Guild Wars 2

Either directly or indirectly, the biggest complaint of rangers on the forums seems to be their pets. As far as I can tell, none of the developers play ranger as their main, meaning we don’t have an advocate. So where does that leave rangers? Crying over our spilt milk.

Personally, I think the devs really need to rework the beastmastery line and make pets reflect more how we set up our rangers. Below are a few suggestions as to how that might work.

A) Our pets act as part of our damage and health pool. Placing pet in peace mode should not cripple rangers by essentially removing the pet. Instead peace mode should be potentially another strategic option for rangers by triggering a boon. The boon is replacing the large loss in DPS.

Ex. for peace mode boons:
Shared pain (half of damage taken by ranger is taken by pet instead) -or-
Swiftness (pet is no longer guarding so ranger and pet can run full out) -or-
Stability (pet is not actively attacking mob, but “actively” supporting the ranger) -or-
Soothe hurts (pet takes conditions from ranger)

B) Trait line point bonuses should affect the pet as well as the ranger. If a ranger dumps 6 trait points into marksmanship to make their attacks hit harder (+power), then pets attacks (~30% of ranger DPS) should also hit harder. Same goes for precision, toughness and/or vitality. I’m not suggesting that equipment bonuses should affect the pet either. Why should ~30% of what makes us rangers be unaffected by our trait point choices. We can’t spec out of our pet like the necros can theirs if they choose not to buff them.

C) Spending points in the beastmastery line should enhance pets far more than it does. While it does help the pet/ranger a tiny bit, I find the points much better spent and more cost effective anywhere else. You can tell how bad it’s going to be with the first point spent. Instinctual bond….seriously? Painful bond would have been better with the pet taking 10% of damage dealt to the ranger.

Rending attacks, stability training and intimidation training, why are these restricted to work with only certain pets? Intimidation would actually be worthwhile if it applied to all pets.

Zephyr’s speed should be replaced completely. I’d rather see something where any boon the pet/ranger gets is shared with the other (Fortifying bond only goes from ranger to pet). That is a much better grandmaster trait.

Conclusion

It doesn’t have to be about DPS or the health pool. Utility is just as useful. A pet could be ccing, or stripping boons or absorbing damage or eating conditions off the ranger. There is some of this dispersed in the trait lines, but those would be a better fit in the beastmastery line. Anything to make it so you have to kill the ranger/pet team instead of just the ranger or the pet.

Ever since the first MMO’s came out and rangers kited melees into the dirt, developers have made rangers the “bottom of the food chain” and weak. For some reason, they think “historically” melees were on top and should be in an MMO. They forget the longbow put Britain on top as much as their navy. Genghis Khan’s warriors wielded the recurve bow, not the sword, from horseback to win their battles. Or, maybe they all play melee and don’t want a fair fight.

Kiting ability is fairly poor in GW2. The ranger profession mechanic (pets) has some significant issues. This can be most felt in PvP situations, but affects PvE as well (group situations more acutely). Rangers have very little control over their profession mechanic. If the devs can’t fix AI issues and don’t want to increase DPS, then perhaps increased pet utility is the way to go.

Rangers should not be considered a “free kill” in PvP or the unwanted/auto kick class in dungeons.

-decrease the amount of dps, that pets are able to deal and increase the amount of dps, that weapons are able to deal

-handle pets as buffers and ccers

Tyeme.6589:

Rangers should not be considered a “free kill” in PvP or the unwanted/auto kick class in dungeons.

I get that people are frustrated, but let’s not pretend that almost all high level PvP teams aren’t running with at least one ranger, and that rangers don’t bring massive damage boosts to dungeon speed clears. Start from somewhere that isn’t hyperbole.

On topic, I wonder if reverting pets back to how they originally were isn’t a viable band-aid. Way more damage, far less health. When the game first came out, the majority of PvE noobie rangers couldn’t keep their pets alive, and they apparently were too dangerous in PvP. Now rangers can easily keep their pets alive and people are more knowledgeable about how to mitigate pet damage in PvP. Sort of like how hundred blades used to be considered OP and should now probably be reverted, maybe pets need a revert. More skill used, more gained.

