Guild Wars 2

After playing A LOT of PvP, i correct that, almost only PvP, for 3 months straight, I’ve started to look at “balance” as something more then just “y can i not hit 1 million damage when teef can” or “y cannot i haz nize tings”.

However some things still irk me, as I’ve mentioned some hundred times before, pets and their actives. How they work, and why their so “user unfriendly” as they are.
I will take my favorite pets as example. That would be the Snow Leopard, the Owl, Brown Bear (yes i like it), Fern Hound, Alpine Wolf and Spider(s).
These pets, are probably some of the “better made” pets. However they are not “flawed” per say, just a few QoL things that would go a long way in fixing things.

So to start things off;
Snow Leopard:
It is a powerful pet with good spike potential however it is “land based” and its attack has a short range. This causes it to miss moving targets a lot. So why is this? It has chill on F2, however that F2 suffers from the same reasons. It is a “land based” leap attack. So apart from the obvious animation, it is prone to missing moving targets. So how could we change this? Well, simple. During the “wind-up” make the cat “roar”, applying chill to its target. Then increase leap range from 600 to 900. The accuracy of this skill should increase by a very large margin. Cooldown could go down to 25 seconds, but it is still not totally un-warranted with 30 seconds cooldown considering the spike damage this skill is capable off with investment into BM.

Then there is the Owl:
An equally powerful pet, the active (F2) is what i would consider one of the best made F2’s ingame. due to the bird being a “levitating” creature, it have a easier time hitting moving targets. However with bird(s) the issue rests with the swiftness animation. It is too long, but most importantly, it is executed horizontally. You may wonder why this is a problem, and is shall explain. Due to it being horizontally, when the enemy moves, the bird flies in large circles, this often causes the bird animation to “end” opposite of where the enemy actually is. Giving the bird an unfair amount of “travel time”, drastically reducing DPS by large margins.
As i see it, the best solution would be to slightly shorten and change the animation to a vertical corkscrew movement where the pet screeches and grants swiftness on the apex of the corkscrew then dives down into an immediate attack. This would go a long way in making the bird a lot more fluent in its movement. Better flowing movement is also more aesthetically pleasing to watch.

The Brown Bear:
Hands down the best balanced pet in terms of active ability, function, damage and sustain. All I’d ask of this fluffy ball of death would be a shorter aftercast on its attacks. Allowing for slightly faster attack speed.

Then there is the two hounds;
Both hounds suffer the same “problem”. They lack a reasonable range of effect. This sort of goes for all “shout” based pet attacks, however these are the hounds i use.
The Chilling Howl has too short range, 900 would be more appropirate, the cooldown is also unjust given the duration, and the wind up. It should be reduced to 25 seconds, and wind up from 1.5 seconds, to 1 second flat. The Fern hound would be better off with having 1200 range effect, however i would remove its regeneration and triple its direct healing and allow it to affect up to 10 targets. HOWEVER, wind up time increased by 0.5 seconds (up from 1.5 to 2) and cooldown up by 3 seconds.
Reason for this request of change is that it often heals other AI instead of allied players. This makes it much less useful. The lack of healing power stat of the pet also “screw over” shout regen builds as your overall HP/second goes down. In effect, using this active, if you have any healing power yourself, is hurting you and your allies more then helping.

Then there is the spider pets. This whole family should be redesigned. They should be dealing condition damage. And their F2 cooldowns is grossly imbalanced VS F2 effect.
Their current “base” stats is:
Power: 1374
Precision: 1374
Toughness: 1374
Vitality: 3435
Ferocity: 0
Healing Power: 0
Condition Damage: 0
Agony Resistance: 0

The way i would redesign these pets would be to change the skills and stats as following:
Power: 687
Precision: 1374
Toughness: 1409
Vitality: 3000
Ferocity: 0
Healing Power: 0
Condition Damage: 887
Agony Resistance: 0

Spit:
“Spit at your foe and cause bleeding”
Damage: 107+(0.6*power)
Bleeding(1): 6 seconds
Ranger: 900
Animation time + aftercast: 0.7 seconds + 0.3 seconds aftercast

Entangling Web:
Stays the same.

Poison Ball:
Formerly “Poison Gas”.
Change this attack to a splash attack. So it fires projectiles just like with auto attack, but it does AOE splash poison. Direct damage of the skill to 107+(0.3*power)

F2 ability:
The ability is granted to 3 allies in 480 range of the spider + spider itself. Skill specifically prioritize players over anything else.
Number of attacks: 3
Cooldown of 35 seconds (all spiders)
Immobilize Duration; 4 seconds (base)
Confusion(3) Duration: 4 seconds (base)
Weakness Duration: 7 seconds (base)
Vulnerability(3) Duration: 7 seconds (base)
Wind-up before casting buff: 1.25 seconds (interrupt-able and allows allies to get in range)
The Spiders next attack does 75% more damage (New specific bonus to allow % stacking of ranger’s abilities is needed. Attack of opportunity is already being applied by Hilt Bash, Moment of Clarity and Signet of the Hunt)

First, personally i think the spiders are absolutely good how they work.
Sure spiders are condi pets, nevertheless the only dmg condi of spiders is poion, and in my opinion Poison should be seen more as a control condition than a dmg condition. So stat change would rather hurt the family than improve.
But the stat change could rather help the devourer class as they do the most bleed stacks i think.
Secondly the F2 is imo the best of all pets. What some ranger dont know is, that the f2 spider poison works like the thief poison. We activate and it stays. thats awesome and the duration stays 30s. Right timed i can use the poisons two times in the first seconds of a fight.
Similiar it works with SB#4, A#3 and GS#5…sidenote.

