Guild Wars 2

Salutations folks. Ive been thinking about a soultion to pets taking damage in instances.

what if , when a pet was called back to you it would take zero aoe damage until it was back at your side? Now for fairness sake pet regen might have to not work during that period. but atleast it would be a start.

a second option is whenever you dodge roll your pet evades for 2 seconds.

Now i know this kinda talk is fairly useless until our pets can hit moving targets ect. but i was curious if something like this would make Rangers Happy.

let me know what yall think?

Jaxx of GRIM
-Darkhaven-

Horrible fudge for a broken mechanic, your pet would be on recall more than it would be in a fight and you (as the ranger!) would spend your life mashing that key to get nowhere.

I think it’s a great idea.

Sandpit.3467:

Horrible fudge for a broken mechanic, your pet would be on recall more than it would be in a fight and you (as the ranger!) would spend your life mashing that key to get nowhere.

Well,I don’t thinkit would be that bad. When the boss telegraphs the move you just call the pet,then send it back in after the attack. You could even make a macro to have the pet call back when you dodge roll to keep things super simple.

It would also be useful in WvW for helping keep the pet alive during zerg fights.

F3 should make a pet dodge once towards you, then continue running back.

Sounds good, but I think it will result in a similar problem as just having them take no aoe damage at all. It would take some skill in that you need to know what these attacks look like, or just notice the red circle, however then you just set the pet back on target and basically you have made the pet invulnerable to all aoe. Devs have already said its too powerful to make pet invulnerable to all aoe. Unless I am missing something here and in that case let me know

Edit: I guess you would lose some DPS during the time you are calling your pet back, but it would be pretty minimal. I’m also wondering how this would work if your pet is tanking.

Ah, old suggestions re-emerging again and again! But that’s good, keep pounding the devs with these, and maybe one day they will give us something.

Just one thing – for the love of god, give up the idea that our pets should dodge/evade/whatever based on OUR dodge – the system needs to be a lot better than that. Just give up that thought once and for all.

Currently I find that if the F3 actually made the pet heel properly everything would be fine. Right now it often ends up still over 500 away from me after pressing F3.

I think we can agree that the specific problem we’re talking about is AoE bursts and cleaves, where players are meant to dodge-or-die.

What about giving pets an endurance bar – perhaps affected by Natural Vigor, and vigor applied to the pet? Under certain conditions, the pet would expend one charge and gain evasion/distortion for ~0.5-1 seconds, like players do.

• If the pet is attacking, AND the bar is full, AND the pet would be hit for more than a certain percentage of its health, expend one charge to evade. The pet would not automatically expend its second charge, so the cooldown would be 10s (7.5s with NV, 5s with vigor).
• If the pet is attacking, and commanded to return, expend one charge to evade. This would be available as long as you had not used it recently, because the pet wouldn’t use it automatically.
• If the pet is heeling, and the player dodges (whether on passive and not currently attacking, or on guard and currently recalled), expend one charge to evade. This would let the pet “smartly” avoid AoEs around the player that would otherwise kill it.

Edit for further thoughts:
The automatic evade percentage should probably be such that it would not commonly go off in PvE against small hits, perhaps in the 10-20% range, functioning similarly to Nature’s Protection in the NM tree. I see it primarily being used against burst damage from champions, in dungeons, WvW, and PvP. If the pet got caught in a huge AoE storm it would probably still die, but the player could use F3’s “reserve evasion” to pull the pet back to try to avoid the burst.
Because rangers already use F3 to try to pull pets out of dodge-or-die AoEs (often with little effect), and already dodge when they are about to be hit by an AoE, this addition of a pet evasion mechanic would probably have minimal effect on existing pet micro.

The OP’s idea is simple and elegant and would be easy to implement for the Devs.

Adding endurance bars and vigor and abilty to dodge with us mechanics/changes would be MUCH more complicated of a fix.

Ask for simpler things like the OP and we might get someone to pay attention.

Tracker.6483:

The OP’s idea is simple and elegant and would be easy to implement for the Devs.

Adding endurance bars and vigor and abilty to dodge with us mechanics/changes would be MUCH more complicated of a fix.

Ask for simpler things like the OP and we might get someone to pay attention.

I realise that giving pets another stat could potentially be more complicated, but there seems to be precedent, as some mobs and NPCs do dodge player attacks, and the “if hit for more than X% of health, do Y” mechanic exists with Nature’s Protection. ANet already knows about the issue of pets dying to things that players are supposed to avoid, so I feel that getting them to pay attention isn’t really the problem.

I agree with the basic idea of evasion or AoE immunity (what about cleaves? those are AoE too, and a common cause of pet death in dungeons) on recall as suggested by the OP… but as suggested, that would also mean adding a cooldown to F3 to prevent it from being overpowered, which could dramatically change how rangers play.

Requiring the player (often at range) to dodge in order to save the pet (often in melee) from an AoE or attacks the player may not even be able to see… well, that’s just a hackish solution. Clever, but a hack, and not elegant, and likely to get the player killed when they actually need that dodge.

TL;DR: If it’s worth fixing, it’s worth fixing right.