Since this is really a ranger only issue, I don’t think this belongs in suggestions, and one of the biggest downfalls of the ranger class are their pets; let’s face it pets are horrible, no matter how much you stack them up, as a mechanic they just don’t compare to the usefulness of other classes mechanic. Why is this?
First of all they lack survivability. Now, I don’t believe this is due necessarily to them not being able to take a hit, but due to the lack of their ability to anticipate and dodge incoming attacks like the player. There are many skills in the game that can even one to two shot a player if they aren’t careful, but while the player dodges these and waters out incoming damage until their heal is up to cover for the hits they do take, pets stand there and look at you funny while they take it up the rear.
One way to remedy this is to increase pet movement; pets should be flying and running much larger paths around the player and enemies. The area they should be “stalking” from should be from just outside of enemy attack range (lets just say, for example, fluctuating anywhere between 600-1200 range). They would still run within a pretty close distance to the player when not in combat (like they do now while not in combat) This would increase pet survivability by decreasing the likelihood of them being within attack radius. The next change would be to their auto-attacking.
Pet auto-attacks should be changed from their dull and unimaginative (especially for pets like wolves) to a more mobile and bursty version. The wolves for example would lose their crappy static auto-attack and would instead have more attacks like their leap/knock down; they run in do their thing and then run out to a safe distance for a few seconds before using another attack. The damage and such would have to be played with in order to adjust fro their new burst roles.
Combining the new range of movement that would keeps pets away out of harms way and changing their attacks to a more burst oriented style would make them a a bit more useful in my opinion. Setting them into their “guard” mode (attack mode) would leave them to attack on their own accord almost at random (kind of like they do now, except they would retreat to a safe distance after every “burst”) and at risk of running into an attack, while setting them in avoid combat would keep them at that “safe” distance and allow the player to tell them when to attack with “Attack My Target” (F1) so that players that would like to have a bit more control and keep them out of those pet ohko’s can do so.
I believe this would be a start in the right direction for pet AI. It’s the AI I believe that is the true problem here when comparing the ranger mechanic to the other classes (at least the other classes have a bit more control over
Please discuss and add to it