Guild Wars 2

With the current 50 character limit on thread titles, I couldn’t make a proper title that actually described what was in the thread. The title was supposed to be “Ranger pets – Dull, generic, effortless to obtain, and nearly uncontrollable in combat.”

The current process of getting a ranger pet is boring and uneventful. You run up to it and press F. There’s no skill involved, no effort, and it doesn’t make ranger pets feel special. In World of Warcraft there were pets that were rare spawns that had their own unique models, had their own unique interesting abilities, and the process of getting to them and taming them usually had some interesting mechanics.

Now keep in mind that in WoW there were plenty of pets that were easy to obtain and had their own abilities as well and were no better or worse than the rare pets. These rare pets were for people who wanted a little bit more from their pets, a challenge and a reward.

I have to say that the pets that are currently in the game are dull and generic. There’s nothing interesting, creative, or exotic that is tameable. They are all generic pets like spider, wolf, lizard, ostrich, bird, ect. Which is fine but why are there no interesting, unique creatures that you wouldn’t see in any other game that are tameable? Why are they all completely bland animals that you’d find in real life and any game ever? Absolutely no creativity, none. (minus the devourers) I mean pigs are a tameable pet for kittens sake. The somewhat interesting things like rock dogs, cave bats, skelks, ect. aren’t tameable. Why? Bring in elemental pets, bring in the challenge, bring in something interesting and unique to look at that makes people go “Wow, that’s really awesome! I’m amazed that he has that!”

The current taming process is so boring and effortless, make it creative, make it a game, make it a challenge! Why would you want dry effortless content in your game? Think of all the things you could add to the game with something just as simple as WoW’s tame cast bar? You don’t need a cast bar, but put in SOMETHING. Pressing F is not a very interesting, rewarding task.

I see a ranger pet, I walk up to it, I press F, I say “Neat.” and walk on giving 0 kittens. You got a lashtail devourer? Who cares? All you did was go to ascalon and press F, here let me go get one I’ll be back in 5 minutes… You see? It makes ranger pets seem so meaningless.

Now on another topic; ranger pets abilities are also completely uninteresting.
Most of them are cliche, one purpose abilities with overused visual effects. Nothing interesting, no conjured storm, no lunar strike, no abilities with unikittenfects. All we have are generic abilities like is roar, bite, breath (which is completely worthless), poison, slash, and forage (neat idea, completely impractical.)

Some of the ranger pet’s abilities aren’t even functional or are so impractical that you would probably never use them. Take for example the drake’s breath ability. Not only do they have a ridiculously long and obvious cast time but their range and width are extremely small. Let’s not forget that while your pet is casting this it is completely stationary and doesn’t even change directions so that it fires the ability at its target if it has moved. Even if your opponent is stupid enough to stand still for the 7 seconds it takes to get the full effect, the damage and effect of the ability are so small and so useless you’d honestly be better off letting your pet auto attack instead of using these worthless abilities.

Also you only have control of ONE of the ranger pet’s abilities. The other 3 the pet uses whenever it feels like it. “What’s that? You wanted didn’t want your devourer to burrow away just yet? Too bad. You can’t control your pet in combat, deal with it.” Who thought this was a good idea?

It would seem that the only thing that arenanet got right with pets was allowing a player to be able to get ALL of them and be able to access them from anywhere.

I miss the days of GW1 where you had to equip a skill and go out in the world and fight a pet until it was a tamable health lvl… On that note I miss the days of only being able to change skills in town, it made going out and adventuring feel alot more challenging and you actually had to put some thought and skill into what you did.

On another note, I miss all the amazing things that made GW1 so special and kept me hooked for 5 years… god only knows what happened to ANET to make them abandon all the amazing ideas they had…

SlimJim.3087:

I miss the days of GW1 where you had to equip a skill and go out in the world and fight a pet until it was a tamable health lvl…

Taming in GW1 was just equipping Charm Animal, run to a tameable pet, use Charm Animal and wait for 10 seconds (and hope your team mates don’t kill it).
You’re confusing GW1 with Pokemon or so.

