Guild Wars 2

Can’t say I’m surprised.

Death And Taxes has always had an issue with staying together when raids are involved. Either they’re too hard, such as Sunwell (lol rite) or they act like arrogant dorks.

Kirk.3086:

or he can go into invisible and wait (healing himself and regen initiative). Cos you really don’t know run away he, or not.
But real problem ,that you can’t run away from thief…

Reveal him. You’re a Revenant, you can do that.

No Revenant has any right to lose to a Thief.

Gaaroth.2567:

As i said in other threads 3s is the sweet spot imho. You just proved that with math :P

If it ain’t science, it’s…

I’ll again reiterate my point that when a utility skills cooldown lasts longer than the time required to generate the energy to use it, there’s barely even a point in energy in the first place outside of being able to use it initially.

Even dropping it to 4s will work wonders. A minor buff to shut us up, and a good reinjection to the complexity of Revs CD/Energy system.

Been goofing around with a couple of different builds. I’ve yet to find one that I haven’t had fun with, although some are much more capable than others.

I’m just a sword-fiend though, so I’m sticking with my own version of the Shiro Power that I’ve used since BWE2.

That explains why people keep trying to bounce on me, I guess.

Gaaroth.2567:

cd+energy is the perfect combination.
Energy allows to create powerful effects without much fear while cd stops the skill to be spammed (otherwise you’d need energy costs over 50% and would be unusable)

rev system is the better version of thief’s one.

However when cooldown duration means that a Rev would regenerate more energy than they’d even spent on the skill in the first place, there’s no longer any play to having energy in the first place.

Take the 5s on Phase Traversal. If it was 3s or even 4s, it’d make sense. As it stands, during those 5 seconds with default energy regen you’d have generated 25 energy, in the cooldown of a skill that costs 20. The complexity of that skill is now entirely removed, all that matters is if you can afford to use it initially. They’ve nerfed the skill, but inadvertently buffed how easy Rev is to play.

Even making it 4s would be a huge patch on this issue. A minor buff, which would actually inject a lot of the complexity back into the usage of the skill, as you’d only generate enough to use it again, and so those 4 seconds would’ve been wasted in terms of energy generation. That’s the sort of play I swapped mains for, decisionmaking, rather than just pushing buttons off cooldown.

I’m no buffchaser, but there’s a legitimate reason for this cooldown being reduced to either 3 or 4, rather than 5.

As it stands, the skill costs 20 energy. In Shiro, we’re presuming a constant +5 regen outside of Impossible Odds burns. Currently, there may as well not even be an energy cost to this skill, as with the recharge we’d always generate 25 energy during its downtime. This is 5 more than the skill even COSTS, meaning it can just be used on recharge without concern.

There’s no longer any play here, no longer any risk of overextending and blowing all your energy and leaving yourself in an unfavourable position. Reducing it to 3 seconds would mean that you’d always lose 5 energy when using it off cooldown, meaning there is at least a degredation. Reducing it to 4 all but negates the effect of energy regen when Phase Traversal is used off cooldown. Even this is a bit more play than the current way the skill works.

A minor buff, in order to reinject risk-reward and play to the class. I think we can agree that such a move would be best for the game and the Shiro playstyle.

At least it’s a known bug, so I can sit tight.

Hey, so I’m nerding about on my lv80 Rev in HoT and found those achievements to get the Mistward recipes. Now they’re telling me I should complete the specializations to receive them, which is all well and good besides the fact that I ALREADY HAVE. Is there another step I need to do somewhere or did my achievements bug out?

spoj.9672:

Blaeys.3102:

World’s first head transplant. World’s first water powered car. World’s first civil cartoon cat/mouse political debate.

These things would be newsworthy. World’s first raid kill is not. No one outside of a very tiny number of people cares.

Test my game and make sure it is fun before my guild goes in. That is what I care about.

My impression was DnT did care though.

A tad too much.

As a former thief main, the ability to be a magnificent b*****d.

I’ll miss the more nuanced portions of my class, the way that sometimes the thief comes together to do something beautiful and hilarious in its simplicity, in a way that other classes just can’t even with the way thief has been gutted as of late.

I’ll miss that, the feeling that WHEN everything DOES all come together, I’m doing something marvellous.

But I won’t miss it enough to make me want to push myself through more years of what thief has become.

Wandelaar.3746:

Cyrus.4105:

Wandelaar.3746:

although hardening persistence seemed to be giving more stacks than you should be getting (I was getting 8 stacks where I should have only been getting 3.

No, 8 is correct.

The trait doesn’t simply give stacks from each pip of degeneration, but rather each point of upkeep you’ve currently got rolling. Your base regen is 5, so to reach -3 you have to be using 8 upkeep points.

