Guild Wars 2

Atherakhia.4086:

Right, it’s just all classes should be equal. So while a Warrior should swing their greatsword around and deal crushing damage to their foes, a Ranger may swirl their greatsword around daintilly, but that 300lb jaguar will pick up the slack. Net result being they both do the same damage. In theory anyway

Disagree with this though. Classes shouldn’t be equal. classes should be unique and have their own strengths and weaknesses, pro’s and con’s. Warrior with greatsword should out-melee any other class. Ranger with bow should be best at ranged physical damage and warriors should out dps a ranger. Same as a Guardian should out-tank an Ele and a Necro out-spell a Thief and a Cleric out-heal everything.

In my humble opinion, it should be about maximizing what your class does best and trying to mitigate class weaknesses. not every class having the same DPS just with different “pretty” animations.

Unfortunately classes have become a little too much generalized, with everyone having a little bit of everything which leaves some classes feeling somewhat directionless/flavourless (Rangers can fall into this category at the moment) and then the drive by the player-base to demand even more parity of the classes. It’s a vicious cycle which actually stifles individuality. May as well make it a clkitten system.

AdziH.2360:

Atherakhia.4086:

Right, it’s just all classes should be equal. So while a Warrior should swing their greatsword around and deal crushing damage to their foes, a Ranger may swirl their greatsword around daintilly, but that 300lb jaguar will pick up the slack. Net result being they both do the same damage. In theory anyway

Disagree with this though. Classes shouldn’t be equal. classes should be unique and have their own strengths and weaknesses, pro’s and con’s. Warrior with greatsword should out-melee any other class. Ranger with bow should be best at ranged physical damage and warriors should out dps a ranger. Same as a Guardian should out-tank an Ele and a Necro out-spell a Thief and a Cleric out-heal everything.

In my humble opinion, it should be about maximizing what your class does best and trying to mitigate class weaknesses. not every class having the same DPS just with different “pretty” animations.

Unfortunately classes have become a little too much generalized, with everyone having a little bit of everything which leaves some classes feeling somewhat directionless/flavourless (Rangers can fall into this category at the moment) and then the drive by the player-base to demand even more parity of the classes. It’s a vicious cycle which actually stifles individuality. May as well make it a clkitten system.

i agree with this.

And to be honest, i think rangers are fairly “well balanced” in that regard. We cannot deal with multiple bursts that good, as we got no reasonable ability to burst heal, unlike ele, guard, warrior can. And our traits does not give us the same array of passive bonuses that engineers get.

Still, i feel like the pet still needs some work, and that we could be pushed more towards a proper BM role.

Ideally, i’d love to have 2 pets out at the same time, IE; option C. But if this turns out to be too much work to be realized, then Option A, with shouts being intergrated into F# commands is a clear “second” for me.

What I typically do when encountering a heavy AoE situation is simply switch pets. Return to me is fine when trying to extract your pet from single AoE circles but when there are multiple area attacks then it becomes inadequate because pets come directly to you rather than try to avoid the attacks.

The easiest solution would have “Return to Me” teleport your pet to your location. Exactly like what happens when you switch pets except the pet is not switched and their health is not reset.

The biggest problem with pets is not their attributes, except for condition damage and healing power even when traited, as they are quite good. However, in the few situations where both our pets are killed we are without a class mechanic. With other professions you can manage your class mechanic cooldowns fairly easily and choose when to use them for the effect you want.

With rangers when a pet dies it is placed on a 50 second cooldown. Once again that is not bad since you have another pet. It becomes bad if your second pet dies soon after making it so that you are without a class mechanic.

My personal preference would remove the death cooldown but also remove the full pet health on switch. Specifically, when a pet is “killed” then they are automatically stowed. When stowed they regain health from healing skills, Signet of the Wild and Natural Healing. Of course, you would need to be able to see the health of both of your chosen pets so that you can manage them more efficiently.

There will be no forced cooldown on pet death but only the 20, 15 if traited, second cooldown on pet switch. So as long as a pet has some health and the pet switch cooldown is not in effect you can switch in a pinch even if the pet you switch to does not have a lot of health. It would seem more forgiving in places where there is a lot of damage and area attacks. Combined with “Return to Me” teleporting your pet to you then it should help with pet survivability and usage. My opinion of course and this is mostly from a PvE perspective rather than one from a structured PvP background.

