Guild Wars 2

I have been hearing that the new dungeon, albeit really cool, is a nightmare for rangers because there is a lot of AOE’s and pets are constantly fried during battle. I haven’t done it yet (logged in yesterday to do daily only, logged off right away).

Anyone having trouble in the new dungeon? Hopefully Anet can check this also and see how terrible it is to have the pet dead 90% of the time.

The dungeon itself isn’t THAT bad. Sure, there are a lot of static fields, but that’s mostly manageable.

The two boss fights, you will be mostly petless. The first one kills the pets with lasers that they can’t avoid, and the second is with AOE burning and shock damage that your pet will be eating.

It’s sad but true.

Ouch, kind of figured. __

Would be nice if pets could dodge, or at least ignore environmental hazards…

Pet’s dead? Dang. Oh well, didn’t need it anyways, I’ve still got my shortbow to hurt it with decent damage from decent range!

Oh, I need to be close to big boss man to hit with that now? Well at least I have a bunch of blocks!

Oh, I don’t have blocks? Well evades can work too!

Oh, the evades will reposition me and slam me into an AoE, defeating the point of dodging? Well at least I can toss the damage and conditions to my pet since that’s the only way we can shake those!

Oh yeah, pet’s dead. Bollocks.

This is so dumb, it shows how broken we are in dungeons when our pets get one shotted at the start of a boss fight. I really wish they would make pets a traitable option and just make all of our weapon skills have some sort of animal element to keep the nature theme (example: warhorn 4 calls in birds, GS 3 makes you fly with a bird animation, Sword 3 makes you evade and poison with a snake animation…just have every skill do something animal related)

There’s two bosses. One fight happens in a circular room with beams of energy that act like “spokes” of the circle and rotate around repeatly, like a spinning diameter line of death.

The one people complain about is the lower beam. It’s coincident with the ground and thus kills pets, or at least that’s the thought, however, properly timed swaps can prevent this. You really only get into trouble with the beams once every 30s. When you are about to lose the pet, on swap the next pet will appear in front of you, usually to your left. Use this to “teleport” a pet to other side of beam. In other words, swap before your pet gets pinched. Another possibility to avoid the ground beam is birds. Has anyone tested that?

On the last boss fight, if you are doing a speed run, you have to alternate what you attack: Mai or her add. Doing this in the right order (google it) prevents a HUGE aoe from spamming the arena. Speed runs in this dungeon will want to aboid the time consuming aoe but also must be good enough to focus down targets with the right amount of power. You can’t just feedback land aegis while dropping 100b like they do on the kitten Lupicus video.

Now you DON’T have to play this way. If you run it like a pick up group you will just accept that you will be dodging aoe. There’s a chance to lose a pet. Swiftness, careful dodges, well timed swaps, and signet of stone are important.

Rangers must be strong. ANET is challenging us, not hating us. They love us. So they make it hard, forcing us to improve. It’s NOT an unfair fight to rangers.

I hope that helps.

It’s not dumb, it’s a great chance to bring up enhancements for pet AI. If they screwed up somewhere on the new dungeon was there. I even tried to keep my pet in passive mode and have it live through everything, but ultimately it’s impossible. Where my allies could have used a good wolf fear, a fern hound’s heal, a moa’s protection… etc, there was none.

The best change I can imagine for pet AI is this: if on passive mode, bring the pet to the ranger’s exact location. That would be fantastic for so many reasons, not just dungeons, I bet you fellow rangers would agree. Dropping this into the suggestions forum.