Guild Wars 2

I played a Ranger in GW1 for years, where all the pets had exactly the same skills and damage, and so like most people I was really looking forward to being able to have pets with unique differing skills and capabilities in GW2. But am I happy? No, I am not. Because pets are so weak in GW2 that they are basically dead before I get the chance to use most of those cool unique abilities.

In GW1 my pet was a really useful part of my character – I very rarely had to res them during a combat and they at least responded to the very limited commands I could give to them. In GW2 I’m switching pets all the time in order to try to keep them useful, and spamming heals, calling them back out of AoEs – it’s a freakin’ full time job just keeping them alive.

Psychologically it’s also very annoying – in GW1 I built a real relationship with my pet because she was always there by my side helping me. In GW2 my “pet” is just a short-use skill that gets swapped in and out like anything else. There’s no real sense of my pets being a real animal companion to my character.

So given that the general consensus is that the Ranger is one of the weaker classes here’s my suggestion for redressing the balance. Don’t bother buffing our weapons, they are more or less fine the way they are (well, once the sword root bug gets fixed anyway), instead just buff our pets’ survivability. Even if it’s only a little tiny bit, enough for them to actually stay alive long enough to make a difference in a fight.

And at worst, if you feel have to lower pet damage in order to compensate, I could live with that. Because right now pet damage output is barely above zero anyway since they spend most of their lives either running towards the target or limping back to me waiting for F4 to cool down. I guess that’s why well over 50% of the Rangers I meet have a bear companion – it’s the only one that lives long enough to be even slightly useful.

Our pets are our primary class feature (those lovely F1-F4 buttons) and right now they are almost useless except as a cosmetic addition. We’re basically reduced to not much more than Thieves without a Stealth mechanic, or Warriors with crappy armor. I’d rather be a proper Ranger.