Pets are broken.
Part of having a pet is using your skills to enhance its efficacy, but I do see your point.
How much damage does any melee class lose to a moving target. Just as you need to pick the right weapon for the job, one needs to pick the right pet for the job.
There are attack skills and spells that have long animations or cast time which may cause you to miss a target. regardless of how much damge they do you would not include these in a damge test unless you could ensure you could hit the target with them.
While pets do have issue with moving targets you can help them hit the target by using the right pets and specs. Increase their speed or crit damage. Even apply more condtions with them to make up for when they are not actually hitting them.
Pets are an extention of the ranger. They work together to accomplish a task.
In a real situation the pet would hit more becuase the ranger would be using cc. The pet are also more likly to land thier cc when master and pets work together.
In a real situation rangers switch alot to gain access to more of the pet’s skills and quickness that applies to both. This also puts the pet at your side putting the pet in optimal postion for attack since most of the time your target is the aggressor (benificail side affect of being seen as an underpowered class).
There is a video floating around with a pet destoying a Heavy golem in 2.5 seconds. While this result isnt the average it does show it can be achieved and that without spending sometime in the class you would get those types of results.
Rangers are not your cookie-cutter, child-proof, spoon-feeding, EZ-mode, autopilot, UI-based, hand-helding, back-patting, gimmicky, cheesy MMO class..
In order to properly understand the big picture,
everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.
everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.
Hitting your target shouldn’t require the right pet and spec. It should be a basic feature of the pet. Does anyone else feel like breaking out into hysterical laughter every time someone suggests that we have to choose specific pets and builds to make the class perform basic tasks like landing hits?
Agree with OP. ANet defines us as ‘the masters of long range’, so quote This also puts the pet at your side putting the pet in optimal postion for attack since most of the time your target is the aggressor unquote is obviously not what they intended….
Our pets are supposed to be 50% of our damage, but as anyone with any experience of wvw knows, pets vary from a source of a buff to pretty much useless unless you roam around when your pet has more than half a chance of reaching the target without being slowed, crippled and generally dead, then you’re on pet cooldown and 50% of your damage is gone during the best fights.
Against moving targets they are next to useless. If you find enemies are always in your face you’re playing it wrong or seem to think melee ranger is the way to play, which is great if you like standing in one spot or like hobbling around crippled (much like your pet).
I’m still a great fan of watching a pet with ‘rampage as one’ come running towards me – all nice and red and glowy, making it completely obvious, then just avoiding every single one of it’s attacks while killing that melee ranger from range.
Victory, Beings Lost On Borderlands (BLOB), SFR & Gandara (inactive)
Pets are garbage. Mine are always dead in larger wvw fights and I usually attack from 1200. Some kind of base aoe resistance is essential and hopefully they figure that out soon. I feel that aoe on the other hand is fine
As a Ranger who plays multple classes at 80, I can avoid most Ranger pets 60% of the time, or 100% of the time if I apply cripple to them. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it can’t be done just because most players just don’t know how to do it, or don’t bother doing it.
Renno – Stonegard – Aece
80 Thief – 80 Warrior – 80 Guardian – 80 Ranger
80 Mesmer – 80 Necromancer
80 Thief – 80 Warrior – 80 Guardian – 80 Ranger
80 Mesmer – 80 Necromancer
How much damage does any melee class lose to a moving target. Just as you need to pick the right weapon for the job, one needs to pick the right pet for the job.
Most classes (not the necro mind you) have gap closers, to add to cripple, chill, and immobilize to stay on target, not to mention stuns. Unfortunately the pets do not have this available to them for the most part.
One cripple will take a pet out of the fight for the entire duration. Pet’s unless you’re running Bear, can not cure themselves. These are only the beginning of the problems that exist against a good player. I rarely, if ever get hit by a pet.
There are attack skills and spells that have long animations or cast time which may cause you to miss a target. regardless of how much damge they do you would not include these in a damge test unless you could ensure you could hit the target with them.
