Guild Wars 2

- – - Warning: There have been reports of pets doing less damage since the last patch. This data is based upon tests performed before the patch, so I cannot confirm if this is consistent with the current state of the game – - -

So, ranger pet DPS isn’t a new topic and the comparison isn’t unknown, but I like Excel and I like to see my numbers in a good layout for comparison, so I went to the mists and recorded how long it took for each of the pet types to take down a golem and put the numbers up in Excel. Here are the basic parameters I used for my test:

1) The first comparison was with a 10 point BM investment and the second was a 30 point BM investment.

2) I chose the pets with F2 abilities that increase their personal DPS the most out of their family when applicable. I tested beforehand to find the highest dps F2 abilities. I didn’t use the F2 for any moa since confusion does nothing to a target golem and the time that it takes to cast Fury on a red moa offsets any dps gain from the boon.

3) For bird pets, I started the timer after they cast their first swiftness since they don’t really start attacking when you send them in until after they cast this.

4) The golem of choice was the Heavy golem since it survives longer and is more likely to give precise results

5) Also, the Arctodus was the only pet that had its F2 ability used twice in the tests since it took so long to take the golem down.

6) Numbers are the average of 5 tests for each entry. Tests against the moving golem had 10 trials averaged since there was a larger degree of variance.

Update 2/20 – Updated with tests of underwater pets. Note that the Devourer in the water tests is a Whiptail instead of a Lakittenail since the Lakittenail F2 does no damage underwater.

Underwater Pets Notes
So, after testing underwater pets, there were some interesting finds. Most noteable of this was that amphibious pets perform different than out of water. This would be expected to some extent for some pets since there are some pet abilities that are modified for underwater, such as Drake F2 abilities, but even when there was no change to abilities, some pets just performed differently.

The jaguar a bit did less dps, which was particularly strange to me since there was nothing really different about the way it acted. Drakes made sense since they would back away from targets, then charge them before casting Tail Swipe, which meant they spent a lot of time moving instead of dpsing. Devourers simply seem to have a faster rate of attack.

Also surprising was how Armor Fish and Sharks performed. I expected Sharks to be high dps, but unless you spam their F2 on cooldown, they’re lower dps than Armor Fish. This was likely because sharks also did a weird pathing thing like drakes where they ran away from the target, then ran back before casting an ability.

I have to admit, that out of the tests I’ve done so far, this has probably changed what pets I will use the most. As much as I like Jellyfish utility and their high burst F2, I’ll probably be running with an Armor Fish and a Lakittenail Devourer now (Lakittenails’ F2 doesn’t deal extra damage underwater, but it does stun, which is pretty awesome for control).

I like the spreadsheet. Great way to show best case scenario dps with a stationary target. How many times did you do the test with each pet? Just once or is this an average of “X” number of times? Also, you should do the same test on the moving golem that’s running around the pillar/rock. The results are significantly different and may surprise you.

I didn’t test all pets multiple times since I just did this quickly before heading to work, but I tested most at least 2 times and I didn’t get much of a variance.

But yea, there are some small factors that can make a big difference for some pets. I mean, if the golem had 10% more health, than some of these pets may have gotten in another big attack off cooldown which may have made them significantly stronger.

Oh yea, as an additional note, I didn’t use the hyena for canine F2 testing since the dps was actually lower with that pet due to hyenas having half as much power as other canines.

Dahkeus.8243:

4) The golem of choice was the Heavy golem since it survives longer and is more likely to give precise results.

Do note that boars and cats have bleed effects on their regular skills. Arctodus, hawks and eagles, and lash tails (filter won’t let me type that as one word) have bleed effects on their F2 skills.

Bleed ignores armor, so when testing on the heavy golem it will give these pets a bigger advantage relative to the other pets than they would have against lower armor.

Solandri.9640:

Dahkeus.8243:

4) The golem of choice was the Heavy golem since it survives longer and is more likely to give precise results.

