Guild Wars 2

Tragic Positive.9356:

They die less often in HoT because new content’s AoEs are reduced by 90% to minions (pets, illusions,…). When it comes to PvP they die less because you can send SmokeScale to burst-evade all DH traps. Old PvE content has lots of attacks that ignores that change, though (heck, even the new content).

A lot of design in GW2 is outdated.
We just suffer the most because one third of our existence is glued to their outdated pattern. People do not remember this but they didn’t want new spec to be oriented around pets especially because they are unreliable.
Well, our nature cannot be denied so once we got what we wanted people started hating that there’s no synergy with pet.

Pets in small scale fights are now mostly fine because if you heal yourself you heal your pet as well. When next xpac comes – there will be no more druid – and no more pet that lives in small scale fights.

If you ask me – Ranger will not ever be enjoyable unless they get their ß$¤? together and fix what they never did right – the core Ranger.
If they keep fixing the Ranger by never addressing the main issue and trying to give him everything he lacks in 1 spec over and over again – no one will stay to play the class. There’s just so many other games with better designed Beast Masters, Archers, and skirmishers in general.

What’s amazing with ranger is still that when there is a pet that happen to work pretty well, most of the pvp community cry and the pet is nerfed asap.

And I agree with you, Anet don’t seem to want to fix the main issue of the ranger. We’ve pointed out for almost 3 year and a half now that they have to work on the rangers pet (a lot!) and from what we’ve seen up to date they’ve simply stick to the lazy bad design that we still have today.

There are plenty of things to work on the pets. Be it the UI, the skills balance, the pathing or even the unwanted skill that plague some of the pets.

There is so much work on just this aspect of the ranger that obviously they will try to avoid involving the pet mechanism for each and every elite spec they will create. An elite spec that would rely on the current pet mechanism would be broken and almost unsuable. It’s sad…