The pets are a part of our damage, being able to avoid 90% of that damage just by moving is broken.

Not really. Look at druid before smokescale nerf. It did so much damage that you couldn’t ignore it in the fight. All the druid had to do was heal and then they won all the 1v1 fights. The pets need more reliable damage from their f2 skill and thats it.

FrownyClown.8402:

Not really. Look at druid before smokescale nerf. It did so much damage that you couldn’t ignore it in the fight. All the druid had to do was heal and then they won all the 1v1 fights. The pets need more reliable damage from their f2 skill and thats it.

And that was exactly how it was supposed to be.
A ranger(druid) sacrificing 2 traitlines, 1 heal and 1 Elite utility and a pet skill was actually able to hurt just like I think he should.
I’m sorry, but you just said something you shouldn’t. You just admitted you believe Ranger pets should be ignorable. And I’m sorry if this gets surprising but that’s something that our whole ranger community tries to change ever since day 1.

A thief will blow your head of by auto-attacking and you can either force him to evade and make you waste half of the attacks of your whole team or he’ll wipe you all out without your team ever being able to resurrect you (because elite). And if you successfully focus him down, he’ll just decap another point thanks to stealth.

Pets need more reliable damage. Full stop.

Tragic Positive.9356:

FrownyClown.8402:

Not really. Look at druid before smokescale nerf. It did so much damage that you couldn’t ignore it in the fight. All the druid had to do was heal and then they won all the 1v1 fights. The pets need more reliable damage from their f2 skill and thats it.

And that was exactly how it was supposed to be.
A ranger(druid) sacrificing 2 traitlines, 1 heal and 1 Elite utility and a pet skill was actually able to hurt just like I think he should.
I’m sorry, but you just said something you shouldn’t. You just admitted you believe Ranger pets should be ignorable. And I’m sorry if this gets surprising but that’s something that our whole ranger community tries to change ever since day 1.

A thief will blow your head of by auto-attacking and you can either force him to evade and make you waste half of the attacks of your whole team or he’ll wipe you all out without your team ever being able to resurrect you (because elite). And if you successfully focus him down, he’ll just decap another point thanks to stealth.

Pets need more reliable damage. Full stop.

Don’t get me wrong Tragic, long time ago my thoughts were like yours. The pet needed to be an actual threat.

Fortunately when i began to taste other professions in WvW i saw what the actual problem is: No person thinks is fear to lose a fight because it got killed by an NPC.

It is true the pet is the ranger mechanic and we could argue that actually it is fair to be killed just by that mechanic, but the perception is not like that. Also this kind of mechanics allow some very cheesy build were the druid just become the extreme tank while the NPC does all the work.

So, in my way of seeing things: while the pet autos DPS should be nerfed the pets should have buffed the player controlled skills (and the ranger’s weapon dps ofc)

We invert the roles here: the pet autos become like the solar beam from the staff. A weak attack but that is able to hit reliably. As i pointed out in this thread other changes would include to be able to directly control with F2 and F3 up to 2 skills from the pet: one for utility (swiftness from the birds or the knockdown from the dogs or the Harmonic Cry from moas) and another to burst when needed (the mauls like from cats or the smoke assault in the Smokescale)

With those 2 changes the pets would improve a lot.

Add the much shorter distance from the ranger when not attacking and the evades when the ranger evade and the pet get will stop dying for no apparent reason in WvW.

And if when they add the new utility and Burst skills to the pets they add new skills from other professions so the ranger can choose to have access to 2 additional effects otherwise the ranger would not have access to (like pets casting Guardian’s Shield of Absortion, or Heralds Gaze of the Darkness) it could make every single pet unique in their uses.

At last to give them one trait line for pet family so you as a player can even customise how the pet plays in some sort of way as it was in GW1, but nothing fancy, traits already other professions have but applied exclusively to the pet (like having the choice to apply Diamon Skin to the glassiest families or traits to increase their attack speed)

All this changes would make of them an actual threat but not because they are NPCs that eat your lungs out while the ranger sits at 1800 pewpew, but if used strategically can protect the ranger, burst you down, interrupt or apply strong CC, make the rangers attacks unblockable when you are blocking, reveal you when you are in stealth meanwhile the pet is applying small but constant damage even when the ranger is not in LoS.

Just logged on to get that sweet login reward of more Essences of Luck (..). As (essences of) luck would have it, I came across something that was interesting [to me] and recorded it to highlight the subtle things about Pets. Specifically, how effective they can be against ambient creatures hiding behind a pebble.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Just logged on to get that sweet login reward of more Essences of Luck (..). As (essences of) luck would have it, I came across something that was interesting [to me] and recorded it to highlight the subtle things about Pets. Specifically, how effective they can be against ambient creatures hiding behind a pebble.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwUIgMywXes

Hahaha oh god why am I crying and laughing at the same time.

Tragic Positive.9356:

FrownyClown.8402:

Not really. Look at druid before smokescale nerf. It did so much damage that you couldn’t ignore it in the fight. All the druid had to do was heal and then they won all the 1v1 fights. The pets need more reliable damage from their f2 skill and thats it.

