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.