Run around in the world, around the pets you have. I can gather an ungodly amount of spiders, or drakes for example, and never suffer damage, or get hit by their abilities. This fact alone cracked me up about the horrible AI this game has. Hell, I can solo Champions with multiple classes, which are easier to kill than most normal mobs in Everquest I. This is 2013, right? <laughs>
While pets do have issue with moving targets you can help them hit the target by using the right pets and specs. Increase their speed or crit damage. Even apply more condtions with them to make up for when they are not actually hitting them.
While this might work in PvE, this only works in WvW when you’re facing a novice player. More skilled players will easily handle the pet(s), and never get hit by them. See my first paragraph to understand why. Even worse, most pets hit for such low damages, it is laughable at best.
Pets are an extention of the ranger. They work together to accomplish a task.
Getting the pet to work with you, with this horrible AI, is harder than pulling teeth. The AI is worse than games released in the mid 90s, and this should never happen in any turn of the century game.
In a real situation the pet would hit more becuase the ranger would be using cc. The pet are also more likly to land thier cc when master and pets work together.
Maybe against a NPC test dummy, but real players don’t stand still and let the pet hit them, unless they are novice players. In a real situation everyone is moving, everyone is using CC, or condition removal. In WvW with the use of food, you can create a situation where CC lasts less than one second on your toon.
In a real situation rangers switch alot to gain access to more of the pet’s skills and quickness that applies to both. This also puts the pet at your side putting the pet in optimal postion for attack since most of the time your target is the aggressor (benificail side affect of being seen as an underpowered class).
Quickness does not increase movement speed, so if the pet is not hitting, because it was CCd, dodged, stun’d, etcetera, that Quickness is only 50% effective, if you actually were able to make full use of it. Most classes are also ranged, so the pet being at your side is a detriment, not a benefit. You are playing GW2, right? O.O
There is a video floating around with a pet destoying a Heavy golem in 2.5 seconds. While this result isnt the average it does show it can be achieved and that without spending sometime in the class you would get those types of results.
Show me this post BETA video. I remember one being shown in BETA, before the Ranger got nerfed.
Renno – Stonegard – Aece
80 Thief – 80 Warrior – 80 Guardian – 80 Ranger
80 Mesmer – 80 Necromancer
80 Thief – 80 Warrior – 80 Guardian – 80 Ranger
80 Mesmer – 80 Necromancer
Anet’s defination of a ranger involves using pets to distract enemies while you strike safely from a distance. This means rangers are meant to be range experts b/c our pets can grab and HOLD aggro. Unfortunately this is false as I have yet to see my pet grab and hold aggro vs npc’s beyond one hit. By then the npc is on his way to attack me and I didn’t even fire one shot. This begs the question why have the pet if it can’t even hold aggro for a ranged class. If I have to use moblity to run around and evade all my targets in order to survive then why bother creating a ranged expert class. Rangers wear medium armor so allowing anyone to get into melee range means that we failed to accomplish our role as ranged experts, or more precisely our PETS failed to do their job by holding aggro. As for the role of pets in WvW…..plz lets not even go there, if anyone sneezes to hard in WvW our pets die. How anyone can still defend the role of ranger pets in this game is beyond me. And plz no l2p noob answers. Thx
Freyja Ernouf
lvl 80 Ranger
JQ
lvl 80 Ranger
JQ
i think right now pet damage is balanced around the fact that they miss often, so if they made them stick to the target they would have to drop their damage, so it makes no real difference imho.
In fact, this way rewards good players who can increase the chances their pet will land a hit.
Unfortunately this is false as I have yet to see my pet grab and hold aggro vs npc’s beyond one hit. By then the npc is on his way to attack me and I didn’t even fire one shot.
Seriously? I don’t find this at all in PvE. If I let my pet go in first and do one or two hits before I start shooting / throwing axes, they tend to hold aggro until I switch them out. (Or until they die, if I’m being bad) If pets couldn’t do that for me, I couldn’t use shortbow because flanking would be far more difficult.
As for the topic overall: I’ll admit I don’t see it much in PvE, but I agree it’s there. I’m a bit surprised moving auto-attacks aren’t a thing… If that’s too difficult to do properly, maybe increasing the range of melee attacks or something? Keep the coding to have the pet move in close and it could improve accuracy.
Mixing insults with your post is like pooping in a salad.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
Yes, Pet mechanics and usefulness overall is very very weak.
