Guild Wars 2

F1: Attack your target!!! lol shouldn’t be wasting our F1-F4 abilities and assigned to a different button

F2: The only one that is useful and should be on the F1-F4 bar, now if only CD wasn’t half a year on 90% of pet skills.

F3: Return to me!!! lol even worst than F1 and should also be macro’d on other buttons instead of wasting our profession specific skills.

F4: I cannot believe swapping pets is wasting a slot, this is beyond stupid…

Some classes get invulnerability from Distortion, others get aoe CC, combo fields, blast finishers and such. We get the ability to call our pet back, what the F!?

Change class name from Ranger to Animal Whisperer. =p I wish I could joke about it and not actually kinda believe myself.

Nuka Cola.8520:

F1: Attack your target!!! lol shouldn’t be wasting our F1-F4 abilities and assigned to a different button

F2: The only one that is useful and should be on the F1-F4 bar, now if only CD wasn’t half a year on 90% of pet skills.

F3: Return to me!!! lol even worst than F1 and should also be macro’d on other buttons instead of wasting our profession specific skills.

F4: I cannot believe swapping pets is wasting a slot, this is beyond stupid…

Some classes get invulnerability from Distortion, others get aoe CC, combo fields, blast finishers and such. We get the ability to call our pet back, what the F!?

F1 has its uses, by default the pet will attack whatever the ranger hits, by using F1 and switching targets your pet will hold a different target than you (useful in some cases for sPvP, I don’t do PvE so I can’t think of something).

F3 is to get your pet out of the fray and possibly save its life/out of aoe’s, however the response time is not too great. If they wanted to increase survivability of pets they should work something in w/ this command (like a leap+dodge back to the ranger)

F4 swapping pets is actually required, Where were you hoping for it to be placed?

Some pets get condition removal from F2, others get aoe CC, combo fields, blast finishers and such. We get pet damage in addition to their other effects, what the F!?

I know you mean well to say “put somewhere else” however there are no other buttons in game, F1-F4 are unique depending on which class you are, there is no other place to put them. There was some talk about expanding pet control, however a dev stated on SOTG that is was passed over because it would make the ranger too difficult to play (Which I disagree with)

I do believe all key bindings can be reassigned. So if you don’t like their placement it’s very simple to change them.

As for their function:

F1) Is there in case you have your pet on passive so it wont attack everything that gets near you but you do want it to attack a specific target and ONLY that target.
F2) Cool downs a pain and I’d like them to let you toggle on/off auto attack, but it gives you a measure of control on when the ability is used.
F3) More useful than people are willing to give it credit for. Very helpful for pulling purposes. Also a big help tight quarters where AoE might bleed through the wall and provoke the pet, causing it to run off god knows where. But most of all, it calls your pet back from attacking the infernal turrets! I cant tell you how many Flame legion turrets and Rot Mouths have ruin my day.
F4) Switching pets may be a requirement sometimes. As a combat mechanic having the right pet for the situation can be a big difference (melee or ranged for instance). It also give you a chance to keep one pet active for soloing and one for groups. Also and this is usually only a problem when jump from ledges, sometimes enemies don’t auto reset when they cant path to you after jumping up or down ledges. Swapping pets can null agro and force the mob to reset.

my caps lock = my f1
shift= my f2
6=my pet swap

Sorry im having to much fun making fun of us, but that’s what i use.

Yes im aware “there’s no buttons in the game” but at the same time this game is on pc, buttons isn’t exactly what’s missing. And just think for a sec how worthless our F1-F3-F4 is compared to pretty much any other class in the game. I certainly would take something like Distortion over calling my freaking pet back any day of the year.

Well don’t forget every pet has 4 of their own abilities as well, 1 of which always gets used straight after pet activation. So actually we have at least three ‘F’ abilities at the ready, which can also be swapped out for a large number of variations.

Its actually a lot better than some classes…

If you’re suggesting that we should be able to manually cast the pet’s skills, I agree with you. I would love to be able to tell my wolf exactly when to use it’s knockdown, or make my birds cast swiftness on demand (or make it never cast it while DPSing), or even better, manually target my drake’s blast finisher.

That said, I don’t agree with the way you presented your idea. Way too ranty. I had to really filter out what you wanted to say.

It would be nice to have another skill in our comand..Moas healing,drakes blast finishers,birds swiftness etc….Right now Rangers seems random and passive..
And i think the F1 and F3 managing right now is more annoying and difficult than just managing another very important skill.
The ideal will be our pets never die,not to pull em to us and shut the 40% of our dmg..

