I love my pets in pve, and have little issue looking after them through out during trash pulls in explorable, however unless I am running Bears, Devourers or Spiders they will die to random area of effect damage, fairly often I can pull Cats and Birds back out before AOES hit them, however it kind of defeats the point of having a damage pet out, that instantly dies if it is in combat for any real duration.
Even Bears take high damage, and need constant pulling around to keep them alive, but it gets to the point where I have to ask, the point of controlling a pet to keep it alive so that it can do no damage while running back and forth.
I could understand it if my pet had the main threat, and getting its fluffy face smashed in, that it may die fairly often, but why must my pets die to sneezes not even directed towards them. I can only switch my pet every 16s and its a 50/50 that my pet will come back to me when I am spamming “f3”, I don’t mind that I have to play two players when playing a ranger, but please give us the tools to properly manage our pets, Allow us to Re-bind Passive to another key, as well as store pet, make the keys take priority over all pet attacks, and increase their passive movement speed by 15% so when specing with the extra 30% they can move at 45% speed, if its an issue just remove the passive 15% from pvp.
Pets really do need some love right now, and saying they are fine is rather odd, when using a very few of the “vast” selection of pets that we do have is the norm. And please stop Grubs spawning on pets during Lupicus, I don’t even know why it does in the first place other than to screw over melee ranger pets and the 5 point necro death magic trait line.
I don’t mind boss fights having an ideal pet to use, in fact its apart of the game I imagine, apart from the fact that the vast majority of pets are useless during boss encounters. Please in the future have a little fore sight with the boss encounters, and make sure they do not remove the use of 32 out of the 39 pets available on land. Having a melee pet out should always be an option, if you do not want people to have the option to run a melee pet, I would suggest adding more ranged pets, because the 7 current choices could really use fluffing out if you want the vast majority of fights to be using ranged pets.
I hope this does not sound too much like a rant, I just have very little hope that such a fix as reducing AOE damage to pets will come at any point in the near future, mainly because of how attacks work in this game. I do love my ranger, and will be sticking with it through any future difficulty’s, even if it means ending up playing an auto attack class that watches its pet die from enemy wet farts.
