Guild Wars 2

Right now from what I experience in game and what I read on the forums Ranger pets deal too much damage and are too squishy. Rangers should account for about 60% of all damage and health and pets should account for 40% of all damage and health. Having almost half health sounds unfair? Make the damage mitigate from the ranger to the pet and vise versa. That way the health pool of the ranger and pet will be linked and both can survive longer.

Dumb idea? Give me yours!

No I do not like this idea at all.
Ranger works very well right now

I play ranger as my main and I think it is perfectly fine as is. If you don’t like that a large chunk of your damage is shared with a pet that you need to manage, then you picked the wrong class. There is a reason why you get to have so many pets and are able to change them on the fly out of combat. Predict the fight and choose the right pet for it. Most of the complaints seem to come from people who try to make one pet work for everything instead of using all that is available.

Survivability versus Damage along all specs seems to be perfectly fine in my experience. I here complaints about GS, but as that is my favorite sPvP weapon, I don’t see the problem with it.

The only problems I see needing a fix is bad pathing A.I. on the pets here and there and that pets will sometimes miss on moving targets passing by them. Its especially troublesome in some of the sPvP maps. Also spirit survivability doesn’t feel like its up to par for the buffs they currently provide and their long cool down times.

My experience with the Ranger so far. I love the pets for pve, they are great, they do alright damage (dps ones) and have ridiculous aggro. You switch pet mid champion fight, it attacks twice and has aggro, quite annoying if you have someone to ‘tank’ in the group and you need your pet alive. At times I find the pet dying from his aggro but I just swap out and focus on pet 2 alive for a minute.

In sPvP I dislike pets. They have their advantages, e.g. attacking downed foes to stop them from self resing while you nail their friends. You can also pet swap and use ability’s when downed, so you can switch to wolf and use fear. But I find them to be more just a buff with a life bar, keeping them close to use the Bears cure, ferns heal or stalkers extreme might. My friend has actually made a elementalist and engineer build to slaughter rangers pets (pets in general like minions, clones etc) and is quite annoying, making me take a ranged pet when fighting against him.

The dps pets are alright but a lot of their powerful F2 abilities such as the lynx’s bleed leap or the drakes breath moves and the only thing that you can do to help these are wait for the right moment. The reason it misses is because the pet always attacks where you were and doesn’t target track when charging its move. River Drake will fire in cone of about 30-60 degrees in front of it, some times being nice and firing 90 degrees. But if the foe has moved out of that cone the ability will fail and go on full cd instead of interrupt cd which I would much prefer.

My current Ranger build is contradictory to the above. I’m using River Drake (lightning) and wolf for fear. I start by lining up my target, send my pet at it, see what they are going to do and at the right moment pop F2 lightning breath, wait for it to fire then immediately pop quickening zephyr and rapid fire. They are in a lot of pain after that.

What I dislike about pets is their startup time, river drake is 3 to 5 seconds, reasonable cause it does so much damage. But my beef is with the ability having lag in an ability based game and that it is to my playing around not effected by quickness, so if I use QZ to soon it will fail and only half of his ability is quicker.

The AI is a little annoying. I would like for pets to follow you down hills and ledges. Pets can ‘teleport’ in jumping puzzles but can’t quite figure out how to walk down a cliff, instead preferring to aggro everything on the way.

I was using spirits but stopped in pve, they are stupid and draw more aggro then me and my pet attacking a mob in front of us. Did I also mention they die in one hit untraited.