Do note that boars and cats have bleed effects on their regular skills. Arctodus, hawks and eagles, and lash tails (filter won’t let me type that as one word) have bleed effects on their F2 skills.

Bleed ignores armor, so when testing on the heavy golem it will give these pets a bigger advantage relative to the other pets than they would have against lower armor.

Good point. I edited my post to include this.

Interesting results.. pretty much agrees with the consensus that cats are the best offensive pet. What surprised me though is that drakes and birds are pretty close both in F2 and non-F2 categories.

Hope you can expand your tests so we can get more informed choices when picking pets

great data +1, would love to see similar results against the wandering golem :P

Can you test Lynx and Hawk as well separately?

Dps test vs a moving target would be nice. Tested with and without cc. Aswell as with and without a speed buff. Vs a moving target I think the ranking would be pretty much the same when both speed buffs and cc are used. I would be surprised if the speed was drasticly different as well.

Updated the data. I reran everything with a 30 BM trait investment. The most interesting thing I found was that the Lightning Breath seems to scale the best of all F2 abilities. However, it should be noted that because of this, I got a wide range of data for the Lightning Drake test with F2. Results were between 18 seconds and 10 seconds whereas most others only had a difference of a few seconds.

@ Wanderer – Great idea. I’ll do this on the next update.

@ Ensoriki – I’ll try to do this on a later update as well.

@Dahkeus great find!! And keep in mind that the salamander drake actually has THE HIGHEST breathe attack of all the drakes (unless the river drakes bounces between 2 targets, then i think he pulls ahead, or if the reef drake gets confusion up against some trigger happy people).

Could you test this with the Malicious and/or Condi Damage traits? I know the shark especially with those 2 traits makes his kill time almost 1/4 of what it is without them.

ugh…well this game isn’t fun anymore.

forced to use cat from now on =(

Love it, thanks for the data.

Ok, I updated with data on moving targets.

@ Durzilla: Yea, I tested a bit between Lightning Drake and Salamander at first and chose the Lightning Drake since he came out ahead…but yea, it was from targets bouncing, lol. I might redo some of the data later on with the Salamander instead, but I need a break from testing for now.

@ Methal: Cats look good here, but remember that they have totally inferior numbers for defensive stats and realistically won’t survive a lot of situations. After all, a dead pet does no dps. This is why I tend to choose canines for most all around situations.

Do it again against moving targets and see those numbers shrink to 10%.

jubskie.3152:

Interesting results.. pretty much agrees with the consensus that cats are the best offensive pet. What surprised me though is that drakes and birds are pretty close both in F2 and non-F2 categories.

Hope you can expand your tests so we can get more informed choices when picking pets

The thing to consider however is the Drake can hit multiple targets with not only its bite but its tail and the F2 on the River Drake will chain through multiple targets.

In a tightly packed mob the bite might register 400-600 on two targets and the tail swipe +2K on 3 or more.

On a single target a Bird or Cat is useful but if there’s a mob bring out the Drake.

So, I’m curious. Is there much interest in getting something like this for underwater pets?

Methal.9045:

ugh…well this game isn’t fun anymore.

forced to use cat from now on =(

That’s mostly based on DPS. Play around with the F2 skills on different pets. Nearly all of them have situations where they’ll excel. I started a new ranger and was running with the jungle stalker (AOE might), with river drake as a backup. But after Dahkeus mentioned how well its F2 lightning did, I gave it a shot (I’d basically been ignoring F2 on the drake because of the long cast time). OMG. At level 21 with 10 BM and a partial master’s bond stack it can almost single-handedly kill two level 24 ettins with a single breath. Lightning breath, a tail swipe, and one regular attack = two dead ettins. It’s replaced the cat as my #1 pet.

