Guild Wars 2

This question is directed to players who don’t mind pets and recognizes that pets will never be removed or have a “perma-stow” option.

Since pets have been made more responsive when compared to how pets were a year ago, I was wondering, how do you guys feel about the skill cast times?

For me, there are some skills with cast times that I find really annoying such as the reef drake’s confusion screech (too easily stepped aside even in PvE due to cast time and cone shaped AoE) and the jungle stalker’s insane three second cast time for mighty roar.

Yeah the mighty roar one is a PITA. The range is pretty small so you can’t walk away. Also the cast time on the bird swiftness is kinda long.

Among other things, pet skill cast times prevent the ranger from being truly viable in any high end competitive PvP (what we have now and what this game could be), simply because the pet does not react as fast as we need it to causing the ranger to be a liability. Sometimes you REALLY need that wolf fear. So you swap pets, detarget and try to fear, but the wolf attempts to run to your previous target, so you hit f3, hit f2, he tries to fear again. That 2 second delay can determine if someone gets rezzed or not, determine a fight, determine a game.

Most of them are too long for their effect.

If we had complete control over each pet skill(like engis F1-F4 etc), then the cast times are appropriate according to the skill being cast. But, since we don’t have control, the cast times are too long for most of them.

I also have no idea why Jungle Stalker’s F2 ability for AoE might has a raw cast time of 3 seconds, which is 3,75 if we take animation into account.
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In PvP scenario everything has already been explained.

I think most the cast times are fine, then you get ones like the Jungle Stalkers F2, the Bird Swiftness skill, and a few others I can’t think of at the top of my head that are just stupidly long for such a short range.

Personally i think the melee drakes should also have a shorter cast time than the Reef Drake or at least have their effects buffed up a bit to make landing them feel so much better than it does now.