Guild Wars 2

I had an idea on how to improve the way that rangers interact with their pets, like telling a pet when to use it’s self heal at a certain health threshold, so far the only thing i see my pet do, is attacking and not healing when he needs to be healed.

If we could tell our pets when to use their abilities, i think they would be alot more useful than just cannon fodder..

I fully agree. One of the major problems with the pet is the lack of control we have over it (in addition to the fact that is has problems hitting moving targets and problems evading damage).

One of the important fixes for the pet would be to give us total control over the pet skills, i.e., the pet will attack with his auto unless told otherwise and we could trigger any of its other 3 skills (I am not fully in agreement with a pet self healing system though, perhaps it should continue with a combined healing – I imagine in your comment you knew that when the ranger heals it affects the pet too, right?).

This could be done in two ways, fully active, i.e., we have buttons that can be tied to each pet skill and we trigger them at our convenience (a very good option that would not make it so “easy to use mechanic”) or a programmed pet skill, i.e., provide different parameters in which the pet would use its skill (e.g., first attack when engaging use X, use X whenever out of cooldown, use X if health falls below Y threshold, use X if ranger health falls below Y threshold, use X if ranger uses skill Z, etc.).

This last mechanic would be coding intensive, but seriously it existed in one of the most amazing (if not best game ever) to a certain degree – Baldur’s Gate. And it also existed in NWN I and II. So I don’t think its something impossible.

Both ideas work for me, although in spirit of keeping the game more active oriented I believe we having the option of triggering the move better than a passive conditional mechanic, but with either alternative I would be happy.

That would help a lot.

One thing I miss a lot with pet is the ability to flag it, like you would heroes in gw1. Guard is not optimal for this as I have to give up utility for pet control. I would like to be able to set my pet to back away from a boss while I remain melee (seeing as I can dodge, but the pet can’t) or to run around an AoE instead of going the most direct way to the target.

Even with 0 cd flagging ability, it would still require a lot of the ranger because it would be necessary to do often but at least it would help mitigate some of the problems with pets, particularly in wvw zergs (imagine actually being able to tell your pet to go around AoE just by flagging it every few seconds to a new location as it approaches)