Guild Wars 2

This class has been taking a lot of hits lately. The Marionette for one, all I heard is turn off your puppy pet. I hate dungeons for that reason too many players too willing to tell you how bad or just how to play. It ruins the game.

But here’s the deal we are set up to use the pet which is just fine as your soloing around. But you get in other situations and maybe the pet is setting off bombs and killing other players as in the Marionette. Your only choice is to turn it off. Some places you can use a spider who mainly attacks from behind you. You can use yourself and a ranged pet instead of the tank. But your pet is 45-50% of your damage and build and if you just turn it off you take a big hit on how effective you are.

So why are we not compensated for this when we turn off the pet? When the pet goes off we should take on the power and effectiveness of both. Maybe they need to put in Spirit pets that don’t actually do anything but buff you. Instead of running a bear you could take on Bears Spirit and maybe get some special skills on the skill bar above the regular skills where the bear skills usually are.

For one In the Marionette event a pet was an asset if the ranger was half competent.
The bomb boss was a lot easier if pet had agro. The Boss would just sit in place an lay bombs. Many platforms failed because the kitter would kite in too big of a circle (best tactic was to dodge though boss just as mine was laid). If you had Boss one ( attack for behind) the pet would hold its ground while all other platform members could attack from behind.

Pet were once 30% of our damage but after nerf I would have to say its about 25%. Unless off course you go full BM but I don’t know why you would since pet don’t scale with gear your losing a lot of damage in the trade.

Pets provide a lot of utility not just dps. KD’s, CC’s, buffs but, not only that the pet is another target. I always wondered why the ranger lack an inherent defense mechanism. I mean we have defense but it’s tied to a weapon. Other classes defense’s are tied to weapon as well but have inherent abilities: like stealth, clones, and extra life bar, lots of toughness coupled with great healing (rangers extra vitality doesn’t mean anything when we don’t have the armor.)

If ranger pets were like clones in that they are consider a player for targeting purposes that would be another story. I could see how the dev would consider a pet defensivly in theory but in practice it falls extremely short. I mean a Mes can have like 3 clones and the Dev still had to change the targeting rules even while Mes have an abundant amount of stealth and blinks.

I guess what I am trying to say is while we have issue’s. Our issue really only affect the player. 98% of complaints by other players are misconceptions like ranger pet agro mobs (this hasn’t happen for along time), a l2p issue on the rangers part, a combination of the two or simply deploying the wrong tactics ( which I guess is a larger l2p issue outside of the ranger core).

The ranger are in this current state because the Ranger core has no vision of where we should go. They want to copy what other classes do (stealth and the like) rather than carving out a niche for itself.

The dev don’t have an idea of what they want use to do. Sustained damage with out an inherent defense to stay alive. Sword and dagger are fine what about when running axes or bows. 50% more poison damge really. We have more access to bleeding than poison outside of pets. I guess I have to see what other changes were made.

Without a pet that does damage arrows are easy to dodge. Pets are too the issue here is your not going to dodge both and if one gets you it sets you up for the other. Read the wind isn’t going to cut it alone. Even if it did that works for bow what about melee.
a lot of build rely on both condi and pets. Removing the pet creates a lot more issues than it solves.

The shorter answer is, that’s not the design.

The design may be flawed, but that’s what they’re working with. They’re finally just now starting to actually listen to us a little and it’s possible we’ll start to see some real changes that improve how the pet functions as a part of us, but for now we’ll have to wait and see.

It’s also possible that in the future we may see changes that do actually give us something back if we choose to remove our pets from the fight, or possible options to redesign the functionality of our own pets to give back to us instead of being combat oriented.

The idea would work something like this. You have a pet bar and you pick if you want your pet to be real or for you to take on his spirit. Each pet could have a different spirit. You would get a couple of skills on the new pet bar that would relate to if your using bear or spider or moa or cat. Then you would get a buff for using the spirit animal instead of the real one.

So this way you could solo with your real animal or become a better fighting force in a group with a spirit animal. This would still keep the basic ranger pet aspect of the class but update it so interaction with other classes would be better.