DesertRose.2031:

SlimJim.3087:

I miss the days of GW1 where you had to equip a skill and go out in the world and fight a pet until it was a tamable health lvl…

Taming in GW1 was just equipping Charm Animal, run to a tameable pet, use Charm Animal and wait for 10 seconds (and hope your team mates don’t kill it).
You’re confusing GW1 with Pokemon or so.

Thats how it was in WoW essentially. Use charm animal and it had a 10 second cast time. The effort came in when they made things interrupt you so you couldn’t finish the cast or finding ways to keep the animal locked down with CCs so you could get the whole thing off. It was fun.

WoW pets were unique early-on, before all the special ones were nerfed basically to basic stats because of PvP “balance” issues. I still remember the massive disappointment of watching my really hard-to-obtain pets like Humar and the black rapror (can’t remember its name) getting reduced to basic stats. The SKIN was still unique, but definitely not worth the 3+ days I camped, waiting for Humar to spawn.

Personally I’d love it if the devs added in some of the same sorts of “rare spawn” pets, with not only custom skins but custom STATS as well. If there’s a worry about PvP “balance”, reduce them to some sort of generic baseline in PvP/WvW areas, but leave the specials intact in all PvE areas.

Oh, and I’m still holding out for a pet that’s also a mount (hint hint hint) – now THAT would be amazingfantasticstupid-awesomecool.

DesertRose.2031:

SlimJim.3087:

I miss the days of GW1 where you had to equip a skill and go out in the world and fight a pet until it was a tamable health lvl…

Taming in GW1 was just equipping Charm Animal, run to a tameable pet, use Charm Animal and wait for 10 seconds (and hope your team mates don’t kill it).
You’re confusing GW1 with Pokemon or so.

Yes but by equipping Charm animal you had to remove a skill that may have been useful to your build, as well some of the pets were in rather obscure and hard to reach places… unlike GW2 where almost half the pets if not more can be found in a cave with no enemies in SoD… either way pets, and alot of things in GW1, were alot more interesting.

“Charming” pets in GW2 is certainly boring, agreed. Back when I played Star Wars Galaxies (in the days before the 8-class simplification crap) you had to go out, find a baby creature which would randomly spawn anywhere on the planet, mask your scent from enemies (and hope that other enemies in the area didn’t break your mask), attempt to tame the pet which had a certain success rate based on skill from your progress in the profession tree / clothing mods, probably fail a few times and have to run away to get the baby to disengage, and finally get your pet. It was exciting to get what you were looking for after a long search and potentially difficult taming process. Then you watch the pet grow up and get to full strength over time, train it for commands, ect.

There weren’t even “rare” pets (well, not rare in the sense you mention in the OP anyway where you could only find them in 1 spot at the end of a dungeon or anything, though obviously some random spawns were rarer than others) but it was still a pretty exciting process trying to get a specific new pet.

This, like you said, its just “walk up, press F, pet get”. Its already full-grown at that point (or as full grown as they get in this game anyway) and fully trained. And the locations are all set in stone, so a simple look at the wiki will instantly tell you exactly where you need to go. Even if you don’t use wiki, you’ll probably stumble upon juveniles with your other characters and then you’ll know where they are. There’s little actual searching, but if you don’t know then you’re completely blind. You might see adult versions of the animal all over the place in that area of the map, but there may be no juvenile anywhere in the area, so you’re searching in an area where you can’t possibly find, a 0% chance of success (which leads to frustration and saying “forget it, I’ll just check the wiki”). In the above case of SWG, as long as you’re on the planet the animal lives you can find it as a baby.

I can’t say I agree with your other complaints, though. I also prefer the more “fantasy” oriented pets and a few more would be nice, but there’s a decent split of fantasy and realistic animals. You seem to mention Devourers as the only ones, but fire breathing lizards, giant spitting spiders, leafy dogs and prehistoric bears all fit the bill just fine, for me anyway. And I’m sure in time they’ll introduce more pets and hopefully use many of the fantasy-themed animals in the game like Griffons.

