Guild Wars 2

I’m curious to see how people would feel about pets having no health pool and thus invulnerable to damage. I’f anet wanted our pets to be a significant portion of our damage than why not have them un-killable. This would solve being gimped after our pets die for a given time and then just have our ability to swap pets affected instead. Make it so we cannot swap pets unless they are withing mele range of us and give us some sort of summoning animation kind if like a mesmer mantra. It would make the choice of pet more meaningful in my opinion and give a little believe ability to my pet swapping than them just appearing out of thin air. This could cause other problems, but it was just an idea i thougt of. What’s your thoughts?

You know what i have another idea, why dont they just give me the option, to fight without a stupid AI at my side. If someone want a cute little kitty then thats fine, but pls let me play ranger without the stupid pet.

Nah, I odn’t like the idea being an aura type gimick. I’m fine with the pet being a functional part of the class. I’m 110% against that function accounting for 50% of my total DPS though.

This is how I’d approach pets.

Make pets account for about 10-20% of our total damage depending on where you invested your traits (obviously 20% would be for fully capped BM). This would then obviously mean increasing the Ranger’s damage by a sizable margin. Considering the ranger would be lucky to hit for 50% of the damage a Warrior is hitting with his rifle for auto attacks, it seems reasonable though.

Make pets automatically take 85% less damage from AEs of any kind (this includes the clumsy melee mechanic as well). If a player wants the pet dead in PvP they should be expected to invest actual effort into killing it. Not expect the pet to be a casualty of war when attacking the ranger.

Make it so the action skill for pets trigger instantly. I don’t care if the pet still needs to play through the entire animation before moving again, but when F2 is hit, the effect should go off. There is no reason for this not to be the case.

With these changes alone you’ve made the pet effectively a DOT and made it a reliable DOT in PvE and PvP. Now we can go about improving the pet to fill the other problems the class has with burst damage and PvE utility.

What I would do from this point is make it so all pets do the same damage, but they all fit into 3 categories.

DPS Pets – Pets that have a higher chance to crit.
Utility Pets – Pets that provide an aura around the pet or Hunter and who’s F2 abilities are focused on PvE.
Defensive Pets – Pets that provide an aura and who’s F2 abilities are focused on PvP.

DPS Pets can consume bleed stacks and deal XXX damage for every stack of bleed on the target. They can also consume Daze, Cripples, etc for even more damage.

Utility Pets are just DOTS and do nothing special outside of their utility.

Defensive Pets can consume the same things as DPS pets but their effects are more control oriented. Like remove a daze and turn it into a root where the animal tackles the opponent to the ground and holds him there for 8 seconds or until the pet is almost dead.

Things like this. This way the pet is still a valuable addition to the class, but we don’t see our raw damage penalized for something that is ultimately out of the player’s direct control.

What about if you have your pet in a passive state, you lose its utility, but you gain a flat bonus to your damage? Or a signet that does the same, but only works if you don’t have your pet out?

Or just have your pet dodge every time you do.