I’m sorry i don’t agree with a lot of what you’ve put Corana. What you’re asking for is to make Pet Management lazy/easier. Ranger is a thinking person’s class which can punish the player heavily when mistakes are made. I’m all up for changes that improve the class, not neccissarily changes that make the class easier to play.

I don’t believe a 2 pet system could work because they would both have to nerfed ala hyena to not OP Rangers. And we all know how useless Hyena is.

I think the current system is adequate and rewards the players who effectively manage their pets (within the constraints of a not ideal system). There are even traits to support the regular swapping of Pets which can be rather useful.

I think an adequate punishment of no pet thus less dps is warranted if they both managed to get killed within 60 seconds.

To reiterate what’s been said in many post before, a more defensively intelligent pet would be a massive step in the right direction with damage avoidance. Stances for pets perhaps?

I really like the idea of have an Aggressive/Passive mode with corresponding skill bar. i’m thinking aggressive mode being like current lynx all cons and crits with passive mode being all loiter and pump out boons and outlet to transfer dam or cons etc

P.S. Switching out Pets to avoid AoE is a smart way of dealing with the situation. Shame pet looses stacks though

Prysin.8542:

AdziH.2360:

Atherakhia.4086:

Right, it’s just all classes should be equal. So while a Warrior should swing their greatsword around and deal crushing damage to their foes, a Ranger may swirl their greatsword around daintilly, but that 300lb jaguar will pick up the slack. Net result being they both do the same damage. In theory anyway

Disagree with this though. Classes shouldn’t be equal. classes should be unique and have their own strengths and weaknesses, pro’s and con’s. Warrior with greatsword should out-melee any other class. Ranger with bow should be best at ranged physical damage and warriors should out dps a ranger. Same as a Guardian should out-tank an Ele and a Necro out-spell a Thief and a Cleric out-heal everything.

In my humble opinion, it should be about maximizing what your class does best and trying to mitigate class weaknesses. not every class having the same DPS just with different “pretty” animations.

Unfortunately classes have become a little too much generalized, with everyone having a little bit of everything which leaves some classes feeling somewhat directionless/flavourless (Rangers can fall into this category at the moment) and then the drive by the player-base to demand even more parity of the classes. It’s a vicious cycle which actually stifles individuality. May as well make it a clkitten system.

i agree with this.

And to be honest, i think rangers are fairly “well balanced” in that regard. We cannot deal with multiple bursts that good, as we got no reasonable ability to burst heal, unlike ele, guard, warrior can. And our traits does not give us the same array of passive bonuses that engineers get.

Still, i feel like the pet still needs some work, and that we could be pushed more towards a proper BM role.

Ideally, i’d love to have 2 pets out at the same time, IE; option C. But if this turns out to be too much work to be realized, then Option A, with shouts being intergrated into F# commands is a clear “second” for me.

I was choosing not to respond since I didn’t want to side track your thread down the DPS path again. But I’ll give my opinion on both responses.

Classes need to be equal in overall power to ensure they have a reason to be brought along. It’s especially important in PvE. As mentioned before, some classes will have certain pros that may edge them ahead of other classes, but those pros should come with cons to keep them grounded.

Take Ranger for example… their damage could justifiably be below that of another class because they bring both precision and frost spirit to a group which are unique for the most part. But the price to bring these buffs can’t be so taxing that the group can’t break even when you factor in the damage increase for the 4 other classes vs the lost damage for bringing the Ranger over another class. If the net result is a negative, you’re kind of in the situation we have now where the Ranger simply isn’t worth bringing.

There are countless variables involved and these variables are more than making it so one class shoots 3x a second for 33 damage and another only shoots once for 100 damage. But the end result needs to be roughly similar DPS no matter how you get there which we’re not currently seeing.

And I agree with both of you that a large amount of the problems we’re seeing with this game all fall back on ANet going with the ‘everyone can do everything’ model instead of the tried and tested trinity model. When every class is a DPS class, extra care must be taken to ensure they’re all useful. You can do this by ensuring they all do the same damage or you do this by ensuring each class has a unique niche to fill.

Unfortunately ANet has already moved this game so far away from the 8 unique classes with 8 unique roles that the only hope we have left is 8 unique classes with competetive DPS.

Atherakhia.4086:

Take Ranger for example… their damage could justifiably be below that of another class because they bring both precision and frost spirit to a group which are unique for the most part. But the price to bring these buffs can’t be so taxing that the group can’t break even when you factor in the damage increase for the 4 other classes vs the lost damage for bringing the Ranger over another class. If the net result is a negative, you’re kind of in the situation we have now where the Ranger simply isn’t worth bringing.