Some notable F2 skills I’ve found:
Black bear: AOE weakness for 10 sec
Brown bear: AOE condition removal
Murellow: AOE poison cloud
Boars: not F2, but one of the regular skills is an AOE knockdown
Fern hound: AOE regenerate
Hyena: summon another hyena, for when you need another cannon fodder body
Carrion devourer: ranged AOE poison cloud
River drake: 5 pulses of bouncing lightning (each hits 3 times with 2+ targets)
Jungle stalker: 5 stacks of might for 5 sec (bug: gives 10 stacks underwater)
Jaguar: stealth for 3 sec (all attacks during that 3 sec will critical)
Red moa: AOE fury, 15 sec
Jungle spider: 2 sec immobilize

There’s a lot here to like. The cats are like shortbow’s autoattack – extremely high DPS, but only against a single target. If you want AOE or utility, the other pets easily beat the cats.

Thanks for the info. I greatly appreciate this.

Could you do a comparison where you keep cripple on the moving golem? I’d hope that the dps increases decently with a crippled golem.

Sebrent.3625:

Thanks for the info. I greatly appreciate this.

Could you do a comparison where you keep cripple on the moving golem? I’d hope that the dps increases decently with a crippled golem.

Hmm, I’m not sure how I could keep much uptime on cripple without causing damage to the golem with something other than the pet. The canine test was probably the closest to what you’re looking for since canines put up cripple as one of their natural abilities along with the knockdown, which is why they have such strong damage on the moving golem.

Perhaps using steady weapons and turning off auto-attacks?
Or maybe a frost trap?

Wow. It’s amazing to see how much simple straight-line movement can reduce the damage output for our pets.

Seras.5702:

Wow. It’s amazing to see how much simple straight-line movement can reduce the damage output for our pets.

Yeah, and it gets worse even with snares agains’t half competent player targets damage output will be closer to 0.

Keys A and D are the ultimate pet counter.

@ Sebrant: I’ll consider looking into that, but I think underwater pets and/or land pets with F2 abilities that snare against the moving golem may be my next tests.

Seras.5702:

Wow. It’s amazing to see how much simple straight-line movement can reduce the damage output for our pets.

The difference you see here isn’t from straight-line movement. The moving golem runs around in semi-random movement around a pillar. If you took out the pillar alone, you probably wouldn’t see much dps loss at all from ranged pets and even some non-ranged pets would be more likely to land certain attacks.

So, I’m about halfway done testing underwater pets to compare dps and it’s interesting.

Some of the land pets that have the same skills underwater have different dps than when they’re on land. For example, I’m finding the jaguar doing slightly lower dps while the devourer is doing a good bit more. Also, it’s not looking good for the shark, while the armor fish is a lot more beastly than I would have expected.

Hopefully I’ll have the update posted tomorrow morning.

Updated with underwater pet tests.

Sweet, sweet data. Amazing post. I’ve been using Armourfish for a while, this confirms what i suspected – he is a beast, the only downside is he can’t chase ppl out of the water when you’re sitting comfortably capping a point.

Actually, sharks kill faster than every other pet underwater if you have rending attacks and the + condi damage trait, they are a very condition oriented pet, another thing I found is that sharks (and drakes) hit players A LOT better than the other pets do due to all their movement, where a totally stationary mob, like the golems, freaks out their AI and makes them perform at a lower lv.

Durzlla.6295:

Actually, sharks kill faster than every other pet underwater if you have rending attacks and the + condi damage trait, they are a very condition oriented pet, another thing I found is that sharks (and drakes) hit players A LOT better than the other pets do due to all their movement, where a totally stationary mob, like the golems, freaks out their AI and makes them perform at a lower lv.

Yeah that’s what I always felt too, it’s basically a wolf with bleeds if I could have bleed on the wolf I would go for double canines in notime.

Considering the higher power of canines vs felines, it would be interesting to see what the result would be with more or less constant fury up from warhorn and weapon swap!

