Pet Tanking at Higher Levels
They can… somewhat, but you have to take the right pet and the right build. Don’t expect them to live through the entire boss battle like a player tank, that will never happen.
I did a level 70 dungeon today and one of my Moas was able to stay up for a couple minutes at a time, which is pretty good.
With some practice, I should be able to utilize F3 to move him out of enemy attacks and keep him up even longer. I did F3 a couple times to get him out of an AoE and felt rather proud of myself.
Remember, every second they are on your pet is a second they aren’t on your team.
Paper is fine. Nerf rock.
(edited by spayced.2016)
In dungeons, pet tanking does not work, you have to think intelligently.
In general PvE? I just dinged 70, and I feel like I’m cheating with how easy it is to just get 80% of the mobs focused on my pet.
First, there is no real “tanking” in GW2 because there is no taunt mechanism and it appears that most big mobs like champions and dungeon bosses have a random aggro table. That means everyone, including pets, will get their share of aggro. When soloing at lower levels, pets look like they are tanking but it’s only because they are doing more damage than the Ranger. The gap narrows when you approach Level 80 and by then you will have to have learned how to kite and dodge. As for dungeons, pets do pretty good in Story Mode but last about 10 seconds in most explorable mode dungeon boss fights. The bottom line is you have learn to kite, dodge, swap wep/pet on every cooldown and mitigate incoming damage or you won’t survive long. Thankfully, rangers have some nice traits to extend these abilities.
If you invest in beastmastery (max it out) the pets will generally be okay unless they get mobbed (hello Orr) or you do something silly like send a melee met at something that two-hits things in a melee fight.
That’s when you swap out to the ranged pet. :p
What I am coming across more and more at level 80, in the 70-80 areas mostly. My pet is completely ignored by mobs, they b-line it right for my face. I assumed pets were suposed to take some brunt of the damage, at least that was how they were working out from 1-60ish. I didn’t notice it as much from 60-79. Now at 80 I find myself dieing A LOT because everything is ignoring my pet and just going right for my face. I am not even talking about bosses, or champion mobs even. Simple veterans, and nothing next to their names at all are just going at me like I am filled with candy, they must try and bust me open!
This is happening 1v1, just me, my pet, and 1 mob. I feel like somthing is wrong with that. I expect 5 mob pull to end that way, my poor pet can only hit so many at once to draw attentions. Is there any sort of threat mechanic in the game, or is it just later in levels everything just randomly hits what ever the heck it wants to?
I would hate to have to send my pet in, wait 5-10 seconds till it hits the thing enough times, then get to attack myself, that is crazy boring. I also do not expect my pet to snap threat off my if I open up with some crazy damage, but after running in circles from 1 mob for a good minute I expect it to get bored of me at some point, and go for my pet who was smacking at it the whole time I was not even hitting at all.
Sucuri is right, for some reason mobs above level 70 tend to ignore pets in the regular zones.
Bears with the right ranger spec can tank pretty much anything a player can tank. IE there are some bosses that noone should be trying to tank. Pets still tank fine at 80 if you know what you are doing and specced in a way to allow them to.