I definately don’t agree with the idea of rediculous effects for pet attacks like conjuring storms or lunar strike (whatever that is, sounds like an over-the-top Final Fantasty attack). They’re animals, not gods. Bites, claws, pounces, thats how animals attack. The wild animals in the game don’t do anything silly like calling forth storms, so why would Ranger pets?

umm some pets and or their mob versions summon more of their type out of thin air..

just saying that there are odd abilites.

But the pets are fine in the sense of how you get them. They are not fine in attacking moving targets.

Electro.4173:

I can’t say I agree with your other complaints, though. I also prefer the more “fantasy” oriented pets and a few more would be nice, but there’s a decent split of fantasy and realistic animals. You seem to mention Devourers as the only ones, but fire breathing lizards, giant spitting spiders, leafy dogs and prehistoric bears all fit the bill just fine, for me anyway. And I’m sure in time they’ll introduce more pets and hopefully use many of the fantasy-themed animals in the game like Griffons.

I definately don’t agree with the idea of rediculous effects for pet attacks like conjuring storms or lunar strike (whatever that is, sounds like an over-the-top Final Fantasty attack). They’re animals, not gods. Bites, claws, pounces, thats how animals attack. The wild animals in the game don’t do anything silly like calling forth storms, so why would Ranger pets?

Ah, I forgot about fern hounds. They are neat. But yeah they are really dull generic creatures in my opinion. Spiders are in every game, fire breathing lizards are in a lot of games, bears… are you kidding me? Bears are in everything, fantasy or not.

As for the whole storm thing I was thinking more along the lines of spirit beasts from WoW. Nothing too over the top like final fantasy lol.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-overhaul/page/2#post736553

If you would like to add something there is a post for almost all current issues with pets. Feel free to give feedback !

Thanks

Searingarrow.4637:

The title was supposed to be “Ranger pets – Dull, generic, effortless to obtain, and nearly uncontrollable in combat.”*

And I could live with all that if they were actually functional in adding damage/support to a ranger. If they didn’t miss 80% of the time and they provided reliable support abilities most rangers would not care about the pets.
Unfortunately this is not the case.
Instead rangers get their characters nerfed for a non-scaling dot that occasionally hits your target and draws adds, plus an activatable utility skill that again does not scale with the ranger and more times than not is un-responsive.

Code.1327:

Searingarrow.4637:

The title was supposed to be “Ranger pets – Dull, generic, effortless to obtain, and nearly uncontrollable in combat.”*

And I could live with all that if they were actually functional in adding damage/support to a ranger. If they didn’t miss 80% of the time and they provided reliable support abilities most rangers would not care about the pets.
Unfortunately this is not the case.

Right. While it would be fun to have a more involved process of acquiring/taming pets, the thing that really matters is combat performance.

My observation is that pets simply don’t think often enough. There’s a pretty obvious delay between pet actions that appears to be the root of most of the issues I have with pets. My pets often attack thin air because they don’t keep up with moving enemies — and the enemies are always moving (toward me) because my pet couldn’t hold aggro if I glued the mob to its paw. The mob has moved on, but the pet is attacking the empty space where the mob used to be. And we’re not talking about milliseconds here.

Pets are pretty boring in this game, and I am talking about all the pet classes not just Rangers.

Right now I find Bears to be the most useful pet followed distantly by Felines and Spiders. Spiders do ranged attacks and are thus usually alive longer in Dungeons. Overall no pets are useful in dungeons really.

Ranger pets need an upgrade. In addition I agree with the poster that wants more “fantasy” type pets.

It would have been easier to list what’s not wrong with the pets if you ask me.