Durzlla.6295:

Actually, sharks kill faster than every other pet underwater if you have rending attacks and the + condi damage trait, they are a very condition oriented pet, another thing I found is that sharks (and drakes) hit players A LOT better than the other pets do due to all their movement, where a totally stationary mob, like the golems, freaks out their AI and makes them perform at a lower lv.

I’ve never tested the dps of my pets, but just playing I’ve always felt that shark burns enemies down faster than any other aquatic pet. Squishier for sure, but a bleeding Shark frenzy is awesome.

Too bad there’s not an moving golem underwater. =(

Dahkeus.8243:

Too bad there’s not an moving golem underwater. =(

It is kinda upsetting, there’s plenty of room for one to be down there =(.

Seras.5702:

Durzlla.6295:

Actually, sharks kill faster than every other pet underwater if you have rending attacks and the + condi damage trait, they are a very condition oriented pet, another thing I found is that sharks (and drakes) hit players A LOT better than the other pets do due to all their movement, where a totally stationary mob, like the golems, freaks out their AI and makes them perform at a lower lv.

I’ve never tested the dps of my pets, but just playing I’ve always felt that shark burns enemies down faster than any other aquatic pet. Squishier for sure, but a bleeding Shark frenzy is awesome.

Oh, btw the F2 on the shark and QZ stack with each other making him just shred people and put up a TON of bleeding (2 per attack via frenzy + 1 per crit = devastating).

Dahkeus.8243:

Ok, I updated with data on moving targets.

@ Methal: Cats look good here, but remember that they have totally inferior numbers for defensive stats and realistically won’t survive a lot of situations. After all, a dead pet does no dps. This is why I tend to choose canines for most all around situations.

Dahkeus incredibly useful info thanks very much; based on your research I think I’m going to compromise: keep Jaguar and pair him with a single Canine.

Questions:

1. Which Canine did you use for the tests?;
2. Which Canine do you recommend or use yourself in WvW (Alpine Wolf, Fern Hound, Krytan Drakehound, or Wolf)?

glock.2089:

Dahkeus.8243:

Ok, I updated with data on moving targets.

@ Methal: Cats look good here, but remember that they have totally inferior numbers for defensive stats and realistically won’t survive a lot of situations. After all, a dead pet does no dps. This is why I tend to choose canines for most all around situations.

Dahkeus incredibly useful info thanks very much; based on your research I think I’m going to compromise: keep Jaguar and pair him with a single Canine.

Questions:

1. Which Canine did you use for the tests?;
2. Which Canine do you recommend or use yourself in WvW (Alpine Wolf, Fern Hound, Krytan Drakehound, or Wolf)?

I’m glad this helped! As for your questions:
1) I used a wolf. I admit that I didn’t think to test canine dps with the Alpine Wolf, but I may do that later.
2) Personally I lik the wolf for most situations where I use a canine. In PvP I often also use a Drakehound, but in PvE I take the wolf since the fear occasionally comes in handy. That being said a fernhound is probably a bit more useful since a fear can be so situational.

Nice!

I think the most telling is the fact that it takes 2x – 3x longer in most cases to kill a moving target, and the moving golem isn’t even “smart”. A human player can extend that advantage even further. And yet, I’ll bet that when Arenanet did their “balancing” of our DPS against other classes, they probably used stationary targets.

NEWSFLASH: MELEE PETS NEED THEIR HITS TO GO OFF FASTER OR A WIDER HIT RANGE! RANGE PET NEEDS MASSIVE PROJECTILE SPEED INCREASE! DEAD PETS DO ZERO DAMAGE AND NEED AN AOE DMG REDUCTION FOR SURVIVABILITY!

Dahkeus.8243:

glock.2089:

Dahkeus.8243:

Ok, I updated with data on moving targets.

@ Methal: Cats look good here, but remember that they have totally inferior numbers for defensive stats and realistically won’t survive a lot of situations. After all, a dead pet does no dps. This is why I tend to choose canines for most all around situations.