Glad you’re still participating as i do like an open debate.

Yea what I’ve quoted above is basically the go-to reason a lot of people say “why bother with a Ranger” and i quote honestly can’t argue against the factual nature of information. However, we need to compare three types of Dungeon groups:

1. Leet/speed
2. PUG
3. Guildie

Now, that argument works with 1. It’s used but shouldn’t be with 2. and should never be a factor in 3.

1. If you want to min/max and blast through then crack on, whatever shaves off that 1 minutes 30.
2. Wannabe Leets but never going to happen with a group of strangers. You make the best of the situation you’re in.
3. should be pink fluffy warm hugs all round with subsect of 1’s doing their thing.

Agree’d we’ve gone way off topic here so i apologise for this and will keep input back about pets

even more sidetracking now, but the issue is NOT with the classes and their balance. Its the party size and how the game is balanced around 5 players.

5 players is perfect for trinity as you go 1-2 tanker, 2-3 DPS and a healer. But for “our” meta, if we are to make things equally challenging as most trinity based games are, then we would need 2x sustained healers, 2x burst healers, 1 buffer, 1 debuffer and 4 DPS. Total group size, 10.

Reason it would be like this is because then you’d need certain professions to specialize in a role. Rangers can fit the debuffer and sustained healer. While a ele and guard may fit DPS, burst healer and buffer.

This games content is balanced in a way that prevents classes from specializing. You are forced to generalize, and while rangers are exceptionally good at generalizing, we managed to do the job of 3 players, but at 80% capacity. While we can surpass their ability to do pretty much anything, we are unable to do so without having to sacrifice something else. This is balanced and fair. However other classes can take the same approach at a lesser cost.

Most of our versatility DOES reside in the pet. It’s command system and sustain is at the core of the whole issue.

Well that’s the problem with MMO’s in general. What the raiders find optimal the others take as fact and ignore everything else. So while the whole ‘no rangers’ idea can be based on raw data by elite groups, and the difference between an elite group clearing a full dungeon vs a group of 5 rangers is probably less than 5min difference, people will still take the elite runners words as gospel.

I’ve personally never been kicked from a group with my ranger and I’ve beaten most stuff with a 5 ranger group. I also don’t play this game for PvE. But even with that said, the simple fact still remains that the Ranger isn’t where it should be and raw DPS is the least of our problems in PvP and WvW IMO.

As to Prysin’s post, that is somewhat true if you really want to define a role like ‘debuffing’ as a class role. That debuffer is still a DPS though (even in more traditional MMO’s).

5 man dungeons are fine. The problem goes back to what you said prior that there’s simply too much overlap between classes because ANet has designed every class with the intention that they can do anything. But then they do silly stuff like penalize ranged damage due to the range advantage it has over melee, but then give every melee class in the game 2:1 abilities/skills to stay in melee range as ranged classes have to get out. They then introduce silly class mechanics and decide to make them account for a large chunk of a class’s damage even though it will take nearly 1.5 years before that mechanic is even remotely functional and yet still far from ideal. Or you do something much worse and design a class with no real defined goal or niche to fill and let them try and tred water with a horrible class mechanic tied around their waste and call them a pet class :/

Even in PvP, pet DPS is actually fine. I wouldn’t up pet DPS much. For the sake of staying “in the race” with the other professions, pet DPS must at some point, somehow, increase by 19% total to be “in line” with the DPS calculations that guang and DnT has done post april 15th patch.

Pets need, a way to automatically sustain themselves. I would also argue that pets should be carrying its own form of debuffs (a form of “utility skill” outside the normal attack rotation) that is used in frequent intervals, providing a long duration debuff to the enemy. Say long duration, low stack, vulnerability or long duration cripple.
Things that matter, if only for pet performance itself.

Ideally, pet should have its own heal and condi cleanse skill that is used when a certain “threshold” is reached.

Adzi, I never mentioned having two active pets at one time in case that was directed at me.

Personally, I have never had any problems with pets surviving as I can typically keep them alive long enough for a pet switch if they are in danger of being defeated. However, there are situations that is very difficult to save your pets from which usually consist of a heavy damaging attack or many area attacks.

