Guild Wars 2

It’s been a long term thought process on my behalf playing as a ranger in WvW. I enjoy my ranger, I successfully kill people and have a place in my guild as the scout commander, but one thing that I’ve noticed when people mention the current class meta, it’s pretty much “every other class except for Ranger”.

The Ranger class from the get-go is supposed to be the pet class of the game. It’s come to my attention that there could be an evolution to the Ranger class as far as what the Ranger is defined as. To evolve the class, let’s talk about pets.

There are many pets in the game that allow the ranger to utilize certain (F) abilities, play styles, and perks based on what pet you have and thus benefit well if geared/traited properly to your pets needs.

I myself I play a power longbow ranger with a great sword. I personally have no problem playing with it in WvW and PvE where I kill A LOT of people. My ranger itself is good, however, I do not feel that I have defined myself as the pet class that ANET has specified that to be since release.

I use a spider and an owl. The owl I use it for its size (not many people seem to notice a bird flying at them and burst damaging them plus stacking 6 seconds of chill on them. The spider is helpful for weakness/vulnerability/immobilize/poison AoE at ranged encounters, but there isn’t enough for my pets to be recognized by others as the pet class still yet because even though my bird deals 6k burst damage in 2 and a half seconds and helps out with DPS and my spider helps out with ranged dps/condis, many people I fight disregard my pet as if it’s an insignificant force that won’t affect the battle.

To help make pets have a noticeable mark on the field of battle, I recommend an “Evolution” system where you can grow your pet, regardless what it is, into an advanced stage where its base stats are naturally increased, the skill set it augmented, and every pet looks like a fighting force on the field.

Imagine Pokemon. As it is right now, my Salamander pet is like Charmander, but what Rangers need to stand out as the pet class is a Charizard.

If Charmander has ember, bite, scratch, and tackle, I want my Charizard to have flamethrower, crunch, fury swipe, and body slam!

How this evolution process would work is that everyday that you play (relative to the login rewards), a ranger can play/feed their active pets. You can feed your pets a maximum of 5x a day. Just to clarify, it’s not “feed Owl 5x and feed Spider 5x a day”, it’s “feed Owl 3x a day and feed Spider 2x a day” and on their 60th feed (for example, and scaled by what i’ll call “Nurture Points”) that pet that has been fed will be given the opportuning to mature into their evolved form.

In the end after being evolved, a pet will look more menacing, deal damage as if they were menacing, and their skills would actually make enemies consider pets as if they were players (in terms of awareness).

What do you guys think? Do you think my suggestion will help Rangers be defined as the pet class that it should be? How do you think this idea could be beneficial to Druids when HoT releases as well?

Well… Pet’s have merely 2 thing they need to fix them :

- Get rid of their cast time/animation when they use shout
- Allow ranger to disable some of the pet’s skill

With just this pets would be easier to handle, pets with shout would be a bit more popular and their will be less issues due to pet hurting party teamwork. Would this make ranger better? Probably. Would this make ranger OP? No.

On the other hand, an evolution of pet won’t do any good because, you just seek another pet in the end.

With your suggestion it MAY make the game more responsive (to some), but it’s a bland solution that won’t be expansive at best.

You say that I’m seeking another pet. From a perspective that’s impactful, yes, I am. As far as seeking different pets as in variety, yes, I am as well. The Rangers pets are extensions of the Rangers themselves. You want the pet to be a force as noticeable as the rangers themselves. By allowing pets to have an evolved form, we benefit from many things (ANET included).

From a player perspective:
-We have “new” pets to work with that have slightly different, but very familiar skills that the base model pet gas. That adds a variable learning curve to how rangers utilize their pets in an expansive way and not simply a “fix” that may not even be interesting to and noticeably beneficial in the first place.
-More build variety to consider because of these evolved oets, their attributes, and new abilities. That means more combination of Zerker, Knight, Soldier, Valkyrie, etc to work with and less focusing of specific gear stats.
-A big reason for many rangers to play the class more because it involves both short term and long term growth (those that want to evolve only a few pets and long term for those that want to evolve many)

As far as the ANET benefits go:
-They have more loyal players from the Ranger pool
-They can potentially make more revenue due to loyal players enjoying the game
-Appealing to those that appreciate pet growth and pet based gameplay and less of the independent growth of the character
-With PvE/WvW features being released in the HoT expansion, that means more options for players and less headaches for ANET to conjure ways to balance classes for players and work on “fixes” (that don’t need to be fixed as the “fixes” people are mentioning are not game breaking)

i’ve been putting a lot of thought into pets and i’m still listing a lot of their flaws in my head. i believe, even with current AI, they could be salvaged to be a more forceful ally to the ranger rather than a burden

three major things need fixed for this to work:
1. rooted while attacking
2. slowness
3. harshness of death

these don’t even need to be baseline abilities, they could be incorporated in the way of beastmaster traits, i don’t care. just with the fixing of these 3 problems with really make the pet shine imo

i would do it as so:

1. rooted while attacking should be entirely removed(with special exceptions, such as drake breath attacks) – the pet(this goes for every class with a pet/minion) should be able to properly track its target when attacking. this alone would make pets amazing.
2. increase the base movement speed for most pets by around 25% with special exceptions(such as the tankier pets)
3. the cooldown to be fully revived, in my opinion, is fine. 60 seconds is a long time, but it’s manageable in a 1v1 situation(usually). i would, however, like the ability to bring it back before that time. it won’t be fully healed(it could even have a short debuff), but at least i’ll have my pet back.
4. add utilities specifically for pets(it’s weird that we only have one pet skill: RaO). i’ve been thinking about how to implement them, so far i have:

The Great Hunt: 40s cd
Pet. Increase your pets movement speed and damage.
Damage Increase: +50%
Movement Speed: +50%
Duration: 15s

trait(s) to increase its duration or potency

Wolf’s Call: 180s cd
Pet. Like a wolf in the wild, let out a howl to call upon two wolves.
Damage: 180
Duration: 30s

trait(s) to increase the number of wolves, damage or duration

Rip: 20s cd
Pet. Command your pet to deal a deep wound to your enemy, leaving them injured.
Damage: 185
Bleeding (6s): 840 Damage
Rip (6s): Pet attacks are more severe and cause bleeding; Damage +30%

trait(s) to increase damage or duration

Dazing Strike: 30s cd
Pet. Command your pet attack your target, dazing them.
Damage: 180
Daze (5s): Unable to use skills.
Unblockable

just a few ideas, obviously they need work. i’m also trying to work out a way to have both player and pet attacks work with each other for a more “enforced” pet feel(similar to the “Rip” skill, perhaps the player could cause effects that boost the pets damage).

Not sure it this is entire still the case, but this more or less is Anet on pets:

‘Pets that delay F2 use isn’t some wait script we put into their skills it has to do with core AI behavior shared by all pets and creatures and how they decide tasks. Rewriting that has the risks of breaking millions of unknown things so we have up until now band aided the solution. It is something that needs addressing but won’t be addressed until we can know how and when we will test it.’

If pets are supposed to be an extension of the Ranger, then pets need to act like human controlled characters. They should be able to attack and move at the same time. They should be able to get effects from food and runes. Their stats should be affected slightly by gear.

Anet gave Rangers pets, but the problem is that they are kind of horrible, AI controlled pets based on existing world creatures that anyone can 1/2-shot with no effort. Rangers have always had a handicap in this game, and that isn’t going to change until players learn to work around that handicap, or Anet fixes it with something other than +70% hp band-aids.