Guild Wars 2

So, in another thread, someone mentioned the idea of druids, rather than swapping between pets having a single primary pet that F4 heals instead of swaps out, and you pull up the secondary pet’s HP to add to the first. What happens to your second slot? It becomes an aspect.

I’ve said a few times in these boards that if the druid is a support-caster, it makes sense for the focus of damage to be shifted away from the ranger to the pet, mainly by buffing up its ability to dole out damage and take hits. This creates the dynamic of, even when solo, supporting the damage dealer in your party.

People have asked for pet stat allocation in the past, and the way I see it, this idea is a good concept to run with that – basically, you take a certain amount of the stats of the secondary pet (somewhere between 30% and 50%, I think) and add them to your primary pet, creating a powerhouse that, in theory can tank tank for you and make up for your lost damage while you’re focused on keeping people standing. Interestingly, this was how beast masters in GW1 operated, though they mainly just focused on keeping their pet standing.

There’d have to be some balancing done, obviously, otherwise we’d have some people going Cat/Bird and having it churn out absolutely stupid damage, but this idea works for things like Drake/Bird. Along with some AI enhancements and tuning the player for healing and boon duration over damage to go with some AoE support abilities (consecrations, anybody?), this could theoretically be very workable.