Guild Wars 2

Looking through the traits I was wondering if anyone takes Instinctual Bond? I would think Natural Healing is just a superior choice.

The following idea came to me when I decided I would overhaul my ranger. With nothing left but the old armor i intend to replace and the reusable pick axe, I continue to do dailies but I use my pet to kill mobs with.

So the idea is to change Instinctual Bond to simply Beast Master.

By selecting this trait, you lose your 1 to 5 weapon skills and instead, your second pet commands are put there instead.

You can still weapon swap for trait and rune purposes.
You can still pet swap for trait purposes

Weapon swapping would change the weapon you are holding and would give you the different stat benefits.

With pets swapping, all this would do is switch up which pet makes use of 1 to 5 and and which one uses the F keys.

The F1 to F4 commands wouldn’t change but the 1 through 5 would be a bit different. F1, F2 and F3 would be the same as 1, 2 and 3. F4 would continue to be swap pets however 4 would be something new while 5 would be a pet revive.

Lick Wounds would still use your primary pet only so you don’t have insane regen while downed. As well as “Protect Me” would also use the primary pet only.

Before Instinctual bond got nerfed TO THE GROUND I took it over Natural Healing because on the off chance i did get downed my pet would shred them to bits as they stood nice and still to “finish me”.

Tbh, i’d MUCH prefer if instinctual bond would give your pet a % of -your- stats making it so you could make, say a bear, do some decent damage, or a cat being sturdier, or hell, giving us the ability to boost ourselves to the moon in PvE like every other prof can due to them not having ~50% of their damage not scaling from their stats.

I’m not a huge fan of the idea of loosing my weapon abilities, i use my weapons to keep the enemy slowed down so my pet can catch up and eat them, or use my pet to slow them down/immob them so i can stay back and shoot, it’d essentially just make the trait even less useful if you ask me.

Provided they would have to fix the issue with pets missing moving targets at normal speed (without the pet being slowed and without the target having a speed buff). Perhaps skill #4 could be a cc of some kind. Then mix a cc pet like the spider with a dps pet like the cat and you won’t have to worry about cc’ing with your weapon.