With your change idea spiders would work like semi-traited-Venom-Share-Thief. I dont think that would work well in general.

BUT
the stat change idea would be great if spiders would apply torment. Then my pants would be wet 24/7.

Prysin.8542:

Then there is the Owl:
An equally powerful pet, the active (F2) is what i would consider one of the best made F2’s ingame. due to the bird being a “levitating” creature, it have a easier time hitting moving targets. However with bird(s) the issue rests with the swiftness animation. It is too long, but most importantly, it is executed horizontally. You may wonder why this is a problem, and is shall explain. Due to it being horizontally, when the enemy moves, the bird flies in large circles, this often causes the bird animation to “end” opposite of where the enemy actually is. Giving the bird an unfair amount of “travel time”, drastically reducing DPS by large margins.
As i see it, the best solution would be to slightly shorten and change the animation to a vertical corkscrew movement where the pet screeches and grants swiftness on the apex of the corkscrew then dives down into an immediate attack. This would go a long way in making the bird a lot more fluent in its movement. Better flowing movement is also more aesthetically pleasing to watch.

The owl is the same as any other pet, with the exception that is has different skills, animations and model.

That is, the owl is a land creature too and it’s movement and actions are based on the same things as any other land creature such as the snow leopard or bear.

It is levitating per what you see because of the animations, but is actually a land pet just like any other. Give the owl (or any other bird) the model of a bear, keep the skills but change their animations to the bear’s and it would still behave the same way as it did before. The only difference is in what you are seeing .

solrik.6028:

Prysin.8542:

Then there is the Owl:
An equally powerful pet, the active (F2) is what i would consider one of the best made F2’s ingame. due to the bird being a “levitating” creature, it have a easier time hitting moving targets. However with bird(s) the issue rests with the swiftness animation. It is too long, but most importantly, it is executed horizontally. You may wonder why this is a problem, and is shall explain. Due to it being horizontally, when the enemy moves, the bird flies in large circles, this often causes the bird animation to “end” opposite of where the enemy actually is. Giving the bird an unfair amount of “travel time”, drastically reducing DPS by large margins.
As i see it, the best solution would be to slightly shorten and change the animation to a vertical corkscrew movement where the pet screeches and grants swiftness on the apex of the corkscrew then dives down into an immediate attack. This would go a long way in making the bird a lot more fluent in its movement. Better flowing movement is also more aesthetically pleasing to watch.

The owl is the same as any other pet, with the exception that is has different skills, animations and model.

That is, the owl is a land creature too and it’s movement and actions are based on the same things as any other land creature such as the snow leopard or bear.

It is levitating per what you see because of the animations, but is actually a land pet just like any other. Give the owl (or any other bird) the model of a bear, keep the skills but change their animations to the bear’s and it would still behave the same way as it did before. The only difference is in what you are seeing .

ok, i will not even begin to explain all the wrong in your post. Let us just leave it with this; Birds use same pathing as any other AI in the entire game. Birds still have better “hit” ratio then cats.
Don’t believe me? Go check it out on a moving target.

My current biggest issue with pet actives is that the aftercast on a lot of skills is ridiculous. Red Moa for example. A popular one for upkeeping fury. If I take Commanding Voice, I should be looking at roughly 15sec of fury every 20-21sec. Realistically, the cooldown doesn’t even start for four-five seconds after activation. There are some other pets that have similar issues.

Prysin.8542:

ok, i will not even begin to explain all the wrong in your post. Let us just leave it with this; Birds use same pathing as any other AI in the entire game. Birds still have better “hit” ratio then cats.
Don’t believe me? Go check it out on a moving target.

I have tested it on the moving target. Granted it was before the patch where they supposedly tweaked how well pets could hit moving targets, but most of the opinion that birds are better pre-date that patch anyway.

Average kill times, 5 trials each:

Cat
34.3s = Stationary
105.6s (32.4% stationary DPS) = Moving
78.0s (43.9% stationary DPS) = Moving, Signet of the Hunt
extrapolated

Bird
45.6s = Stationary
94.6s (49.2% stationary DPS) = Moving
93.4s (49.9% stationary DPS) = Moving, Signet of the Hunt

• Cats kill a stationary target 33% faster
• Without Signet of the Hunt, birds kill moving target 12% faster
• With Signet of the Hunt, cats kill moving target 20% faster
• Signet of the Hunt improves cat DPS by 35% against moving target
• Signet of the Hunt improves bird DPS by 1% against moving target
• Cat’s DPS against moving target peaks at 44% stationary DPS
• Bird’s DPS against moving target peaks at 50% stationary DPS
• Ratio of these two is 50/44 = 1.136
• Ratio of Swiftness (33% speed buff) half the time (10s w/ 20s cooldown) to Signet of Hunt (25% speed buff) all the time is ((1.33+1.25)/2) / 1.25 = 1.032.

My conclusion from these tests is that birds behave exactly the same as cats against moving targets. Their improved ability to hit moving targets is almost exactly what you would expect from having swiftness half the time. If you give a cat Signet of the Hunt (slightly worse than Swiftness half the time), its DPS against moving targets is almost exactly proportional to a bird’s DPS.

Not only that, in the best case (both pets with Signet of the Hunt), a cat kills a moving target quicker than a bird.

I’m guessing the bird’s DPS is more uneven and bursty (DPS drops to near zero while it’s casting swiftness and prepping some of its attack skills). That would explain why its DPS with swiftness exceeds what you’d expect if you just do a linear combination (1.136 vs 1.032). That is, swiftness increases the bird’s average speed over swiftness by only 3.2%. But a greater proportion of that speed increase falls in the time the bird is attacking. A greater proportion of the time the bird doesn’t have swiftness, its wasting its time casting swiftness (zero DPS either way).