Heavy damage attacks by bosses typically give enough time to pull back your pet. But in the case of many area attacks it becomes problematic because the pet comes directly to the owner when you select “Return to Me.” In many cases they tend to run directly into one of the area attacks. In those situations “Return to Me” is not suitable and often requires the use of a pet switch.

If both pets die then the ranger is partly responsible but the ranger is deprived of their class mechanic for a period of time and lose part of their damage. That is something that no other profession has to deal with. The closest would be the Necromancer’s Death Shroud but they to deal with a 10 second cooldown and 10 second activation rather than a 50 second cooldown.

I do believe that pets are one of the stronger class mechanics already but that is because that it brings indirect durability to the class when it comes to damage mitigation. At least I could survive situations that would have defeated many of my other characters.

Oh I absolutely wouldn’t increase pet DPS at all. I’m in the other camp. I don’t want the pet removed, but I would like it marginalized to a more supportive role. If the class as a whole needs a 10% increase, the last thing I would do is find a way to justify that increase in a pet that has never worked in WvW and likely never will.

No, I say reduce pet damage to that of a 5 stack of bleed and effectively make the pet a class specific DOT and move a lot of the group utility this class provides to be centered around the pet in a more functional way.

This way you maintain the pet being a very important part of the class but you make the only thing ANet cares about, class damage, fully in the hands of the player.

Agreed with both you guys, the issue is in no way pet dps, god forbid Anet get it in their mind to increase that!

Like the idea above Ather about basically outsourcing the Supp role stuff to Pet. have them more Con based and claw the raw dps back to the Ranger.

How about a new Whip or Whistle weapon or maybe an engie-kit-like utility skill which would come with 1-5 as dedicated pet skills in addition to the F1-F4? That way the basic pet control can stay for everyone not wanting to be too involved, but there’s an activable dedicated beastmaster skill set.

I think that having pets scale the same way as PVE mobs would work really well in dungeons and WvW. If they choose that route, toughness should be scaled over vitality so that heals don’t become completely useless.

My biggest problem with the pet right now is that it has a lot of pointless limitations. It’s like Anet decided not to look at our pets too closely because they were afraid they might find work.

Killsmith.8169:

I think that having pets scale the same way as PVE mobs would work really well in dungeons and WvW. If they choose that route, toughness should be scaled over vitality so that heals don’t become completely useless.

My biggest problem with the pet right now is that it has a lot of pointless limitations. It’s like Anet decided not to look at our pets too closely because they were afraid they might find work.

they already do scale like PvE mobs, with the ability to gain extra stats depending on player investment. its like a PvE mob++

Honestly, I would see outsourcing support role aspects to the pet and damage to the ranger to be detrimental.

Pets have both damage and support skills which can change depending entirely on the pet chosen and the traits a ranger chooses, which I find to be quite nice. Additionally, even though pets are not exceptionally strong you can easily maintain a constant stream of damage regardless of circumstance.

The reason is if the pet is being focused on then those enemies are not focusing on you which allows you to maintain damage on that target and if an enemy is focusing on you then that allows the pet to maintain a constant stream of damage. This allows the ranger to recover more easily and buy time for cooldowns while still defeating enemies.

The point of the ranger is that the profession can adapt to the situation easily. If our pet is defeated we suffer a bit of a damage drop but no significant difficulties and if our pet was more support based then we just lost a little support. But if the support role was placed more on the pet it would make the ranger much more vulnerable than a slight decrease in damage.

I could see having one the Moa’s “Harmonic Cry” shifted to the F2 or being able to switch a single skill from a pets skill bar to be placed as the F2 so that we can control it.

Question, each point in Beastmastery increases pet attributes by 50. For pets how much damage mitigation does that provide a pet, how much damage and critical chance as well?

Pets do the same as our Traits each point up all the stats by 50points.
50 for toughness= Damage done = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s toughness ( since pets don’t have Armour) so it would be stock pet toughness+Bm points.
50points=Crit damage 3%
50points = 2% crit hit , 21 points per 1%.
50= 50 healing power adds 50points of healing for direct healing , so if Bm maxed adds 300 healing hp to the harmonic cry? or 750 if traited could be a 4k hp heal harmonic cry every 40secs + f2 Invigorating Bond stock 1.482k heal +750 = 2.232k hp every 20secs , so every 60secs you could get a extra 6.2k hp healing ontop of your own heals.

and you don’t even need to gear for any healing power only for the traits in bm.

i think i’ve got it 100% wrong but even so the idea of a 6k healing comming from your pet , as soon as you see that harmonic cry you can f2 for more healing if needed, would be amazing for a blue moa/pink moa , tell your team mates to get ready for the cone keeping nearby , wait for the harmonic cry and boom.

it makes for a perfect cap point bombing hp pet/ bomb your target with a daze + healing team mates at the same time.

each point of Healing Power adds 0.125 healing for Regeneration, 0.06 healing for Rejuvenation. and each trait for Bm is 50points if someone way smarter than me at maths could work it out.

