Guild Wars 2

Many Rangers feel that pets are more of a burden than a boon. I’ve heard so many times in dungeons “The only problem with rangers, is the constant babysitting.” I’ve played the Ranger class for 1000+ hours, doing dungeons, fractals, and WvW alike, and I unfortunately agree with those players.

The biggest problem with the current pet UI is that it lacks control, and forces our pets on us, even if we don’t want them at that moment. This makes pets uncontrollable and unwieldy.

Here are some changes to the pet UI system that would greatly improve the current system:

• Create the ability to right click the “Hide Pet” and “Activate Pet” button. This would lock the pet so that it doesn’t unhide whenever your attacked. A solution to people then ignoring their pets would be to unhide pets, even if locked, when the player attacks.

• Allow for ground-targeting. Right now the only mobility commands we have is “attack my target” and “return to me”, it would be great to have a direct move command that would tell the pet to move to a specific location and stay there until commanded otherwise. And no, “guard” is not a valid way to do this, because then you’re wasting a skill slot on a useless skill, and your pet would attack even if put on passive.

• “Return to me” needs to be improved as well. Even when you use it, your pet runs 10 feet in front of you. When you use “return to me”, your pet should return to the direct side of you, thus not aggro-ing everything in the vicinity.

• Pet skills should activate instantaneously. While I understand the delay for some pet skills, like the devourer special attack skills, something like “shake it off”, that the brown bear has, should be activated right away no matter what, similar to the warrior’s shout ability, otherwise it defeats the purpose, because by the time it has been activated, the condition has already worn off.

• Lastly, please improve the general movement of pets. Right now pets move very clunky and all over the place. It would be great if their movement patterns were cleaned up and more crisp.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. If you have anything to add, or just have any comments or criticisms, please feel free to reply below.

I can agree with all of these points. While I don’t consider the pet a burden, implementation of these suggestions would improve pet control even more. Good post.

I completely agree. These are kinds of quality life improvements we need.