Guild Wars 2

Let me just preface this before someone complains about large pets; the ones we can tame (juveniles) don’t have to be full size, and the Devs don’t want pets to overwhelm player models. The Juvenile Bristleback is a perfect example of a pet that’s far, far smaller in juvenile form than normal. Additionally, if you’re worried about players being lost in the press of large bodies, that’s already a thing – a max size male norn with a set of bat or feathered wings, for instance, is humongrous and can overlap with other players, and recently I saw a minimum height asura minionmancer with the name “Bone Fiend” blending in with his minions. Both sides of this are already present in the game.

Now that that’s out of the way, lets get to the meat of this.

The Basics:
We’re never going to see a pet rework, or if we are it’s in such a far flung future we may as well not even consider it right now. Because of this, it’s important to note that this sort of pet would need to be made available with an elite specialization, as those are already meant to change the profession mechanic in some way, either minimally (mesmer getting another shatter) or majorly (Death Shroud turning into Reaper Shroud). This is something I’d consider a major change.

Larger pets, by dint of being, well, larger, make sense to be somewhat more powerful, but there has to be a way to balance that, and remarkably it’s actually a fairly simple solution. If you’re using one of these special sort of pets, it could take up both of your pet slots. In this case, the F4 changes from a pet swap to a heal and condition cleanse, and if the pet goes down, the F4 could go on a cooldown to resurrect the pet that takes about 20-30 seconds, giving you downtime between having your more powerful pet available if you let it get downed, which does happen.

I won’t get too deep into the rest of the idea of an elite spec for this. This thread is meant to be focused on the pet, rather the potential elite spec, which we’ll simply call “Tamer” for now as a matter of convenience.

How Powerful Should It Be?:
This is an interesting question that I’ve given a fair amount of thought to, and I think I have a pretty decent answer for it. We’d need the single large pet to be somewhere between 20% and 30% stronger than a basic pet stat-wise, but in the case of a beast mastery elite spec focused on this sort of thing we’d also have to eliminate an inherent problem with the way pets work currently; Kiting. A large part of their issue comes from the fact that pets have to be standing still to attack, which completely destroys the DPS they’re capable of, and that’s a problem. The way to fix this is actually two or three points, one which has been asked for several times by the community, and twp that make sense for large animals

The first is the idea of lunging attacks. This has been requested several times for the community due to the way player pets have to stop to attack enemies, which severely hampers their DPS is a ton of different scnarios. Recent pets (the Bristleback due to ranged action and Smokescale due to teleports) obviate this need but it hasn’t gotten any better for others. New pets means an opportunity to make this problem go away, at least for them.

The second part is cleaving. Currently unique to drakes, the idea of large creatures affecting several targets at once is not a difficult one to comprehend, and would make these pets more viable in horde scenarios, which is something that the current pet selection has a lot of trouble with outside of the aforementioned drakes.

The third part is the defiance bar, commonly referred to as a “break” bar. Adding this to a pet would mean that it can’t be slowed, immobilized, blinded, or a few other things as those get turned into defiance bar damage instead, and when they get through the pet would be stunned for several seconds.

Even just two out of three of these would solve the issue handily enough.

What animals Would Work as Large Pets?:
There’s actually a wealth of options for this question that already exist, both ingame and in lore. Among the creatures that aren’t already in the game, there’s hydras (they live in the crystal desert), junundu wurms (in the deserts of Elona, most prominently the Desolation), kraken (the jade sea and coasts surrounding Tyria), and Hippos.

Among the creatures that are already in game, we can look at any of the larger Saurians (though most notably Stoneheads and Arrowheads), Giant Devourers (Which charr already often tame as living siege weapons, and would serve as a ranged option), Drake Broodmothers, Karka, Giant Sharks, and Dire Boars. Any of these could easily have new spawn locations for juvenile ones added to existing areas the game with relatively little fanfare, though obviously their use would still be restricted to someone with the Tamer specialization.

What Niche would this Fill?:
I can think of two big things that’d really make a pet like this work. The first is DPS and CC; GW2 as a game is very focused, meta-wise, on the idea that you need to kill targets quickly, and a set of pets like this would easily facilitate that if given proper due – pets already deal fine damage, they just actually need to hit their targets, which we addressed earlier. CC is also something that a lot of pets lack entirely and in fact many builds outright ignore CC effects for the sake of damage.

The second niche they could apply is that of tanking, allowing the tamer (or their party, in group content) to act without fear of reprisal as long as the pet is actually kept alive. this could be particularly good for raids, as it could give Rangers an additional niche they could fill, though making the pets too powerful defensively would be a problem in its own right. A balance would have to be struck, but at least since players in pvp already complain about pets being high damage, a defensive buff would at least sidestep that issue.

In Conclusion:
I believe large pets not only work for the sorts of content we’re looking at now and want in the future, but that it’s also doable from a dev perspective, and would give players something they want (a pet rework) even if it’s locked behind the purchase of an expansion. Something to think about, and, if we’re lucky, maybe see something of the sort in the future.

Well thought out post. I think it would be pretty dope spec. Break bar on pet would deff have to be fine tuned too much and now it’s a love boss too little and you might as well not have it in the first place

Yeah, a Break Bar like that would need a lot of fine tuning. Like in pvp, if another player could just do one CC and take your pet out of the fight for several seconds, it solves nothing, but if it can eat the effects of two, maybe two and a half CCs, suddenly it’s good without being potentially destabilizing in either direction.

I expect that’s something that would come up in beta testing. Given that break bar amounts are a sliding scale rather than a “you have it or you don’t” effect, it could actually be really focused on and refined if done right.

As much as I would like a defiance bar on the Pet, I don’t. I can see it only as a negative aspect for the Pet, seeing how it didn’t work well on Tempest during beta, it’s going to be a mess in practice.

With so much CC and debilitating conditions that contribute to defiance bar deterioration – considering the 5 second stun duration + increased physical and condition damage during that time – pets would only melt faster in modes where people might think it would help Pets.

I’m all right with everything else in the thread, and agree that core pets receiving a rework is highly unlikely, so we might as well ask for more Pets and hope that at least one of them is useful.