Guild Wars 2

I posted this in the class balance forum, but wanted to put it here too so Rangers can chew on it and give some feedback. It’s a solution I came up with with improving pets scaling. Enjoy.

One problem I see, going forward, is scaling. As gear becomes better (ascended weapons and armor) our pets will be less effective than they were a few months ago. Bosses and events will be balanced with ascended gear in mind (or at least the majority of people in full exotics) and our pets don’t have a way of scaling up.

Our BM trait line has the Empathy attribute that increases pet stats, perhaps making Empathy scale with our own attributes passively (without investing in BM if we don’t want to).

One stat comes to mind as a universal between all rangers, regardless of build, and that is our armor class (NOT Toughness – that’s different). Our armor goes up numerically depending on the color of armor we wear, as we gear up to exotics and beyond that number goes up. Having a ratio of armor:empathy will also increase the pets stats as we gear up. There’s no way to increase the scaling beyond just acquiring the best armor you can in each slot. This is a fair way to passively increase pets stats as the ranger improves his gear and takes on new content.

Slotting points into BM will, of course, make for a better pet, but that’s the way it should be and it can be balanced to accommodate for the increased pet stats gained through armor.

It shouldn’t effect sPvP at all and in WvW it will make pets far more survivable and less
frustrating and give the ranger another reason to gear up.

Thoughts on this?

yea… i want my pet to scale with power

Scaling it with power only benefits builds that stack power. If I want to use a pet for support or if I invest heavily into condition damage it won’t fix the pet scaling issue. Scaling with power only helps one play style and that wouldn’t be fair.

Totally agreed. Pets should get back the ability to scale walls!

just give them the ability to scale in stat with their master stat to begin with

kyubi.3620:

just give them the ability to scale in stat with their master stat to begin with

Make them share boons and buffs with their master too please. I’m looking at you “phased” (Operative brie).

For people asking it to scale with you, why would you want that?

If you are a pure dps your tank pet can no longer perform well and likewise as a tank your dps pet will be extremely lacking (otherwise it would be extremely op as you could have a rampaging bear with the dps of a cat or etc).

What they need to do is let you evolve your pet into the way you want it. They need to allow you to align a set amount of stats from a base set that is dependent on the species.

Personally I would love to have an aoe damage drakehound (do not like having a giant lizard only for aoe) with the red moa’s f2 fury. Is it op? No. All it does is give more options/builds and aesthetic diversity.

Loubbo.9852:

For people asking it to scale with you, why would you want that?

If you are a pure dps your tank pet can no longer perform well and likewise as a tank your dps pet will be extremely lacking (otherwise it would be extremely op as you could have a rampaging bear with the dps of a cat or etc).

Agreed. That asymetry is fun. Also, pets have until now been independent from the oh-so-enjoyable ascended gear grind, i can’t emphasize how much i want this to remain the case.

They could just give certain pets base stats scaled by level, and then allow you to allocate points based on your net gear worth, right?
I don’t feel like this would be particularly difficult, outside of adding an extra tab in Hero that has sliders.