Guild Wars 2

As the title.. what pets are best for leveling?

Please give arguments, why? when? etc!

It depends on what you’re doing. I’d recommend almost anything but a boar type. Their special skill is Forage, which makes it go look for an environment weapon. Have found 0 use for that.
Fern hound’s special skill is regeneration. It will howl to give regeneration to all allies.
I mainly use an arctodus because it can take a lot of damage and causes bleeding. My backup is a lynx, but I’ve been thinking of replacing them with something a little tougher.
I’ve heard Red Moas are good, they give -33% to damage taken.
I could probably come up with a bunch more, but I’ll stop here.

For underwater, I’d say go get the armored fish for one of them. They have incredible defense. Jellies have a ton of life and can do quite a bit of damage, but I prefer the Shark. It just looks cooler. It also does some pretty decent damage.

Honestly you’re probably best off using bears until 70+. They’ll hold aggro and never die. If you’re confident in your ability to micromanage your pet then the Lynx is amazing for pure DPS. If you can’t or don’t want to micro then the lynx is simply too squishy.

Past 70ish mobs tend to prefer you over your pet, so tanky pets lose a lot of value and DPS pets like the lynx become much more valuable.

If none of those pets do it for you Devourers are pretty strong and they attack from range which is cool. Wolves have good CC but require a good amount of micro to keep alive. Drakes are alright and look awesome but honestly I find them underwhelming.

As far as aquatic is concerned, jellies and armor fish make awesome tanks and sharks do pretty sweet DPS.

I do personally like my Brown Bear… mostly for survivability (whether perceived or actual). The condition removal has come in quite handy as well.

I haven’t quite settled on an underwater pet yet. For those brief moments my shark is alive, I generally like having it around.

Pick one pet family for damage (either precision or condition based), and another that has some survivability for when you face multiple of mobs. Then just go for those that has your favorite F2 skills. That’s all there is to it.

Gotta catch ’em all.. keep trying them and see which works with your playstyle

Bears are the most forgiving survival wise, but they have horrible damage. Thus while you’re learning to play the bear is very appealing, but as you grow in skill (and traits) you will want to start trying more aggressive but less forgiving pets.

Heylo

I’d recommend almost anything but a boar type. Their special skill is Forage, which makes it go look for an environment weapon. Have found 0 use for that.

The boars are actually great for beginners. Forage may be a rather unappealing F2 skill, but the porcine family makes up for their lack of F2 interest by having higher overall base stats.

They are second only to bears in HP and last I checked are second only to drakes in AoE damage output. This makes them ideal for PvE and leveling as they’ll allow you to take on larger groups of AI enemies with less skilled input from the player.

They’re almost completely worthless in PvP, however, because their bread-and-butter charge skill is just too easy to avoid. It’s useless against any player who isn’t asleep.

Kind of depends on what your playstyle is.

When you’re first starting out low micro self sufficient pets like Bear are ideal because you yourself are still getting used to the game and trying to formulate your own playstyle. But once you’ve gotten the hang of things, you’ll find other pets suit certain playstyles and strategies better than others.

That same ‘fire and forget’ quality of Bears that makes them appealing at the start also unfortunately makes them a bit shallow. There’s more possible applications and depth to interacting with your pet when the family skills also affect enemies/allies/the playing field instead of being purely inwardly focused.

I think after you’ve gotten settled, you should start playing around with the different families and see what compliments your approach best.

If you use the sword and greatsword mainly for fighting monsters, then use a wolf or feline pet, the feline grants high dps and the wolf grants control, he knocks down his targets and cripples their movement, reducing monster damage on you.

If you use the longbow and shortbow mainly for fighting monsters, then use the bears, they have high survivability, especially the black bear with its prolonged weakness condition ability. A bear will last three times longer than most other pets, and the brown bear looks quite cool. The brown bear also offers a condition removal (at least once they fix F2 pet skills), while it is nice to remove cripple and chill so you can stay at range.

I’ve found that at higher levels they mostly ignore the pets and go after you anyway so I usually stick with the more DPSy style pets like Lynx or sometimes birds, jaguar also is nice. On huge boss fights I go with ranged like spiders. Even if you use bows they tend to ignore the bear anyway and come right after you so you end up kiting it around regardless of the big meat shield standing there .. the bear is useful for leveling up or some hard personal story quests and also condition removal on the brown bear is nice.