Guild Wars 2

To the best of my understanding, pet AI currently reads : charge the enemy, ignore all injury and fight to the death unless manually recalled. (i.e. no “I” in AI). By comparison, my real-life dog is smart enough to back away from fire.

How about this as a simple fix: pets are supposed to have a soul bond with their Rangers, so pets heal a tiny bit when at our side (faster with traits, faster out-of-combat). So let the Ranger choose between two modes for the pet which I will casually call suicidal or smart.

Suicidal is what we have today – if you want your pet tank to hold out to the bitter end, he does. But smart mode says that when it suffers (x) percent injury it simply auto-shifts back to passive mode and runs back to us, where it starts healing. If you are still fighting when it gets better, it charges back into the fight. Simple.

The balance is self-imposing; when the pet is coming back you lose its DPS/tanking whatever, which is meaningful since the class is based on both acting together. Somebody who manually micro-manages the pet might wring out a slight advantage but those who don’t find that fun at least get a painless alternative. Maybe it is a toggle between the two states, or maybe a slider so the user can choose how “self-protective” the pet is, i.e. does it bail at 50% injury, 20%, etc. If you choose a low number like 10% you roll the dice against taking an unexpected hit and going down. Seems like an interesting option to me.

Not rocket science, but would this not be an improvement?

I don’t know, there’s been like 1,000 suggestions for pet ai and devs don’t kitten so whatever. I’m tired of making new threads for the kitten. They need to listen for a change.

It’s kittening bullkitten, can’t ever get a grp in pve , can’t roam consistently , in tpvp every class does kitten better , in wvw there’s nothing a ranger provides to the table that’s unique. Even in 1on1 duels now with the EB fix it it destroys us.

Pet ai blows, half the weapons blow , our eb jus got thrown in the kittenter last patch as it makes our already useless pet even more useless, no decent regen in combat , no trait synergy, f2 is broken on pet , got to use pet swap quickness just to even do f2 on the fly. Which is bullkitten.

It’s like they don’t listen to anything. So whatever.

I just made an engi , hopefully in some months time they’ll get improved, until then it’s other classes for me.

People know that conditions transfer to our pet – half the work for most classes in combat is already done automatically because of this since they can simply apply snares on us knowing they transfer to our pet and will know that we run this if in WS because it’s really the only viable trait there is at this level , and literally is the only condition ‘removal’ we have unless we use a utility slot which only takes 1 condition from us every 10 seconds and be forced to use a kitten heal thats really only good for teamplay or if you bunker, that is utterly unnacceptable. Atleast before the EB fix we had some decent condi removal on par with others, now we’re kittened.

And im tired of seeing ‘just pop the signet and switch pets’ , no … Why should we have to be FORCED to do that? That’s bullkitten and not good in the long run as signet passives don’t work once ou’ve activated.. You’ve removed all the condi and swapped pets, but now you won’t have passive removal for 3 10s intervals.

To put it in short, we got kittened last patch and it really declined the ranger performance as a whole regardless of build as it effects any ranger with a pet and I don’t see any signficant combat changes done anytime soon other than agony resistance for pets in pve situations, but for pvp/wvw I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to be waiting for some months before even seeing a shred of a consistent fix of our class.