This may be a stupid suggestion, or ridiculously hard for Anet to implement because I’ve not been playing this game long. However, in terms of giving the ranger more pet control and since the pet is tied to our dmg, what do you all think about the pets actions being tied to the rangers (ie. Sword 3 makes pet do y action and so on). This would give the ranger more control over the pet and could give you the dodges or evades you are asking for. Also they could then change f1 to aggressive or defensive which would change how your pet reacts to your ability use, and f2 could be replaced by a shout.

i think the devs have been over this the , pets Basicly share the same Ai attack system or what it is , as the PvE animals with no apllication of the dodge.

though evades are natural to some pets just as they are in there PvE monster/animal versions.

My thoughts:

You can’t just say “Give a pet dodge/aegis when you dodge.” To solve these issues, especially when this is traited.

The reason being that this puts the ranger in a position which still sucks. An AOE circle drops above you from an arrow cart, and you run outside of it. Damage prevented. Your pet, though, still decides to stand in it and get hit.

So in order to prevent this, you need to have to not only exit the circle, but then dodge roll after reaching safety, just to preserve your pet.

But meanwhile you’re getting slapped by more AoE bombs. So all you honestly did was save your pet from dying in order to preserve your class mechanic but then died afterwards on the basis you just had to save your pet from dying by wasting your dodge.

So okay, then it seems logical to create a new “pet dodge” button to separate these two.

But then you run into the fact you need to potentially press TWO buttons to dodge a given AoE at the same time while possibly activating other skills and moving. This is just a disadvantage for the ranger.

This is why I particularly agree with the prospect of some trait/skill reworking and removing the damage and defense portions from pets. Instead, pets should just not be able to be hit/targeted, and act as sources of utility for the ranger. This can guarantee pet skills to hit, and rangers can still take on the form of a ~30% damage increase because the pet won’t be autoing to account for their damage. Additionally, now the F-skills can be replaced with the actual pet skills since there would be no need to recall/move the pet around. Being able to control my canine’s knock down would be a tremendous asset when fighting instead of having it autocast every 40 seconds and it gets wasted on an already-downed enemy.

The next bit is my personal “best” fix, but I doubt the amount of effort needed to pull it off will ever go into any existing content, because, well, ANet.

If the really wanted to fix this class, they could just rework the ranger’s entire class mechanic into two separate ones, re-introducing preparations which could be both level-scaling and stat-scaling to give solo rangers more damage/self support options to accommodate for the different style and warden/nature-magic players, and pets could fulfill the beastmaster/warden side. Then, the BM line could be reworked into providing real, useful, and powerful abilities for beastmasters to make that play style more viable (I.E., both pets at once, give the pets auto-attacks or a form of rotation, reduce pet skill cooldowns, etc.), and pet skills/abilities can be merged and removed from the other trait lines to accommodate for preparations, such as a trait which would allow casted preparations to affect nearby allies as well, or something of the sorts.

Pets do not have to have dodge, they should just get a 1 second blur effect when we dodge or use evasion abilities.

Pets should also get the HP buff we got in PvE transferred into WvW as well.

Would have been nice to go that aura route so I don’t have to have a pet and I just get a buff 100% of the time instead of having a pet 100% of the time.

Not to mention, active/guard should have been a keybind from the beginning. The fact I have to hit that button with my mouse is ultra we-todd-edd and a level of stupid very few in the human race have achieved.

Doesn’t matter though. I’ve lost all hope Anet will do anything to redeem Rangers. Of course, this is why I concentrate on my Guardian, Warrior, and Ele now.

