Guild Wars 2

Remember Comfort Animal? I suggest turning a downed pet’s F2 into something like this, a channeled partial HP pet revive.

For the cost of leaving a fight for several seconds to perform the channel, rangers would be able to restore their class mechanic in the case of missing a swap, or pets being blasted by AOEs they cannot avoid.

Dropping combat state performs the same revive, but is extremely clumsy, and often impossible in cases where pets die repeatedly, depriving rangers of a good chunk of their damage for up to a minute.

(A little history: during beta, it was possible to revive pets – unfortunately they showed up the same as downed players, and anyone could revive them, so it was a source of frustration when you wanted to revive an ally but ended up healing a pet instead – so this ability was removed.)

I was actually surprised at their decision to completely remove pet revives. The beta state of pets with downed markers and your interact targeting random pets instead of the ranger or other players was a huge mess, but at least you were able to revive your pet. Arenanet has often stated that they want the ranger to operate with their pet and turned down many people asking for a “petless” ranger style of gameplay. The pet is supposed to be a noticable chunk of damage and utility that you bring to a party and is -the- unique class mechanic for the ranger.
If all this is true and the rangers need their pet to be able to compete with the other classes, why is it possible to completely render their class mechanic useless for a whole minute? This is something that really bugs me. Once the pet has been defeated many of the rangers traits and skills turn completely useless till your pet is back up and there is nothing you can do. No other class I can think of has so many disadvantages and counterplay built into their class mechanic.
As such it would be fantastic to have this suggested F skill, so that Rangers in this situation can get their little buddy back up and ready to go. even if it has to be a channeled skill it would still prove to be extremely useful and a great QOL improvement.
Plus it’s also great from a character / roleplay view of things. Heroically save your little friend! (Or big friend if you’re an asura)

They want you to swap pets when your pet is downed. They don’t want you to waste time trying to revive him. If you’re out of combat, your pet will revive anyway, but in combat, they want you to switch him out and keep fighting. I wouldn’t mind that ability with some of the players I’ve seen lately…

Too bad some traits like Master’s Bond fight against the whole idea of pet swapping…

Drakkon.4782:

They want you to swap pets when your pet is downed. They don’t want you to waste time trying to revive him. If you’re out of combat, your pet will revive anyway, but in combat, they want you to switch him out and keep fighting. I wouldn’t mind that ability with some of the players I’ve seen lately…

I know, but if you swap out a downed pet, and then can’t keep the second one up for 60/48 seconds, then you end up petless for the remainder of that time. Ideally, we should be able to keep our pets up all the time with 20/16 second swaps and heals, but in practice, they often die in content where we need them most.