Pet’s in WvW is literally worthless…
Pets miss often. Too often if 50% of the rangers damage is assigned to them. Especially too often if you are forced to play with one and 50% of your traits are assigned to them and 30% of your skills are assigned to them.
Rangers upfront damage almost seems to support their pets. It should be the other way round.
Warriors and thieve’s can use bow AoE whilst moving on the fly. Rangers end their AoE (Singular..they only have one.) Attack if they move. Who else in game should excel at bows if not the ranger?
Rangers need to use 25 points to get the piercing ability. Necromancer’s get it for free just using a staff. The necro staff will also out damage the ranger bow. This is a direct disparity of skill parity between classes.
Many will argue that the low damage of bow is due to how fast a ranger can fire it. In damage testing a thief will out damage a ranger with the same spec placements with shortbow. So rate of fire is not the problem here. Rangers take 10 arrows to do what others can do in 5 damage wise.
Rangers only deal bleed damage consistently. Game mechanics will generally make condition removal remove the most stacked, then the longest duration conditions. This makes the rangers lack luster damage even worse. After moving constantly to get a viable amount of conditions stacked, they are can be removed in one go.
Rangers lack any form of invulnerability. Mesmers have sword skills to provide this. Thief has stealth. Guardian has heals and aggressive refrain. Ele’s have stone flesh and mistform. Necro has death shroud..again this is disparity between classes. Other classes has givens that the ranger just hasn’t been given at all.
Others classes pets reliably hit their mark. Guardians spirit weapons virtually never miss. Minions reliably stick to their target. Mesmer clones reliably stick to their target. Even the rock dog from ogre runes reliably sticks to its target. Thief companions reliably stick to their target. These pets are instacast abilities. The rangers pet will often stop to text message friends first when given a target it seems.
Rangers don’t stack boons efficiently. Why can others such as warrior or ele effectively stack might into the high teens and rangers can only manage to get 3 stacks at most? Again..class disparity.
This list could go on. However the coup d’ gras is simply that when approaching a capture point solo and you discover their is already another solo class defending..most people will;
warrior=watch for cripples and massive burst
engineer=be mindful of a lot of turrets and where you position yourself
necro= I hope i have enough condition removal
mesmer=try to find the clone that is kiting..that’s most likely the human player
thief=get blocks ready for unstealthing and keep your evade trigger ready
Guardian= I hope I enough DPS to beat this person and not just leave a dent
Ranger= I’ve got this one in the bag. I’m feeling good about this one.
I personally think this is an opportunity for game developers to look forward to. How can we bring something distinctly unique that is on par with some of the outstanding work we have done with our other clases?..cuz lets face it. “Ranger shoot bow and pet attacks.” Well, considering the mantra of gw2 was to break the M.M.O molds and to get rid of the trinity and all the other huff and puff they gave..rangers have been played this way for the last 40 years in role play style games. There is nothing new, interesting or engaging with the ranger..bow, pet, traps..wow..that is so innovative..not.
The pet is the ranger’s defining mechanic. Yet, it is so uselessly designed within the game. Why remove the ability for us to revive our pets? Why is there no “stow pet” for dungeon traps and mechanics? Cough. Jade Maw. Why does the pet have stupidly long cast times/auto attack times, and are rooted while executing them? They should be able to do everything while moving, just like the ranger.
If the pet is such an integral part of being a ranger, why is there such a small amount of weapon skills that actually relate to the pet? As for traits, some of those should not even be traits. 30% increased move speed? That should be default. Natural Healing? That should be an added and scaled side effect of speccing into BM.
Don’t get me started on the AI. The new AI that makes pets try to flank opponents actually decreases my pet’s hit rate, since he now charges at the player, only to occasionally take another walk and try to go behind the player, at which point the player has already moved…
I honestly think they took a step backwards compared to GW1 pets. Sure, both versions have terrible AI, but at least GW1 pets had some personality. They took time to charm, had much more choice with how you could build skills around them, and even grew in size as they became stronger. GW2 has streamlined the whole system to oblivion.
