Guild Wars 2

Minus the fact that pets can’t hit moving targets; an easy way to fix the current situation in dungeon/pve is to make them 80% immune to AoE damage. But this solution would make PvP pets a bit OP and a simple solution to that is to lower their health to compensate. That would make them a bit more squishy in PVP with direct damage but more able to stand up to aoe.

I know others have mentioned this and I just find it hard to believe that we have to reinvent how pets work when compared to other games of this genre.

Honestly this seems a pretty easy solution in code “if(damage == aoe)”.

Not sure about how easily pets die in pvp since I haven’t played it much. But as for dungeons, how about adding aoe mitigation for dungeons only, since that’s seems to be were most struggle with their pets in regards to survivability.
Something that triggers upon entering a dungeon, and wears off as you leave the dungeon again. Perhaps a pet/minion specific boon of some sort.
For starters, why not simply give them a permanent protection boon when in a dungeon, to see if that would help things a bit.

I mostly tend to go with ranged pets in dungeons these days, but would love if the melee pets were a bit more viable as well.

Don’t make it overly complicated. AoE mitigation works well in other MMOs with pets and it does not become overpowered in PvP. A player has the ability to remove himself from an AoE and react accordingly (that isn’t to say they will or how quickly they might). A pet, on the other hand, is a “dumb A.I.” and must be told to remove itself from such situations. To account for this, a “buffer” is often given to these pet-professions to allow the player time to issue an order to retreat the pet. Currently, the time it takes to remove a pet from rampant AoEs is too short, especially in high latency situations where abilities might be delayed between the client and server. This results in the player unwittingly losing a core mechanic to their class.

In these other MMOs, direct damage is still the same on the pets, only the AoEs are passively mitigated. If a Ranger’s pet proves to be a threat to a group, focus firing will result in the same consequence – one dead pet.

The solution is simple for both PvP and PvE: pets take reduced AoE damage. Don’t get excited and think that I’m suggesting something in the range of 80% damage reduction. If the developers take this idea and run with it, I expect them to come up with a percentage that is balanced and fair, challenging but not overwhelming.

meh…not only this, but flat out the HP AND armor of many pets need to be “looked at” and by that i mostly mean in-kittening-creased.

pig pets are complete dogkitten from top to bottom. to the Anet dev who made these, you literally wasted that stretch of your life working on them.

bears are among the only decent pets, by this i mean will come out of fights alive. that’s because they have a disproportionate amount of vitality. what needs to be done is increase the base toughness of bears, jellyfish, drakes and pigs to be at least on par with the devourers(this is the most useless pet, but has the most armor…why? not to mention it does not fight in melee).

pets with screech/roar/howl abilities should have these skills treated as shouts for cast time and animation…as in you can use it while running, NO animation at all and instant cast.

feline pets need to apply weakness on critical.

Yeah I haven’t done too much PvP to see what type of survivability/balance pets have, but I agree with all these posts and it seems fairly straightforward. But again, we haven’t heard anything in these forums in a good while from Anet so still not sure what is going on.

IMHO, A-Net tried so hard to make new mechanics and be different, they left the good parts of “WoW-era” MMOs behind.

Having played a Hunter for 3 years (end of BC to mid-cata), Ranger pets really feel like a step backwards. The issue is A-Net is treating pets with the same ideals as professions, when they both behave very differently. It makes sense on paper that high-DPS like cats should be super-squishy, like how high-DPS builds have low survivability. However, a player can react to his environment. He can dodge roll, move out of AoEs, or use skills like evades to defend himself. Pets can’t do any of that.

That’s why I honestly believe WoW did pets right. They were designed to work within their design. Pets can’t behave like players, so why should they be balanced like one? The AoE resist is the most obvious feature, but there were some other great things. For one, both DPS pet “types” (WoW pets had seperate talents/traits, another great feature) had a passive run speed bonus and gap closer available relatively easily in their talent trees, meaning anyone could take it without having to devote their points into a different tree. WoW pets were also much, much tankier. Even the relatively squishy DPS pets had comparable tankiness to GW2’s Bear (Actual Tank pets were a tad more durable and had some tanking skills).

Now, while GW2 made some great things happen with pets (having more than 3 types and ranged pets is amazing), they could learn from the past. Adding the AoE resist is going to be a must at some point, but added speed and health buffs would be great.

@DoomBunny great post yeah I agree having also played a hunter in WoW. Hunter pets initially was in the same situation with aoe damage and was fixed later.

I am glad you mentioned the fact they actually can’t dodge / roll good point.

