Guild Wars 2

There is a reason why I hate to use anything but birds(with one exception:marsh drake); it’s because all other pets have rooting animation on basically anything, by that I mean that there is at least 0.5s before any attack is executed, this will result in a net 70% dmg loss from given pet on average considering a moving target ( which is in this case any human player ).

Why is that only birds can hit moving targets with efficiency?

Maybe this is just a personal assumption and I may be wrong but really it seems to me that nothing can match birds agility/speed and damage.

Anet has told us it’s because pets share the same AI with ambient enemies (i.e. a hostile river drake) and it’s not fixable. So we’ve had garbage pets for 3 years running. It’s especially laughable since I think the entire GW2 playerbase agrees open world enemies are the equivalent difficulty of those baby toys where you have to put the square in the square and the circle in the circle. “Oh no, river drakes can now attack on the move, Queensdale is unplayable!”

BTDubs, the bird thing is an optical illusion. Cats actually do more damage on moving targets than birds because the bird swiftness move eats up too much time.

I wonder if the reason we have more soft CC than all the other professions combined is because anet was trying to compensate for our pets not being able to catch up…

@Fluff
The soft CC you mentioned might very likely be the case.

You remember them saying that all the “on swap traits” is their effort to make pets wanted since the pet itself is garbage?
Of course they used different wording but that’s pretty much what they said.

If there’s one thing I miss from traits since the changes is the trait that gave you fury and might when your pet HP dropped below 50% (was back in Marksmanship).
… I mean … I wouldn’t argue if The Most Dangerous Game kept it’s current mechanic but triggered based on pet’s health (dead pet included).
I mean… Yea, I would consider this trait in WvW and some other environments that way.
Heck, it would be amazing for open world, too. Pet goes low way too often without any way to prevent it from dying. And it would beat Quick Draw in terms of DPS.

Tragic Positive.9356:

@Fluff
The soft CC you mentioned might very likely be the case.

You remember them saying that all the “on swap traits” is their effort to make pets wanted since the pet itself is garbage?
Of course they used different wording but that’s pretty much what they said.

If there’s one thing I miss from traits since the changes is the trait that gave you fury and might when your pet HP dropped below 50% (was back in Marksmanship).
… I mean … I wouldn’t argue if The Most Dangerous Game kept it’s current mechanic but triggered based on pet’s health (dead pet included).
I mean… Yea, I would consider this trait in WvW and some other environments that way.
Heck, it would be amazing for open world, too. Pet goes low way too often without any way to prevent it from dying. And it would beat Quick Draw in terms of DPS.

oh yeah, that actually seems useful. 2 stacks of might every second, so we can get back the DPS lost.

With all our defensive traits that only works when our health is above 90% they go and put this one when is below 50%… No sense at all.

The reason why birds hit more often is because their auto attack has 300 range.

Is there no way we could get an improved pet ai/pathfinding ?

Honestly, I would be terrified of a pet that could attack while moving. It would be impossible to get the kitten thing off of you.

Justine.6351:

Honestly, I would be terrified of a pet that could attack while moving. It would be impossible to get the kitten thing off of you.

literally “kitten” this time xD

All has been said. Pets share AI with mobs. Birds have 300 range on attacks. The rooting wouldn’t be so bad if some pets had cast and after-cast times reduced on attacks and melee pets have ranges increased from 130 to around 180-210.

I just shows how rushed ranger was in the initial development of the game, and it seems that Anet has learned nothing in the last 2 years that is going to show any improvements.

If it’s not broke don’t err, aww, I did that wrong…

Bran.7425:

I just shows how rushed ranger was in the initial development of the game, and it seems that Anet has learned nothing in the last 2 years that is going to show any improvements.

I dare to disagree. They improved a huge load in design, synergy and effectiveness.
They have been learning from Ranger the whole 2 years.

… And then decided to give it to the others.

This video explain everything. Anet went the lazy and efficient way by making pets share the same AI and functionalities than pve mobs, instead of giving their auto attacks a lung with 300 range, like the moa morph elite skill.
https://youtu.be/CJ4b4uvJ8tY

ItIsFinished.9462:

The reason why birds hit more often is because their auto attack has 300 range.

They could just apply that range to every pet’s AA as well as giving pets a 20% base run speed increase and that would solve all the issues. Pets in GW1 were 20% faster than a player when both had equivalent buffs and that game was a lot slower than GW2, so it is so obvious to me that the same needs to be implemented here.

Not a perfect fix by any means, but it would at least make them function. You cannot really improve the AI to make it hit targets better because there is a fine line between that and pets being super OP set-and-forget killing machines.