Give a more unique progression for pets. Give compensation for the eternally terrible AI (AOE reduction for starters). The “class mechanics” of GW2 are so unbalanced it’s pretty crazy.
Pets miss often. Too often if 50% of the rangers damage is assigned to them. Especially too often if you are forced to play with one and 50% of your traits are assigned to them and 30% of your skills are assigned to them.
Not really. In Pve, mobs mainly stand still so your pet will hit like 99% of the time. In PvP, pets are already considered as OP (see SPvP forum) so I don’t see it as a problem if some of their attack miss against a moving target.
Rangers upfront damage almost seems to support their pets. It should be the other way round.
Although it is probably something more like 70% damage from the ranger and 30% from the pet, I still agree they should tone down the damage of the pet and give some to the ranger instead.
Warriors and thieve’s can use bow AoE whilst moving on the fly. Rangers end their AoE (Singular..they only have one.) Attack if they move. Who else in game should excel at bows if not the ranger?
Agreed. The longbow is completely subpar atm and should be improved (and given more aoe).
Rangers need to use 25 points to get the piercing ability. Necromancer’s get it for free just using a staff. The necro staff will also out damage the ranger bow. This is a direct disparity of skill parity between classes.
Piercing Arrows only requires 20 points and not 25. The necromancer still need to spend 10 points to get the staff usable (enlarged and unblokable marks) and it’s far from outdamaging the ranger bow (by bow I mean shortbow of course). It has better Aoe, it’s a given, but far less utility and conditions.
Many will argue that the low damage of bow is due to how fast a ranger can fire it. In damage testing a thief will out damage a ranger with the same spec placements with shortbow. So rate of fire is not the problem here. Rangers take 10 arrows to do what others can do in 5 damage wise.
This, again, is a very biased view : of course the thief will outdamage ranger when bursting , that’s what they are made for (even if currently the warrior are better at doing so), they also have less life and initiative to compensate. However, ranger has far more sustained damage than the thief and will totally overwhelm him on the long run (again, see damage compares in the SPvP forum)
Rangers only deal bleed damage consistently. Game mechanics will generally make condition removal remove the most stacked, then the longest duration conditions. This makes the rangers lack luster damage even worse. After moving constantly to get a viable amount of conditions stacked, they are can be removed in one go.
This isn’t true, rangers are among the professions able to deliver the wider range of conditions. Of course we have an easy access to bleed, but also to poison ( SB 2, axe 2, sword 3 , dagger 4, viper nest , all spiders , marsh drakes, murrellows, carrion devourers) and we have a decent access to burning (both torch skills, fire trap, salamander drakes, sun spirit – even if honestly the last two are sub-par) and to chill. Vulnerability and weakness aren’t really hard to get to cover up our ocnditions either.
Rangers lack any form of invulnerability. Mesmers have sword skills to provide this. Thief has stealth. Guardian has heals and aggressive refrain. Ele’s have stone flesh and mistform. Necro has death shroud..again this is disparity between classes. Other classes has givens that the ranger just hasn’t been given at all.
So what are “Protect Me” and traited “Signet of Stone”, both are ~6s invulnerability. Some professions would kill to get such damage mitigation. We also have a lot of evades (SB 3, GS 1, S1&3, D4, LR…)
Others classes pets reliably hit their mark. Guardians spirit weapons virtually never miss. Minions reliably stick to their target. Mesmer clones reliably stick to their target. Even the rock dog from ogre runes reliably sticks to its target. Thief companions reliably stick to their target. These pets are instacast abilities. The rangers pet will often stop to text message friends first when given a target it seems.
Then why beastmaster builds are considered as the best build around in current sPvP meta ?
Rangers don’t stack boons efficiently. Why can others such as warrior or ele effectively stack might into the high teens and rangers can only manage to get 3 stacks at most? Again..class disparity.
This is a true statement. We don’t have a large access to boon, and the ones we have a pretty lacklusters. Due to our spirits being as tough as a ill rabbit, the only decent boon-based build is the perma-regen tank ranger. When you see how easy it is for other professions (who said warrior?) to stack might or fury we could expect the same for rangers.
