Guild Wars 2

Many players in the ranger forum are reporting that their pets are not doing as much damage as before. After much discussion and testing, I tracked down the problem (for the feline pets at least) to the critical damage calculation.

I had my lynx pet attack the heavy golem in the mists multiple times. My character was spec’ed with 30 BM and the pet’s prowess trait. With that trait (30% crit dam) criticals should hit for 180% of a regular attack. Here are the averages for a bunch of crit vs. non-crit damage figures I saw from two of the pet’s skills.

Bite: 1320.9 (n=7)
Bite, crit: 2361.4 (n=15)
ratio: 1.79, as expected

Maul is the cat’s biggest attack. It has two attacks in rapid succession. The first attack hits for nearly as much as Bite (the second-biggest damage skill). The second attack hits for about twice the damage of the first. So it’s the source of biggest damage numbers from the cat pets.

Maul 1: 923.7 (n=7)
Maul 1, crit: 1156.1 (n=9)
ratio: 1.25

Maul 2: 2002.2 (n=12)
Maul 2, crit: 2171.5 (n=21)
ratio: 1.08

So the criticals on Maul are not hitting for the correct amount. The Feb 26 patch introduced a bug somewhere in the critical damage calculation for this pet skill, and possibly other pet skills.

I didn’t test birds, but they are the other pet widely being reported as having lower peak damage since the patch. Their big damage skill is also a double attack like Maul (actually all of the birds’ attacks are double attacks). So it’s possible the bug lies somewhere in the code for double attack skills in general.