Dahkeus incredibly useful info thanks very much; based on your research I think I’m going to compromise: keep Jaguar and pair him with a single Canine.

Questions:

1. Which Canine did you use for the tests?;
2. Which Canine do you recommend or use yourself in WvW (Alpine Wolf, Fern Hound, Krytan Drakehound, or Wolf)?

I’m glad this helped! As for your questions:
1) I used a wolf. I admit that I didn’t think to test canine dps with the Alpine Wolf, but I may do that later.
2) Personally I lik the wolf for most situations where I use a canine. In PvP I often also use a Drakehound, but in PvE I take the wolf since the fear occasionally comes in handy. That being said a fernhound is probably a bit more useful since a fear can be so situational.

Eh Fear and Immob are overrated, now chill, oh god does that make me happy! 66% reduced movement speed and 66% increased recharge time? Yes please!!

Dahkeus.8243:

glock.2089:

Dahkeus.8243:

Ok, I updated with data on moving targets.

@ Methal: Cats look good here, but remember that they have totally inferior numbers for defensive stats and realistically won’t survive a lot of situations. After all, a dead pet does no dps. This is why I tend to choose canines for most all around situations.

Dahkeus incredibly useful info thanks very much; based on your research I think I’m going to compromise: keep Jaguar and pair him with a single Canine.

Questions:

1. Which Canine did you use for the tests?;
2. Which Canine do you recommend or use yourself in WvW (Alpine Wolf, Fern Hound, Krytan Drakehound, or Wolf)?

I’m glad this helped! As for your questions:
1) I used a wolf. I admit that I didn’t think to test canine dps with the Alpine Wolf, but I may do that later.
2) Personally I lik the wolf for most situations where I use a canine. In PvP I often also use a Drakehound, but in PvE I take the wolf since the fear occasionally comes in handy. That being said a fernhound is probably a bit more useful since a fear can be so situational.

I played around with the alpine wolf a bit more and it confirmed what I thought: using the F2 ability decreases dps. It’s still gives you some damage, which other canines (aside from Hyenas) don’t do when they howl, but it’s not worth using in a rotation from a dps standpoint.

As for fear vs immobilize vs chill, there’s no real wrong answer for PvE. With an Alpine Wolf, you have a lower cooldown, some small degree of damage, and a longer duration of condition, but you don’t fully stop your enemy as they can still move and attack. The cooldown reduction also isn’t as great as it sounds since it only reduces the current cooldown time of skills already recharging while the person is chilled. In other words, to quote Gnarf from GW2Wiki: “You use a skill, which now has 10 seconds cooldown. Then, instantly, you get chilled for 6 seconds. After the chill wears off, you have 8 seconds cooldown left.” That’s not a bad thing, but a lot of people mistake the tooltip thinking that the entire cooldown is reduced on enemies instead of just during the 4 seconds when they are chilled. With a wolf, you get a total shutdown of your opponent along with some extra distance from them running away, but there’s no associated damage and the cooldown is significantly longer. The Drakehound has the shortest cooldown of all, but it only stops movement and deals no extra damage.

The reason that the wolf is the PvP king is A) fear prevents stomps, which is huge and isn’t countered by stability. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from taking an alpine wolf or drakehound along with your wolf in PvP.

Regarding the debate with sharks, yes, you can get a substantial dps increase with sharks if you pick up Rending Attacks and Expertise Training, but realistically putting this to use can be tricky since BM builds traditionally aren’t seen as very effective in SPvP and builds that focus on condition damage in PvE are problematic as a result of reaching the cap on stacking bleeds. I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to spec for these talents just so you can use a shark (especially considering how rare underwater combat is comparatively), but if you do have them traited as it is, then yes, consider the shark.

Warning: There have been reports of pets doing less damage since the last patch. This data is based upon tests performed before the patch, so I cannot confirm if this is consistent with the current state of the game