Guild Wars 2

When pet is on passive mode , ie. not attacking , it should not take any damage in PvE . This would totally fix the problem of pets dying to random AOEs like the cannon barrage vs Mai or maw laser . Thoughts ?

I use bears against Mai. Mostly because they’re the only pets that can survive for more than a few seconds in melee with her. As a bonus, they survive the cannon phases fairly well.

While I’m not outright disagreeing with why the solution is being proposed, I do have to ask:

What happens when a person keeps their pet on passive, then hits F1 to engage a target. Now that it is attacking, I would assume that it would become vulnerable to damage.

But now, how would F3 (return) play into this? Would the pet remain vulnerable to damage now that it engaged something, or would F3 trigger it to lose aggro and become invulnerable again? If so, it could cause some serious issues with players being able to solo any of the games content (that their pet can kill) by using their pet in this way and using F3 as an on demand invulnerability with no internal cooldown.

Just trying to get a refined mechanic suggestion going here, because I do agree that something needs to be done about pet survivability versus implemented content that isn’t pet friendly (like mines being triggered by pets in the Nightmare tower, along with the other used examples).