AdziH.2360:

Atherakhia.4086:

Right, it’s just all classes should be equal. So while a Warrior should swing their greatsword around and deal crushing damage to their foes, a Ranger may swirl their greatsword around daintilly, but that 300lb jaguar will pick up the slack. Net result being they both do the same damage. In theory anyway

Disagree with this though. Classes shouldn’t be equal. classes should be unique and have their own strengths and weaknesses, pro’s and con’s. Warrior with greatsword should out-melee any other class. Ranger with bow should be best at ranged physical damage and warriors should out dps a ranger. Same as a Guardian should out-tank an Ele and a Necro out-spell a Thief and a Cleric out-heal everything.

In my humble opinion, it should be about maximizing what your class does best and trying to mitigate class weaknesses. not every class having the same DPS just with different “pretty” animations.

Unfortunately classes have become a little too much generalized, with everyone having a little bit of everything which leaves some classes feeling somewhat directionless/flavourless (Rangers can fall into this category at the moment) and then the drive by the player-base to demand even more parity of the classes. It’s a vicious cycle which actually stifles individuality. May as well make it a clkitten system.

The way the content has been designed in PVE is that you need to the most damage as fast as possible to eliminate the threat. Mitigating damage through active dodging/blocking. When they have designed content as they have DPS becomes the most valuable point. This is further reinforced by condition cap and defiance because they nullify conditions. And from my point of view every change they have made thus far to try to change this perception has only intensified the need to bring as much DPS to the table as possible.

By not going with the trinity system Anet was forced to make all the classes jack of all trades and masters of none… yet a couple of classes were deemed masters of dps.

Because of these things Rangers are not

the thing about the passive buff if pet is gone, there is a downside to it.

If we remove pet or reward the lack of pet, then who in their right mind would even play WITH a pet in the first place?
I mean, i LOVE the beastmaster chartype. I LOVE IT. I love the ability to use my pet for damage. Yes i despise the horrid pathing, the more then ridiculously slow response time to enemy movement and such. But i still love the pets, and using them is actually important to how my class plays.

Despite this, if they just gave me the ability to play without pet, without penalty, i’d just drop the pet right there and then. Because aslong as the pet remain as is, there is no way i can justify using it, if not forced to.
My glassbow would be stronger (less durable in some cases as i would lose the wolf fear and KD), more imposing, and absolutely devastating to enemies 1v1.
If we say we can remove pet and get a buff or “let pets die” to gain a buff, then sure.. ill rather take 30% DPS boost to my LB AA, thus hitting 3-4k autos all the time instead of 2-3k. However aslong as the ranger is designed as it is, we cannot just “remove pet” or “reward petless play”. Because it would cause a LOT of people to just send their pets to their death, then play on as immortal evasion bots.

I can say this though, pet death CD must be reduced. It should be no longer then 45 seconds max, but not shorter then 30 seconds.
Pet swap CD should increase to 25 seconds untraited.

And i just got a brainwave – remove current BM adept minor, change it to “remove 2 conditions from yourself and allies upon pet swap”. It would solve our biggest issue of all – condition removal demands massive investments.

As I have never advocating removing it entirely, i.e. no option to use the pet. I just want the options. I hate the pet but love the Ranger. That way people who want the pet can continue to play with it and those who don’t … well, don’t.

It’s all about play how you want, right? I can’t with my Ranger because it’s shackled to the pet. Granted, better than it was a year ago, but still leagues away from where I need it to be to make it better to take my Ranger into a dungeon than my Warrior, Guardian, Ele, Mesmer or even my Thief.

Prysin.8542:

the thing about the passive buff if pet is gone, there is a downside to it.

If we remove pet or reward the lack of pet, then who in their right mind would even play WITH a pet in the first place?
I mean, i LOVE the beastmaster chartype. I LOVE IT. I love the ability to use my pet for damage. Yes i despise the horrid pathing, the more then ridiculously slow response time to enemy movement and such. But i still love the pets, and using them is actually important to how my class plays.

Despite this, if they just gave me the ability to play without pet, without penalty, i’d just drop the pet right there and then. Because aslong as the pet remain as is, there is no way i can justify using it, if not forced to.
My glassbow would be stronger (less durable in some cases as i would lose the wolf fear and KD), more imposing, and absolutely devastating to enemies 1v1.
If we say we can remove pet and get a buff or “let pets die” to gain a buff, then sure.. ill rather take 30% DPS boost to my LB AA, thus hitting 3-4k autos all the time instead of 2-3k. However aslong as the ranger is designed as it is, we cannot just “remove pet” or “reward petless play”. Because it would cause a LOT of people to just send their pets to their death, then play on as immortal evasion bots.