This list could go on. However the coup d’ gras is simply that when approaching a capture point solo and you discover their is already another solo class defending..most people will;
warrior=watch for cripples and massive burst
engineer=be mindful of a lot of turrets and where you position yourself
necro= I hope i have enough condition removal
mesmer=try to find the clone that is kiting..that’s most likely the human player
thief=get blocks ready for unstealthing and keep your evade trigger ready
Guardian= I hope I enough DPS to beat this person and not just leave a dent
Ranger= I’ve got this one in the bag. I’m feeling good about this one.
So, now you’re talking bout SPvP.
Currently it’s more ike :
warrior= easy fight, evade his stun/immo – 100b combo and burst him down in no time
engineer= this one might be tough, if you play a trap ranger try to set your traps both on him and his turrets and if BM, hide yourself from the turret while your pet tears him down
necro= easy fight, even downed you can kill him
mesmer=this one can be tricky if you play BM, but once your pet focus the real one it should be good. Piec of cake for trappers
thief= LR as soon as he stones you then nuke him down, it should take approximatively 5 sec to kill him. I wish there were more of them in tourneys
Guardian= Boring. Be patient and he should die……eventually.
Ranger= Mirror build are a metter of skills, trappers vs BM should give the upper hand to BM.
it really is easy to fix rangers… just rename the class to “beastmaster” and we re done…
If you run beastmaster, your job is to slow the target for pet hits. That is the mechanic, deal with it using muddy terrain or something.
Tin Foil Hat Hearer »—> Ranger Extraordinaire »—> “Be like water…”
It’s 2013 now and some people are still making up excuses for them not managing to come up with ai that can hit while moving :P
Pets are not as bad as some people make them out to be but come on , as a ‘triple A’ mmo but that’s pretty brutal.
All is vain.
it’s really lame when something like animations are holding back an entire mechanic..
the only reason we will never see a change to this is it will cost more time/effort to change the animations to make rangers happy only to have the rest of the community cry that they cant dance around our pets anymore..
You are spot on, OP.
With regards to giving the pet more movement speed, this won’t actually work. The problem is that they stop to perform an action and as long as the target is running at normal combat speed, the pet will miss. The game doesn’t determine if it’s going to be a hit or miss based on range until the end of the cast to allow the target to get out of harms way in the cast time. If there were no cast times, we would never be able to time dodges and evades.
As players, there are some moves we can perform while we run (I can run while I auto attack) and there are some moves we can’t move to perform (if you move while barrage is casting, it’ll cancel the cast and cut the duration short).
When it comes to a pounce, I can understand the pet stopping first then jumping. Mind you the jump should be far enough to cover the distance that opened up between the pet and target provided that;
A. The initial distance was melee range, and
B. The target is not moving any faster than normal combat speed.
However, there are other attacks that should be performed while on the move just as players do.
Or if the pet has to stop, then they can change what determines a hit or miss.
Is the target within range when the attack started casting?
Did the target dodge, block, evade, etc. during the cast time?
If the first answer is yes, proceed to second question. If no, then the attack missed.
If the second answer is yes, then the attack missed. If no, then the attack hit.
Pet’s still stop to perform actions, players can still use their dodge and evades, and pets no longer miss when they shouldn’t be.
As for kiting, this is a matter of staying far enough ahead so that the pet doesn’t try to perform the action or if it does perform the action (F2 ability) then you just answered no to the first question above and the attack misses.
._. incoming leash nerf if ANET removes the BM/cripple/chill mechanic and replaces it with every pet running max speed and landing every hit (within 600 range) in 3, 2, 1, ….
Is that what you heathens want? Lol
Tin Foil Hat Hearer »—> Ranger Extraordinaire »—> “Be like water…”
It is unfortunately true, anet must consider the ranger a failed class due to the pet mechanic. Resolving the issue with pets is also sadly beyond the scope of anets team. They had years of development, untold months of beta and how many months since release and have not yet managed to get them working. They need to buddy up with some blizzard coders (as much as I hate to say it).
Of course they can always prove me wrong and hot patch the pets.
Would be nice if pets had instant attacks none of this poorly coded ai stop initiate miss crap we have currently and they should have a speed boost as well since we are forced to have the pet with the ranger.
Pets will never be fixed until birds can fly and spiders can climb.