And that was exactly how it was supposed to be.
A ranger(druid) sacrificing 2 traitlines, 1 heal and 1 Elite utility and a pet skill was actually able to hurt just like I think he should.
I’m sorry, but you just said something you shouldn’t. You just admitted you believe Ranger pets should be ignorable. And I’m sorry if this gets surprising but that’s something that our whole ranger community tries to change ever since day 1.

A thief will blow your head of by auto-attacking and you can either force him to evade and make you waste half of the attacks of your whole team or he’ll wipe you all out without your team ever being able to resurrect you (because elite). And if you successfully focus him down, he’ll just decap another point thanks to stealth.

Pets need more reliable damage. Full stop.

To me the ideal would be make it a guessing game of which how dangerous each half of the partnership is. Traits to make your pet more or less dangerous and yourself the opposite.

Being able to shift the balance of damage between the two would make it fun to me. That pet coming at you a distraction with only a little power or did the ranger shift his power into the pet and if you ignore it it will bit hard.

Still all needs the pet to be able to deliver it’s damage and debuffs effectively.

Don’t know how many of you tried Blade and Soul, but I loved the Summoner class in it. It was the perfect mix of threat split between the player and the familiar that I truelly desired for the Ranger in Guild Wars. My mind would play mind games on me, I would look away from my cat familiar named Bucket and thought I would see my old vanilla Smokescale…. v_v

Sigh, I miss you Bucket

at one time anet had given pets a buff and the salt in the pvp forums was overflowing. all the hate about having AI killing players etc, etc. basically everyone in PvP wants to be able to completely ignore the pet.

If that’s what anet wants, fine, but give the damage back to the ranger.

Prophet.1584:

at one time anet had given pets a buff and the salt in the pvp forums was overflowing. all the hate about having AI killing players etc, etc. basically everyone in PvP wants to be able to completely ignore the pet.

If that’s what anet wants, fine, but give the damage back to the ranger.

I wouldn’t mind this myself, actually.
I’m not sure who gave the concept initially but there once was an idea of pets who wouldn’t actually deal auto-attack damage at all, but would be sorted into utility categories.

Something like dogs sniffing out stealthed
Birds pecking eyes – blinding
And stuff like that.

I personally think this would have been the best pet concept I can think of. Having a pet that would help you according to content but would only help you hunt down targets instead of pretending to hunt them itself – that would be amazing.

One can dream, right?

Prophet.1584:

at one time anet had given pets a buff and the salt in the pvp forums was overflowing. all the hate about having AI killing players etc, etc. basically everyone in PvP wants to be able to completely ignore the pet.

If that’s what anet wants, fine, but give the damage back to the ranger.

but somehow they are right, it feels really unfair when you are killed by NPC instead a player.

pets could get a nerf in AI driven attacks and a buff in pet’s player manageable attacks and ranger weapons damage. The QQing would be massive at the begining while the players adapt to the new ranger but after a short time i think everything would go back to normal. but in his case we might end up with a competitive class… Who would know?

anduriell.6280:

We invert the roles here: the pet autos become like the solar beam from the staff. A weak attack but that is able to hit reliably.

Here I totally agree with you. Ideally, the pet should become in the players mind something like an anoying damage overtime with an ability to either support, debuff, burst or being extremely resilient based on the choice of the pet’s owner via the [F2] skill.

anduriell.6280:

As i pointed out in this thread other changes would include to be able to directly control with F2 and F3 up to 2 skills from the pet: one for utility (swiftness from the birds or the knockdown from the dogs or the Harmonic Cry from moas) and another to burst when needed (the mauls like from cats or the smoke assault in the Smokescale)

While it seem good, it become overly complicated and [F3] become a tasteless skill that aint supported by any trait in any traitline. Beside the best would still be to retain the actual layout.

anduriell.6280:

And if when they add the new utility and Burst skills to the pets they add new skills from other professions so the ranger can choose to have access to 2 additional effects otherwise the ranger would not have access to (like pets casting Guardian’s Shield of Absortion, or Heralds Gaze of the Darkness) it could make every single pet unique in their uses.

It would be stepping on the toes of other professions and I don’t think anything justify that. totally against it.

anduriell.6280:

At last to give them one trait line for pet family so you as a player can even customise how the pet plays in some sort of way as it was in GW1, but nothing fancy, traits already other professions have but applied exclusively to the pet (like having the choice to apply Diamon Skin to the glassiest families or traits to increase their attack speed)

Honnestly, they can’t even keep in memory the name of the pet. I think it’s best to delay this kind of idea when the real issues will be corrected.

Dadnir.5038:

While it seem good, it become overly complicated and [F3] become a tasteless skill that aint supported by any trait in any traitline. Beside the best would still be to retain the actual layout.

While it would make the ranger less suitable for AFK farming, the ranger community in general are asking for this, more control over the pet as we can’t trust this kind of secondary skills to the AI.
It should be simple enough to implement, as to change the pointer to that function to the function that activates that skill.
Those skills are actually affected by BM WS and NM as their CD and conditions/boons applied are affected as well for the traits.