I can say this though, pet death CD must be reduced. It should be no longer then 45 seconds max, but not shorter then 30 seconds.
Pet swap CD should increase to 25 seconds untraited.

And i just got a brainwave – remove current BM adept minor, change it to “remove 2 conditions from yourself and allies upon pet swap”. It would solve our biggest issue of all – condition removal demands massive investments.

That’s precisely why I posted what I did earlier. Removing pets as combat entities but allowing them to still deal damage, and reworking the trait lines and splitting the class mechanic up would allow for just outright buffs to BM skills and possibly pets in general, such as adding some kind of additional scaling (Damage scaling from healing power, perhaps?). This, while keeping them as non-combat damage-dealing and utility entities, could keep the ranger’s pets invincible as long as the ranger is alive, making the whole ordeal just like every other class’s mechanic, but allowing for a BM ranger to deal sufficient damage.

The biggest disparity, however, will always be terrain. Pets are incapable of climbing up terrain, and frankly, I believe they should be able to port/ignore terrain to a target on unreachable terrain within the pet’s aggro range that you have attacked within a small window of time since your last attack, lasting for a duration equal to this window. This issue is especially apparent in WvW.
Not to mention in doing so, rangers could become immensely useful in sieging keeps and defending them. Imagine the applications of countering siege, hitting low health stragglers atop walls or down below in the zerg. The list goes on.

I agree with what you’re saying in prinicipal, the thing is ANET have already decried most of these options as well, for various reasons, most of which were poor excuses at best.

Options A already refused because Anet feels that it would make pets complicated for beginners. A poor excuse at best since even the horrifically dumbed down WoW still has more pet control. I meanFFS blizzard has been aiming at the lowest common denominator for years and yet they still credit their players as having the intelligence to deal with “complex” pet controls.

Option B they already spoke against saying that they wanted us to work with the pet as a team, not to treat the pet as a passive buff. This option is also in stark contrast to ArenaNet’s own design philosophy…..or it would be if they could decide on one. So far they haven’t, it seems, decided on whether we’re a skirmisher, an archer or a beastmaster yet. They seem to cycle through depending on mood, never settling on one philosophy.

Option C I haven’t seen any Anet argument against, but seriously, why would they have us trying to control two pets when they think we’re too stupid to handle one with better control mechanisms? Also the balancing and AI of one pet has caused significant trouble, I can’t imagine them trying to do it with two.

Then there’s the fact that they also pretty much dismissed the idea of improving the AI. If they were prepared to improve the AI at all, they would have done it by now for the present single pet system or be working towards that goal. A second pet along with AI alterations would be expecting far more from them than they have demonstrated any willingness for in two full years. Just fixing the AI alone would be asking alot from them at this point.

If the main pet could engage in the skills you describe, “Such as applying its own CC, its own bursts and its own sustain (evasion, invuln, block).” then no second pet would be necessary as we’d have a perfectly capable Pet in the present one pet system. No one would be calling for pet removal or passive pets if the things could use active defences to prevent AoE death and boss mechanics which make the pets so kitten ed awful outside of PvP/WvW.

Frankly though, I suspect that the way to fix ranger pet problems, wouldn’t be to actually change the pets. I strongly suspect that the problems rangers face would be fixed if ANET were to completey revise the PvE dungeon mechanics, which are also the cause of the zerk build meta and the reason several classes and all condition builds are basically pointless in PvE. It’s the reliance on pure active defence (which pets completely lack) vs OHK move, conditition immune bosses that is the real root of ranger problems. Take those mechanics away as seen in the PvP environment and suddenly the pet problems all but vanish outside of target tracking.

Sadly I don’t see them fixing that either.

Chokolata.1870:

Pets do not have to have dodge, they should just get a 1 second blur effect when we dodge or use evasion abilities.

Yes! this is exactly what I have been thinking. Every time the player dodges the pet also dodges in the direction of the player. All you need is a blur visual and make the pet move really fast for 1 second. You don’t need to change F1-4 buttons, you don’t need to add or take away from the pet’s skill bars, and you don’t need to drastically alter Pet’s role.

I would also say that this is balanced as the whole ranger (character+pet) is being protected by the dodge mechanic.

A lot of players are comparing pets to Nec Minions and Mes Clones. This is a poor comparison because all 3 require different levels of investment and fill different roles for their respective classes. Necs are not required to bring minions, and Clones are meant to be sacrificial and are easily replaceable.