Guild Wars 2

This forum seems to be divided on whether pets should be as reliant on pets as they are now, so i’m going to chip in here.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Before i start though, i want to make a preemptive counter to anyone thinking “if you don’t like pets, play another class”. There are more reasons to play ranger than just pets. The whole class is stylistically awesome, with it’s evade heavy acrobatic movements. Some people like nature magic. Some people love the idea of playing a ranger (a soldier specially trained in the techniques of guerrilla warfare, especially in jungle terrain – dictionary.com). Other people want to be Legolas. Not all of these people want pets.

Also, hitboxes vs hitscan. A hitbox is a programming tool used for showing when an attack actually hits. For example, you get hit with a warriors GS autoattack. The attack hitbox of the greatsword makes contact with your characters hitbox, and the game knows that you’ve been hit. Often used in action games and very important in fighting games. Hitscan just means that damage is calculated instantly. Pick a target, press the button, and the game instantly does the skills effects on a target. Most classic MMO’s use this for single target skills. Call of duty uses this too.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Pets. They’re AI. AI is inherently unreliable. The necromancer’s summoner class has shown this, and so have the rangers turrets. The only reason Mesmers aren’t horrible is because their AI is incredibly simple and is designed around the fact that they will die quickly.

I want to bring WoW into this, specifically the hunter. WoW is a different type of game. It’s a classic MMO where auto attacking someone with your sword hits only them, hitboxes aren’t incorporated into basic attacks, and there is no way to avoid attacks manually. The pets in that game work great. Why? Because the base game is such that an AI pet isn’t much of a problem. Your cat running up to the enemy and attacking isn’t mechanically different from a warrior running up to the enemy and doing his damage rotation. Pets don’t miss because their attacks aren’t about hitboxes. If you’re in range when the animation starts, the attack hits.

GW2 isn’t like that. This game takes in a lot of action elements. Attacks have defined hitboxes and your survivability is in your hands, not in the hands of the RNG. Here a warrior can’t run up to an enemy and just start auto attacking. If you don’t dodge and if you don’t keep out of heavy enemy AOE, you die. A warrior wielding a greatsword can hit multiple targets in an autoattack, and every single class has some way of raining hell down on an area instead of a single target. Our pets are concepts from WoW jammed into a game where they don’t belong.

Also, as a fun fact, in WoW hunters are less reliant on their pets. They can take skills that reduce their pets contribution to as low as 10% or as high as 50%. Basically, we are stuck with the WoW beastmasters pet system.

Why are we so reliant on pets? They’re unreliable because of flaws with this games AI. They die quickly, they aren’t good at hitting things, and unless they do massive damage by themselves to make up for all the attacks they’ll miss and from all the downtime when they die from AOE, they will be a net loss in DPS. If they get that massive damage we’ll be OP against slow classes or in 1v1 situations. Giving them large HP and letting them always hit their targets means they turn into nothing. Our class mechanic becomes an annoying pointless extra button press between us attacking the enemy, and them taking full damage.

Anet said they want to make GW2 an esport, but what kind of esport has characters that relies so much on AI? They take the skill out of the players hands and give it to a computer.

My suggestion?
1) make pets only 10% of our damage, but give them far more CC options. Give them more HP, the ability to attack while moving, and give us access to multiple skills like stuns, blinds, immobilizes, etc from them. This way the pet isn’t an unreliable part of your damage, it’s a little CC/support that you have a lot of control over.

and with that in effect

2) Let us stow pets. When we stow pets, we lose all of their CC except one skill, and we get a stat buff depending on which pet we stow. This gives us more reliability at the cost of less pet skills.

I’d rather they go back to the pet as an option that required a whole build to work idea that they had in GW1. I was elated when I saw that teh pet was a core mechanic of the class and didn’t require me to be a ‘beastmaster’ to use effectively but it is obvious now that making it work is either beyond their capabilities or they just don’t give a kitten.

Either way, the only way to fix it is to just remove it as a mechanic of the class and make our F skills more generic huntsman/wilderness type skills. Maybe make them preparations like in GW1 that would require us to spend a few seconds applying them but would give us bonuses to stats, damage or cause conditions.

Substance E.4852:

I’d rather they go back to the pet as an option that required a whole build to work idea that they had in GW1. I was elated when I saw that teh pet was a core mechanic of the class and didn’t require me to be a ‘beastmaster’ to use effectively but it is obvious now that making it work is either beyond their capabilities or they just don’t give a kitten.

Either way, the only way to fix it is to just remove it as a mechanic of the class and make our F skills more generic huntsman/wilderness type skills. Maybe make them preparations like in GW1 that would require us to spend a few seconds applying them but would give us bonuses to stats, damage or cause conditions.

This.

I’ve suggested before to allow rangers to use their pets as crafting ingredients. Failing that, “what Substace E” said.

Zaith.9132:

I’ve suggested before to allow rangers to use their pets as crafting ingredients. Failing that, “what Substace E” said.

lol

Yea, I agree people should have a choice in their build to be pet orientated…or not.

Your hitscan definition is not quite correct. In an fps for example most weapons are hitscan weapons, but the target still requires a hitbox to determine if it has been hit.
The only difference is: hitscan is instant. You click, a ray is cast in the direction you are looking and with the help of the hitbox it is determined if you actually hit. Non-hitscan weapons use projectiles, which actually take time to travel.

Of course hit detection works differently in an mmo with single target skills. Just wanted to point out that hitboxes and hitscan can work together and are not necessarily opposites.

Apart from that, good post. This stuff has been said repeatedly and also ignored as much by anet up till now.

pet’s AI is really simple & doesn’t need to be changed.

go to target -> execute ability queue -> return to player upon combat exit.

to solve the F2 problem, simply tap F3 before you hit F2. “Return to Me” will wipe your pet’s ability queue, making your F2 the first command issued.

i have no problems with pet. just putting one voice out there against the tide.

pet abilities could use a balance pass to buff some weak animals ( eg. Moa’s activated ability should be the heal & Boar breeds should put the found weapon onto the Boar’s activated slot without having to pick it up, like Steal for Thief ) & all animal-specific traits need to be looked at ( 2nd tier BM traits are super weak overall ). the traits that improve pet condi damage or pet healing should instead allow these stats to scale with the Ranger.