SlimJim.3087:

I miss the days of GW1 where you had to equip a skill and go out in the world and fight a pet until it was a tamable health lvl… On that note I miss the days of only being able to change skills in town, it made going out and adventuring feel alot more challenging and you actually had to put some thought and skill into what you did.

On another note, I miss all the amazing things that made GW1 so special and kept me hooked for 5 years… god only knows what happened to ANET to make them abandon all the amazing ideas they had…

After putting a ton of hours on my Ranger I new I was with it for the long haul. I decided I wanted the pets you can only get with HoM rewards so my ranger will feel more complete to me.

I just bought GW1 planing to run through it as fast as I could for the HoM Points. After about 40 hours so far all i can say is what a fantastic freaking game! I didn’t think I would really like it coming from a game released in 2012. I am now taking my time enjoying GW1.

I think its a lot of the little things like when you tame the pet it attacks you and you get the feeling like you are taming it. You only get one pet with you so you feel like you have a strange bond with it like its more then a NPC.

The pets are not automatically your level so if you release a pet, your giving up the progress you made with it so you can tame a different pet that will start lower then you usually. You can only tame pets like, three levels above you so some you feel like you have to work for a bit. Plus, if you give it up you might find yourself without a pet while searching for a different one, its great!

Also the pets evolve and can be playful, aggressive, elder, dire. Basically I feel Anet took a step backwards with pets in GW2. The original pet mechanics hit the sweet spot.

Gunmetal.3824:

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Basically I feel Anet took a step backwards with pets in GW2. The original pet mechanics hit the sweet spot.

So does a lot of the community. Many don’t even feel GW2 was ready for release yet. I think another 6-8 months of testing and debugging would have been best. Seems the new trend now days. Always releasing games just a few months to soon.

Hate to say it but even Perfect World had a better way to tame pets, come to that a better pet system period.

I have to wonder what level you are charming your pets at? Stroll through a zone at 80 to pick up a pet sure that as exciting as going to the shop to buy milk.

Dodging running hiding dying to sneak into a 40 area at 15 to get a shark was awesome

In all honesty the last thing I want to do is camp an area for three days waiting for a creature to spawn.

I tell you what pisses me off…..they move the same speed as us…..might as well have a pet snail. I roll my eyes when i see them just happy running at the back of an enemy which is coming for me, for a good 2-3 secs trying to chase them down. And when they finally do, its because I am already engaging them toe-to-toe. Thank goodness i dont need to farm food for them cause i would have slaughtered it and sold the meat at LA even for a few coppers.

And sometimes, i dont know if its a bug, they can stand there for a good 2-3 secs doing nothing before attacking and here i am hammering F1 and fending off attacks.

I have no problem with the Kinds and types of pets.. more exotic ones could be added in the future.
I think Pets have other issues than creativity or the tamingprocess…

Most pets die within few hits… some get even oneshotted by regular mobs and especially by bosses. Do I have to take a ugly bear so it survives two hits instead of one? Imo the healthpool and/or the healthreggen should be increased.
Also some kind of Aoe avoid passiv. like: Areaattacks have a 50% or 75% or whatever number chance to miss the pet.

Pet controll sucks.. even if you put your moa on passiv stance he will run in and attack whenever you activate his buff ability. I want him to stay at my side even when I buff my group with a screech..

You complain because Pets only have one active skill. Well yes because there are not enough buttons for other stuff. F1 is for killcommand F2 is a petskill F3 s for retreat and F4 is for petswap. There is no Button left to put something else on. Its a shame but understandable.

Some skills are terribly broken, like the Drakes breath.. Spiders for example.. why cant the posion be a autoattack and the webtrap the active skill or the Poisonbomb?
The F2 of Pigs is just useless, please give them something usefull.

Pets should be able to move while casting their stuff.

There should be a option to turn threat on of off. I dont want my fragile eagle to get aggro everytime he flies in.

Also our downed 3. Very often the pet runs in but does nt heal. Instead they sit on our corpse waving at the boss so he cant miss us with his next aoe.