Guild Wars 2

I would love to see some improvement to the ranger’s pet UI. As it is right now we only see…

• Health (green bar, no number total)
• Cooldown on f2 Skill
• Active pet
• Petswap (& cooldown)
• Pet controls

While that’s a decent amount I feel like we could use more. The reason I see for this is since a great deal of our class’s damage and playstyle is based on being two creatures instead of one, we should know the same info about each. If we only know half of the information (or 2/3 since we know our pet’s health) we won’t really be able to play at our best.

So! For that reason I suggest adding..

• Pet Health – Number total
  This will help us gauge how tough or soft some pets are vs. others. We can calculate this via the pet stats page, but it’s impossible (or at least not useful) to find your pet’s exact health mid-combat. Seeing this number will also help us gauge the usefulness of traits that increase our pets stats.
• See what’s effecting our pet, i.e. Boons, conditions, other effects
  This one would be an enormous help. Knowing how many conditions are on your pet may help you decide when to use condition removal skills, or seeing how many stacks of might on your pet would help tell us exactly when to use our pet’s burst skills for the most damage, or to see how much longer the protection on them will last. Even if just this was added I would be a happy ranger!
• Move pet stats to the party section
  Since we’re seeing more about our pet, we should move this info to the party section so we don’t clutter up the bottom of the screen. Then this leaves room for another addition.
• Pet’s skills 1-4.
  Even if we can only use the f2 skill, seeing which skill the pet is using by the skill icon flashing will help us time stuff, as well as seeing which of their skills are off cooldown. I actually like how we can only make them use one skill, but since a few important features for our class (Blast finishers, knockdowns, heals) are tied to pet skills we can’t control it would help to at least see when they are being used or on cooldown.

Well, I need to go to work X_X But I wanted to post this while I had the idea. What do you guys think? Is there anything you’d add?
Thanks for reading

Just logged in to support this.

There’s been post giving these same suggestions, but after a year we still have a very poor pet GUI.

I think the priority is the ability to see what boons and conditions are affecting our pet. We have always had problem maintaining our pet alive, and one of the reasons (among others) is that we have no idea what is affecting our pet at any given time.

It’s also so simple, just add the icons above the pet’s health bar, and done! You have given us a great tool to help us manage our pet.

I really hope ArenaNet implements this in a near future.

Bring back the gw1 pet bar, with clickable skills. Some pets have additonal effects on basic attacks that we are unable to chose when activated. Spiders for example can immobilise, but we have no way to tell it to do so and have to resort to hoping the pet does this attack at an opportune time.

@ Lexandro – I loved the GW1 pet bar as well, but I think that style of UI wouldn’t fit the style of GW2. They tried to keep everything open an visible by making the skill bar and health fairly small while still visible. All that stuff is nicely packaged at the bottom of the screen so we can focus on the more active play the game requires.

@ Julian – I think it would actually clutter up the bottom of our screen a bit too much if all boons, conditions, and other effects were listed above our pet’s healthbar. I think if we moved all that to the party section it would look pretty good,

Do want. It’s much needed to be able to see boons and condis on pets (for the ranger at least) like you can on teammates, and it would really help us to see what our pet plans on doing next to help synergize with the critter. Heck, it’d make F2 less frustrating if we could see that our pet plans on doing X and Y, then F2, or it won’t do F2 because it’s too busy doing these other things.

This would be a wonderful option menu to be able to add in once a player gets comfortable with their ranger and the game itself. I know the devs want to keep things simple, and I agree they should, but adding this functionality as an option to us ranger would be the best of both worlds.

I’m logging in to support this, even after it’s been posted for months. This is something extremely necessary. Especially since 1/3 of our skills have stuff do with pets. I don’t want to send my pet on “sic em” when it’s conditioned to hell and i have no idea how to tell.

Arena Net please do something.

We’ve managed to push Anet to give us a numerical health bar for pet. I think being able to see buff/debuffs on our pets without clicking on them should be next priority.

I would love to see what boons and condis are on my pet!