Get rid of the pets and give us a better nature mechanic to work with. Or at least let us stow them in battle when they will be nothing but a liability anyways. (I can solo the Plinx Champion Abomination with any profession except ranger. Wonder why?…)

I put in about peace mode boons because the devs said they wont let us stow pets.

Reverting pets to higher DPS and low health seems like making the problem worse. Seems like cats already fit that bill. As for skill using pets…..that part of the problem. There is very little combat control we can exert over pets. Mode/pet switching/F2 is not much control over 1/3 of our characters combat ability.

I have to agree that pets should be a rangers cc platforms. Basically…..if the pet is alive, you wont get to a kiting ranger. If the pet is defeated, the ranger can’t keep someone from closing the gap.

livlaender.8790:

-decrease the amount of dps, that pets are able to deal and increase the amount of dps, that weapons are able to deal

-handle pets as buffers and ccers

This. Entirely. Remove (most of) the damage of the pets and let them act as “supports”.
Spending traitpoints in Beastmastery should give the pets some damage back.

I think they should bathe and groom them, first. My Wolf has gone almost two years without a bath and he smells.

Sevans.4619:

I think they should bathe and groom them, first. My Wolf has gone almost two years without a bath and he smells.

Just take him out for a swim… oh wait, wolves can’t go into water

They even now don’t react. There is still a 2-5 second delay until they use the kitten F2-skill. This has been an issue since the betas and there were several updates where they told, the pets are more responsive. Maybe I handle it wrong but yesterday I played with my Ranger and the F2 skills were all delayed. Like it was in betas/beginning.

I’d recently been thinking along the same lines – that we should be able to put pets into a mode where they don’t take damage, and they don’t deal damage, or to choose some pets that only radiate boons, and some that radiate CCs.

Change all F2 skills to have a .5 second cast time. A number of skills still can’t be used reliably because the cast time is simply too long.

Change all pet ranged attacks and abilities to have a max range of 1200 yards, but make it so the pet wants to move within 900 yards before casting. This will have no net change in PvE but allow pets to actually finish their casting and perhaps hit a moving target a bit more often.

Give all pets a base movement speed higher than that of players so they can reliably hit moving targets and activate abilities more reliably. Trait could then be removed all together or simply make it so pets don’t suffer from in-combat movement penalty (if they do?) or increase the movement bonus even further.

Here’s the tricky one… pets should take 75% less damage from AE in WvW only. I don’t know if it’s possible, but if ANet can determine if an AE skill had a pet selected at the time of cast, that skill should do full damage to the pet. But say the pet wasn’t targeted, and just so happens to be within range of an AE? That damage should be reduced. Want to kill the pet? Focus it. Something needs to be done to allow pets to function in a zerg.

Make a pass over the current F2 skills and make sure each one has a functional use and each pet would want to be used. I’d argue about 2/3 of the pets aren’t used because their abilities are so much weaker than the other 1/3rd… but on top of that I’d say about half of them are probably outright useless to begin with. Especially with the current stop to cast, cast time, and range limitations many pets have.

That’s about it. I don’t think pets need to be removed. Especially now that the F2 skills are much more responsive. We just need the F2 skills themselves to be better now and pets to survive AE in WvW better.

Im in favor of having only 1 pet but with solid survivability and responsiveness rather then 2 pets with gimmicky swap mechanic. F4 can be freed up to give ranger more interaction with pet. Examples of F4 can be used to:

- activate another pet skill
- command the pet to dodge
- switch the pet between modes: we can have like Aggressive Enrage mode (pet moves faster and deals more dmg, but takes much more dmg at same time), Defensive Bulk Up mode (pet takes less direct dmg and reduced condition duration, but moves much slower), and Passive Carefree mode (pet does nothing except maybe grant ranger a tiny buff every 10s). So yeah, F4 can be used to cycle thru these modes and maybe put a cooldown between modes just like weapon swapping.

Getting F2 to work the first 5-6 times you press it would be a step in the right direction. Right now pets are dying faster than the F2 skill can initiate it’s ridiculous.

Give us the Zerk multipliers that some other classes have