And would be cool if the utility/burst could be redesigned for each pet to actually have a real difference between themselves.

Dadnir.5038:

It would be stepping on the toes of other professions and I don’t think anything justify that. totally against it.

The pets need a defining rol other than another source of bleeds. This also will allow the devs to make the pets actually unique between them as there are many skills from any other classes that could be very cool to have and as i said the ranger would jave to choose 2 of them, the better suited for his\her play style. Devs could even use the same CDs from the original skills as those are already balanced.

It could be very cool a glassy pet (a bird for example) that can cast clones of itself and the ranger at the same fashion as the mesmer, or a tanky one that could cast Shield of absorption.

The thing is ranger is being forgotten from the very beginning and it’s time for Anet to do their home work and make this class something that works for something else than use flame trap and tiger for AFK farming. Which indubitably needs work but this is the result of simply of accumulating problems and unresolved issues.

Give us a way of upgrading the DPS we’ve given up to our pets, to ascended level
Reasoning: No other profession is forced to give up some of their DPS to their profession mechanic, allowing them to have full ascended damage. Perhaps we could have a way training our pets from Juveniles to Adults and when doing so add some player selected attributes to the pet. Perhaps use a pet trainer NPC to allow us to return to them and change our attribute selection.

Give Pets 0.75s Invulnerability when player dodges.
Reasoning: This is the simplest Pet Dodge action to implement, and could be added by re-using the existing ‘companions defence’ tech, and without requiring new pet animations.

Improve auto-attacks to ensure that they actually hit
Reasoning: The pet should be a source of low (but persistent) DPS. This is worthless if pet attacks miss most of the time.

Remove 2 attack skills from each pet, leaving just auto-attack and special attack
Reasoning: Pets are often nerfed because players complain about being killed by an NPC. By reducing AI skills down to a single auto-attack, then the only times players get killed by pets will be when a player uses F2. This also opens up the UI space of the two removed skill slots (and the animations assigned to those skills) to be re-purposed.

Merge F1 and F3 into a single positional command toggle.
Reasoning: You would never use both together, and therefore having them as separate profession mechanics is just a waste of an F slot.

Move the passive/aggressive toggle to F3.
Reasoning: This is our most useful “mouse-click” pet control, and by making it one of the primary pet mechanics passive mode can be improved to give a more interesting and player controlled mechanic.

Prevent pets from attacking at all in passive mode
Reasoning: ‘Avoid Combat’ should do what it says. When in this mode a pet should avoid combat regardless of whether or not it (or the player) is being attacked.

Prevent pets from triggering traps when in passive mode
Reasoning: There are certain parts of the game where regardless of how carefully a player (or party) avoids the red circles indicating a trap, the pet walks straight through, triggering the trap and killing the player. This was especially annoying at the start of the original aetherblade dungeon in LS1. The player should have a way of ensuring that the pet will not kill them.

Prevent pets from being damaged by AoE effects while in passive mode
Reasoning: If a pet cannot attack at all in passive mode, then it should gain some form of defensive ability in return. Pets could still be damaged by targeted attacks, but would be safe from untargeted attacks.

Use the two skills removed in earlier suggestion as passive mode skills
Reasoning: If a pet cannot attack in passive mode, then the attack skills it has access to are irrelevant. Instead, the other two slots could be assigned to a passive-mode ‘auto-attack’ which pulses a minor AoE boon, and a passive-mode F2 skill which grants a better boon under player control. This also places all 4 pet skills under player control the two “auto-attacks” controlled by switching the pet between passive and aggressive, the other two controlled by F2.

they should also make it so that i dont have to keep switching my pets back and forth when i switch between wvw and pve

Kaz.5430:

Give Pets 0.75s Invulnerability when player dodges.
Reasoning: This is the simplest Pet Dodge action to implement, and could be added by re-using the existing ‘companions defence’ tech, and without requiring new pet animations.

They could use the Blur Effect, and it could last longer than 0.75s imho.

Also, add Blur, Resistance and a stun breaker to pets on F3, lasting 3 seconds, ICD 30 seconds. Possibly lower the ICD if traited for it… add to Natural Healing perhaps?

Its been a couple days since the last post so normally I wouldn’t post at this point. However seeing as this thread is still on the front page I feel this isn’t in danger of being considered “bumping”.

Ill keep it short. I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread and my previous thread (linked in the OP) for not only contributing but also for keeping the conversation relatively tame. And for also (in most cases) helping the thread stay legible* by keeping your posts simple to read.

It’s been said Before… but I’ll say it again.

• Pets need to be able to HIT their target if they will have the ammount of (low) DMG as they have today.

Electric Wyvern’s F2 is useless apart from for interrupting. The AoE misses 99 % of the time unless the target is pinched up agains a wall. Why? The pet runs so far past the enemy that the AoE field ends up past the enemy. This pet’s Electric attack needs to be a trail as the larger E-wyverns have.

Also Both wyverns Tail swipe and aouto-attack are way to slow.