Guild Wars 2

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Having seen a few posts crop up on the forum recently about pets and the way creature aggro is interacting with them recently, I thought I’d pitch in with some of my observations regarding the situation.

First up something HAS changed. I’m not the only one who’s noticed it and I’d really like to hear from an (official) authority on the matter as to whether this is an intended change in functionality or if something got messed up somewhere. Even the observation that “we haven’t noticed anything on our end” would assure us that someone has at least given some form of attention to it.

After having done some testing I can cite that it is now a very frequent occurrence for pets NOT to conform to the same aggro paradigm as players seem to, as well as several other specific things:

• This does not appear to be affected by level (unless it applies retroactively to all lower level zones once we achieve a certain level and if this is the case I’m going to hit someone, because really? -.-). This occurs in every zone I go into on my ranger from 1-80.

• This is in no way corresponding to any sort of damage comparison. In other words, the amount of damage being dealt by myself and/or my pet seems irrelevant to mobs aggroing my character over my pet. I’ve built my ranger very tanky and even “tanky” pets tend to output more damage than I do and in every case, on every single pet (I have tried all available pets in game) mobs still come right at me.

• This doesn’t even seem to be contingent on ATTACKING mobs, as I can consistently send my pet in to attack a creature, deliberately NOT engage the creature and have the mob switch to attack me after approximately 3-5 seconds. Every time. Worth noting that the amount of time it takes the creature to switch varies depending on pet type. Tankier pets tend to hold the creature for 1-2 seconds longer on average before it switches than DPS style pets do.

• Proximity and range do not play a role in this arbitrary aggro switching. I have hidden behind walls, sent my pet to the limit of its range to fight creatures, hell, even trooped up to ledges and out of LOS for the duration of the fight and the mobs STILL switch aggro to attack me in any and all of the above circumstances.

• Active and passive sources of healing/regen do not seem to have any effect on this behaviour at all. I have removed all equipment/skills and changed and traits that would provide any form of passive health regeneration and during fights have not used any active heal abilities (e.g. stood there and done nothing at all) and the behaviour is still consistent with creatures switching aggro to me.

It’s worth noting that mobs switching aggro to me isn’t something that NEVER happened before this new trend, but it was far, far rarer if I was careful about how I engaged (you can argue that this isn’t good design but thats a whole different discussion). This isn’t something I can provide non-anecdotal evidence or comparison for, because frankly I never had any reason to record the frequency with which it happened prior to these changes in behaviour and post changes am unable to obtain this data.

Also worth noting that I can in fact get through fight where a creature doesn’t switch targets from my pet to myself, but it relies on me killing a creature very, very quickly. Far quicker than I can consistently achieve the way my character is built. Whether this is because I’m simply knocking the monster off before it reaches a pre-programmed point of “ok, switch to ranger time” or for some other reason I have no idea.

But there is no doubt, it IS happening with far greater frequency. In fact it is the case with by far the majority of creatures that I fight and the ones where this behaviour doesn’t occur seem to be statistical outliers that I can find no explanation for, occasionally (anecdotal but perhaps 2-3 mobs in 20?) they just…..don’t attack me at all for no apparent reason.

Pet’s simply are no longer reliably conforming to any published or known behaviour on how aggro should traditionally work. All the things that have consistently affected aggro for any of my actual characters just do not seem to hold true for pets. At least, not for the last few updates or thereabouts.

I really don’t know whats going on here, but some transparency as to how pet aggro acutally should function (whether it includes this new behaviour or not) and whether or not these were intended changes and why, would only make sense given the drastic alterations to pet/mob aggro interaction that many people are noticing.

EDIT PLEASE READ: So, amazingly, in half a dozen hours worth of very thorough testing across a bunch of different zones, it would appear that I have, in a moderately spectacular statistical anomaly, managed to carry out ALL my tests exclusively on undead/Risen mobs.

Creature type never even occurred to me as something to factor into my testing, but after having written my original post I happened to be wandering around and fought something else and I noticed the behaviour was different. Subsequent testing indicates that the behaviour noticed in the post below occurs pretty much EXCLUSIVELY on mobs that fall under the “undead” or “Risen” banner.

Speculation is that because the higher level zones and more specifically Orr, contain an almost absurdly high percentage of these kinds of creatures, this behaviour becomes a LOT more noticeable as a ranger reaches level 70ish and onwards to the point of appearing to be the norm when it is in fact, not.

Im going to leave my post up rather than deleting it because it might interest some people to know just how undead/risen mobs behave in conjunction with ranger pets, but again, this behaviour seems to be restricted almost entirely to one type of creature that is very prevalent in higher level areas.

P.S. – For the record Arenanet, I’m not at all convinced that this is good design or fundamentally enhances gameplay in any way other than heightened levels of puzzlement and frustration which are hardly desirable.

END OF EDIT

I would def. agree that undead or risen mobs ignore the pet MUCH more than other mobs.. whats worse is they have run speed or knock down making them much more annoying for people trying to stay ranged(which they should for those hard hitting guys!) than is needed.

Very interesting observation, and it completely jibes with what I’ve seen too, now that I think about it.

I’m actually OK with dragon-controlled creatures going after the Ranger, and not the Pet… it’s a very interesting tactical change, and makes some sense.

I’ve noticed the same thing on my ranger.
Glad to see I’m not alone… hope they do something to fix this or at least adjust it.

When it comes to undead/risen, my observation is that they clearly prioritise the player(s) over pets or NPCs. Their behaviour is clearly completely different to the overwhelming majority of enemy types in the game.

I observed this as well, as it happens almost entirely in the Orr zones, or when I reached the point in my Personal Story where the majority of all the mobs were Risen, my pet basically became entirely useless and I spent a great deal of time just having to kite the mobs around.

Just another thing that makes Orr annoying as hell…

But yea I’ve noticed this. I have a tendency when I’m hanging around dungeon entrances of sicking my pet on random enemies lingering around without attacking them myself and without fail undead always make a beeline straight for me with the other types just staying on the pet.