@Doombunny, as for the AoE yes for the love of god… pleeeeeeease give us that… but for the health and speed… i think they already run faster (they ran 25% faster then players in GW1 by default i’m assuming it’s the same IE they run faster then players by default) but they need to keep the health relatively the same, the only thing i’ve seen my pet die from is tons of AoE, or tanking svanir… but mostly the former… not to mention that our pets hit A LOT harder then they do in WoW and just about every other game i’ve seen… i mean cmon, the more sturdy pets hit for like 1.5k per hit, god knows what’ll happen to you if you get immobed while a fully buffed cat is mauling your face….

Honestly if they allow F2 skills to cancel current attack animations and let them attack while moving, the only thing they’ll need to fix is letting them drop down from high platforms to low platforms and voila—pets are fixed.

Then all they have left is the rest of the mess that we’re dealing with regarding weapon damage, traits and 1/3 of our utility skills being completely and utterly useless (looking at you spirits).

The best thing they can do is remove pets and turn them instead into a bunch of utility like skills (like the Hunters Call that summons Hawks).

Make a bunch of the animal types into these type of skills..example would be a Utility Skill that summons a bear to tank/take damage for you for a short period of time the. You can also make a few Elite…like a skill called ‘Pack of Wolves’ that summons a wolf pack (like the elite skill ‘Guild of Thieves’ for Thieves)

You could also do something like Engineer Turrets where you can summon pets but they are basically the same as turrets. You can spec into the tree to strength your pet but you don’t have to go that route. So instead of Turrets, the Ranger would have various ‘pets’ that function like a turret. You could have say birds that fly around and heal you and your allies (like a healing turret), you could have cats that attack (like a dps turrent), you could have spiders that entrap (like a net turret) and so on.

You can even do more of the abilities like they have now with things like Serpant Strike, Hornet Strike and make more.

Having one class so reliant on Pet/AI mechanics is just a bad idea overall. I bet many would go the ‘petless’ route if it was an option.

And for those that want pets, then let them go the pet route and spec into the tree.

Also, Rangers should be able to use rifles and guns. They are considered marksmen. At least make an XBOW for them.

I think pets survivability has a good direction overall.
Wait, wait, hear me out.

I agree there is this need to make sure pets have enough survivability that people who don’t invest in pets feel like their profession mechanic isn’t useless. On the other hand, there does need to be recognizable rewards for investing into pets. And, largely I think these two seemingly conflicted desires are handled pretty elegantly with the gameplay split.

There seems to be two major ways to play the profession mechanic, the sustained ally gameplay people are familiar with from other MMORPGs, and a swap-style gameplay. The main difference between these two is how much survivability and control you have over your pet, which to me, makes alot of sense. With high pet investment your pet is around long enough to do the micromanaging gameplay you were obviously seeking with that investment. With low pet investment your pet doesn’t survive too well in harder content, but it’s basically incidental because your main drive is swapping a pet to circumvent it’s cooldowns and you only need it around long enough to use those. All told, I think this is pretty clever.

That’s not to say, I don’t think there’s some hiccups in the execution or potential improvements.

Anyone with MMORPG experience comes into this with the expectation that the gameplay of a pet class should be the former as a default. So the fact swapping gameplay is sort of the standard for dungeons is something of a stigma right out of the gate. Also, it’s kind of hard to figure out how to achieve the classic sustained pet gameplay in “harder” content. Unlike Swapping gameplay, which has solid early level gains and clear benefits spelled out in minor traits, the benefits of a sustained ally and how to abuse them is less explicitly written and difficult to manage in ‘harder’ content until endgame (because it doesn’t feel like it’s paying off comparatively until you’ve got the traits and stats to back it up). It’s not something you’ll just stumble upon, it’s the sort of thing you need to be purposefully trying to discover. Another thing that makes it tricky is the transition from open-world to dungeon content, because Swapping gameplay and Sustaining gameplay kind of trade places as the standard. There isn’t anything that helps indicate the switch and imply that the sustainable pet gameplay still exists in some form if you build for it, all you really know is that you were previously doing in open-world just suddenly doesn’t work anymore, so it’s just as easy to believe it’s off the table entirely.

There’s also the trouble of pet selection, as the sustained gameplay in harder content has a naturally more limited selection compared to swap gameplay. I kind of wish some traits and utilities gave their benefits in ways that were statistics neutral or worked towards homogenizing statistics (signet of stone made your pet reach a fixed toughness, instead of adding the same toughness for all pets).

/edit: Wasn’t clear what part of the game I was talking about. Too general, sorry about that.