When just upkeeping the swiftness and Facet of nature, I had +2 energy regen, but still got 8 stacks, from time to time. I’ll see if I can find an example in my footage.

Now that’s strange. Check it out in your footage, see if there’s any way to reproduce that.

Bear in mind that at a glance 3 and 8 look annoyingly similar in this game, especially on small icons.

Wandelaar.3746:

although hardening persistence seemed to be giving more stacks than you should be getting (I was getting 8 stacks where I should have only been getting 3.

No, 8 is correct.

The trait doesn’t simply give stacks from each pip of degeneration, but rather each point of upkeep you’ve currently got rolling. Your base regen is 5, so to reach -3 you have to be using 8 upkeep points.

Something I found I could do is run a tankier amulet such as Sentinel, keep my crit chance high with perma fury+roiling mists and then set up a huge burn onto my enemy by doubletapping both Facet of Nature and Facet of Strength, to dunk a bunch of snap-Might onto yourself and then 20 Vuln onto the enemy before going ham.

It basically gives you a small window of berserker damage whilst building more towards being a bruiser.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

MercenaryNote.8506:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

it will become a normal melee attack which applies vulnerability.

2 stacks of Vulnerability I hope!

Yup 2 stacks for 6 seconds.

Will the damage of this single strike be increased to make up for the loss of damage from the returning projectile?

Or a neat way to keep the functionality would be to reduce the damage of the projectiles on Precision Strike but have them instead pierce and return, to maintain the damage if both hits connect?

Darkheron.6271:

Well, the original Ritualist, which is what this seems based on thematically, used wands and foci/fetishes. So scepter or focus might be interesting.

This was actually something I’d envisioned for the elite spec before we had Herald revealed. I was dead certain we’d get Ritualist Legend (Togo? Razah?) with a focus/scepter, and it’d give us the ability to spawn conjure weapons in the same vein as the GW1 weapon spell skills.

Splinter Weapon longbow spawn with a crazy kitten barrage? Vital Weapon shield to fling heals and protection as allies? Oh boy.

A bit off topic, but I just had to sperg at the mention of the good old Rit.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

I’ll investigate the energy regen feeling weird a bit to see if it’s an issue.

After seeing a few threads about it and then going to check it out myself I’ll chime in and say it feels like a bug.

I tested it when swapping out if Shiro and Impossible Odds and the other respective upkeeps, and the energy penalty reset just fine, instantly, sitting me dead at 50 upon swap and with +5 generation immediately. It only seems to occur when you swap out of Glint whilst having at least one Facet up.

Basically, the regen rate will remain as though the Facet is still active for at LEAST a full second, so what’ll happen sometimes if you’ll be at a full -10 from all your Facets (for example) and then swap into Shiro, your energy will reset to 50 but your regen will still be -10, so by the time that resets you’re actually down to 40-45 energy. I’m pretty certain this functionality wasn’t there in BWE2, so it looks like something unique to BWE3, but I can’t verify that.

What I think is happening is that the Facets are lingering for the duration of their current tick of boons, despite having swapped out of the Legend and thus not actually receiving the benefits of the tick, so naturally the regen penalty stays around for that duration also.

Is this an intended functionality to prevent people from trying to cheese Facets by popping them for a millisecond to get the boon tick before swapping into another Legend, because that’s something I could actually see being a thing? If so, I think once that becomes known it’ll just become something people will learn to play around, but in its current unremarked-upon state it feels unintended.

Hope any details I gave here helped, although you’ve probably already been able to get a repro to see exactly what we’re talking about!

Vergil.3970:

It would be REALLY cool if they could make BE or Pain Absorption as a new utility somehow react to the torment stacks or boon+torment stacks. Maybe deal damage based on how much torment they have? That would be an awesomely unique burst mechanic that would reward high torment in general. X damage for each stack of torment.

This is actually a really good idea, and is something that’s not really been done before. I mean maybe Fire Grab to some extent but…

Maybe it makes all existing Torment on an enemy tick as if that enemy was moving for a few seconds? And if they were already moving, then it doubles the tick rate for the duration of BE’s new effect?

I think there’s room for everybody to be happy here:

If we had no glow out of combat, but had some flashy hand-animation when we drew our weapons based on the legend we’re in before our hands settle into the current glow, maybe that’d be a bit better?

I mean the Guardians Aegis doesn’t show when weapons aren’t drawn, and I think it’d feel pretty bamf to witness my hands burst into flame whenever I open on some fool.

Tired as a dog after a full day of goofing off with Herald/Revenant, so all I can say is this:

Roy, you have my patronage. I have left behind me the days of Thief and henceforth I embrace the Revenant. You won me over. Three years of maining the same class stubbornly, and this is what breaks me.

