Guild Wars 2

The ranger pet the black widow spider is still bugged despite being reported since before launch. The pet is supposed to be a duplicate of another spider, the jungle spider. They share all the same stats and abilties except for one, vitality. The black widow spider only has 1,424 vitality, while *every other spider, including the duplicate spider the jungle spider, has 2,798.

Some time during the BWEs all ranger pets received a vitality boost across the board. The black widow spider, for whatever reason, did not receive it (I’m guessing someone just forgot it that that). This has caused the spider to be far squishier than every other spider, with no stat trade off. It’s flat out inferior.

This bug has been reported several times since before and after launch. Please fix it so that this ranger pet is on par with the other ranger pets, it shouldn’t take three or more months to edit a vitality value for a pet when it’s clearly wrong.

Being a fellow GW1 player, I would love to see the bug fixed despite ArenaNet’s apparent unwillingness to address the the subject. I made a post about the topic before that got buried to infinity.

I was browsing the Wiki on pets and surprised by this. I’m surprised that the Black Widow is weaker than the pet it copies.

It is truly disappointing to say the least. Worst of all, we don’t know the reason for the discrepancy.

I read somewhere else here on the forums that Black Widow has lower vitality on purpose so people with all of the HoM rewards wouldn’t have a significant advantage over other players by using both Black Widow and Jungle Spider and swapping between them for the F2 skill.

(I think rather than lowering the vitality of the Black Widow, it would be more fair to disallow loading both spiders at the same time.)

Can we get an official response?

Yeah, it is funny that instead of a purely cosmetic item rangers actually get something that makes them weaker in comparison for all their trouble of earning HoM points. Doubling up on one F2 skill does not make you stronger than others (unless the copied F2 skill is, in which case the F2 skill is the balancing problem, not the fact that it is doubled), you are sacrificing a different F2 skill after all, but having a pet that dies faster makes you weaker than others. As a result HoM pets are pretty much glorified roleplay companions for out-of-combat uses only.

I am genuinely appalled that there is still no answer to this question. Are we simply expected to give up on this bug and stop bringing it up due to this prolonged silence?

Yes, the Black Widow is weaker than the Jungle Spider, but is not the only one.
White Raven should be identical with the Black Raven, but again the White Raven has less vitality.

And a cosmetic bug: Rainbow Jelly fish and Blue Jellyfish should have identical stats, but different skins. They are not different. They have identical stats and the very same skin. They only have different names.