If we’re comparing our F key selection to other classes, yeah there are some that have better utility then ours, engineers get extra gadgets and elementalists can effectively open up a whole new skill set. But there are some that have it worse, the necromancer’s rather uninspired death shroud for instance. However in regards to the ranger class itself, our abilities aren’t that bad. We have a pet, we tell it what to do. Tweeks to response time would be nice but the skills themselves make sense.

It would be nice to have the specific pet attacks as the F1-F4 keys to better set up CC chains. F1 would be their auto attack and the rest you command as needed. It is true that the commands for pets to attack and return and swap could be set up as 3 distinct key bindings, but my guess is that may have been confusing to new players if there were commands that did not fit into the same key strokes like every other class does and is probably the reason for it, with the pet attacks all on a chain.

I would rather they add better pet UI first (so we can see boons/coditions of the pet as well). Then they can change the functionality. Also fix condi damage of pets not being shown pls!

F1:
Tap – Attack/Return (Returns if attacking and vice versa)
Hold (0.5s) – Swap pet
F2: Pet specific ability
F3: Family ability 1
F4: Family ability 2

There, I fixed the ranger… hooray……………..

It’s worlds better than a thief/warrior F2-F4, right?

I’m perfectly fine if F1,F3,F4 are used to control the pet…. but F2 for Warrior/Thief/Ranger should all be on the same order of game changing effect. Compared to other classes with only a single class-ability, Pet F2 abilities aren’t quite as shiny as they could be.

solrik.6028:

F1:
Tap – Attack/Return (Returns if attacking and vice versa)
Hold (0.5s) – Swap pet
F2: Pet specific ability
F3: Family ability 1
F4: Family ability 2

There, I fixed the ranger… hooray……………..

this is perfect! This is how it should be but anet decided to ‘waste’ the whole button to attack AND return.

yes our f1-f4 skills are simply crap…
whould be so easy to make f4 like engi kits to bring pet skills and commends on 12345.
when press again go back to weapon skills.

then they whould be able to make nice f1-f3 skills…
and this skills whould be able to make them
depending on which weapons ranger use

maybe longbow can be something like this
f1: go in stealth, next arrow from high distance make more dmg
f2: next 5 seconds ranger shoot multishoots, 5 arrows
f3: ranger block next melee attack with bow and do a kick

just idea :P

How should i control my pet if those “buttons” are bad. I mean should it just know who im attacking, pull out on its own, go back in on its own, swap itself and use its cooldown ability on its own? Im very much missing the point of this thread.

“i have to push buttons to do things in this game, rage.”

Sure some basic parts of our f skills are bullkitten but you are taking it away completely and that doesnt make any sense unless its not supposed to make sense anyways.

Disclaimer: I have already shelved my ranger for maybe 4 month. I have yet to rework my traits since the latest “huge change”. The following requires the food buff gained from “grain of salt”.

Here’s my take on ranger F1-F4.

By themselves they are pretty standard. Though not flashy, they do what it is they are designed to do, control your class mechanic.

Anet could; however, spice it up by doing what they did for F4. We have some choices for “on pet swap” abilities (my favorite being “quickness on pet swap”).

F1 – offensive F2’s: direct damage/condition damage (arctodus rending maul)
F2 – utility F2’s: boons (pig forage, jaguar stalk)
F3 – defensive F2’s: heals/condition cleanses (bear’s shake it off)
F4 – pet swap

F1 will still command the pet to attack while F3 will still command the pet to return.

Then you can have traits like:
- you and your pet gain prot/aegis on F3 <insert icd>
- you and your pet gain might/fury on F1 <insert icd>
- you and your pet gain evasion on F2 <insert icd>

I agree with the OP but we also need some suggestions about how they could make better use of the buttons – like Seetoo’s suggestion above.

I agree with OP, also you all should read again, he clearly said that the F1 and F3 are a waste of profession skills and should be macrod in other ways not that the skills are useless in general.
The worst is the F2 cast time and randomness, but we all know about it and talked about it, I doubt a-net will change this ever.

Torpian.9142:

I agree with the OP but we also need some suggestions about how they could make better use of the buttons – like Seetoo’s suggestion above.

I recently made a thread on the subject on GW2guru, in which I put a lot of time and effort. For the sake of not repeating myself (and typing out the whole thing) I’ll just link the original thread here. I’m quite curious to see everyone’s opinion on this, but honestly doubt much will be changed about the pet mechanic anytime soon. One can always hope, though.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/84038-fix-ranger-pet-ai/

solrik.6028:

F1:
Tap – Attack/Return (Returns if attacking and vice versa)
Hold (0.5s) – Swap pet
F2: Pet specific ability
F3: Family ability 1
F4: Family ability 2

There, I fixed the ranger… hooray……………..

Add an endurance bar to the pet, and have the Return function incorporate a dodge if there’s enough endurance, and we’re laughing – though I think pet swap should still be on F4.