Bravo.

Branden Gee.2150:

Cyrus.4105:

Inbetween my last response and now, I’ve managed to get a raid open and now the UI option has vanished once again.

Oops?

We’re doing some last minute configurations. Give it a few minutes and it will come back. I’ll post here when the dust settles.

Gotcha, thanks.

Was worried you’d flipped the lever back off on your way to bed!

Inbetween my last response and now, I’ve managed to get a raid open and now the UI option has vanished once again.

Oops?

Go grab that sleep, you’ve earned it.

Whoever else is still up there working, you’re kitten soldiers.

Karl McLain.5604:

FYI the damage increases weren’t part of a re-work of pistols or anything (something I’ve discussed in the past). We realize it still needs some work to get it to where we want, but we wanted to get it closer to being to that point with these changes. We’ll be looking at pistols more in-depth in the future.

-Karl

Thanks for the update man.

Hope these future looks can be extended to the current state of the class as a whole. Keep a presence as much as you can, I know we’re all critical as hell (myself included at times), but we really appreciate knowing we’re at least being heard.

I can hear it now.

“Alright so we’ve got the initial drafts for the elite specialization icons in. You’ll see we gave Chronomancer a clock, pretty clever huh? Dragonhunter is an arrowhead, cause they get bows I guess. Berserker is a sword! On fire! Because fire things! We went with a swirly thing for Tempest because they spin around when they’re doing that lame overload thing… And there’s the others. What do you think guys?”

“What about Daredevil?”

“What about what?”

“Daredevil. The elite spec for thief?”

“Oh! Right! That thing… well… Thieves move about a bunch, how about a shoe? It shows how much they move around!”

“But other classes move around too…”

“We’ll slap a wing on it.”

“Perfect, push it.”

My guild is already making fun of me for being a shoe. Thanks obamAnet.

Hi friend!

You seem to be thinking thieves are OP huh? Don’t worry, we’ll try and sort this issue out and send you on your way a happier and healthier person :)

But first I’d like to review some information with you if that is okay:

1. This was a 2v1, correct?
2. You didn’t use an evade or stunbreaker, correct?
3. You didn’t use a condi cleanse, correct?
4. If you’re complaining about 15.5k damage between two thieves, this must mean you’re a glass cannon correct?

If you answered yes to any or all of these, then I have the solution for you, worry not! :)

When a condition is applied to you, remove it. Those thieves just spent their entire utility bar attempting to squeeze another semi-viable build out of this profession, and it’s easily negated by a single cleanse.

When opened upon with Basilisk Venom, use a stunbreaker. This thing can only happen once every 45 seconds, and without it they’re left with no other choice but to book it like they heard momma calling for dinner.

Welcome to Thief in 2015, we suck, I hope I’ve been informative :)

Raiden.1375:

Cyrus.4105:

Honestly I’d say the only thing you went a little silly with was the cooldown reductions. There’s a lot of 25s’ in there for relatively powerful abilities.

I got giddy when I saw Bountiful Interruption though, THAT is a trait I’d love to see.

Aside from the unrealistic cooldowns, I’d say that a lot of this is not only VERY good but also rather realistic in terms of expectations. I’d love to see this happen.

Thanks. Out of curiosity, are you talking about the Venom cool down reductions now all being 25 seconds? Would like to know which skills you are talking about, and the reasons for why you think they would be too strong.

Just gave it all a re-read and actually yeah I’d say it’s just the venoms that sit that way, the rest is fair upon reconsideration.

I understand that it’s essentially a massive overhaul to how venoms function, but with them all being 25 it does away with the distinction of being ‘elite’ and a heal, rather than just being stuff folk can mash on cooldown alongside their utility bars.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

I was about to control my emotions and then I saw that the Daredevil’s new icon is a shoe with a wing on it

suddenly they seem to have gotten loose

At least it’s playing to our strengths advantages abilities... only option in a fight.

But seriously wat. Other classes get these kitten icons (and always have) and now thieves have either the toothpick and chastity belt key they’ve always had or a new pair of nike air jordans.

What a time to be alive.

Honestly I’d say the only thing you went a little silly with was the cooldown reductions. There’s a lot of 25s’ in there for relatively powerful abilities.

I got giddy when I saw Bountiful Interruption though, THAT is a trait I’d love to see.

Aside from the unrealistic cooldowns, I’d say that a lot of this is not only VERY good but also rather realistic in terms of expectations. I’d love to see this happen.

The big pre-HoT balance patch has come, and our class is no closer to being fixed.

The only hope left is that Karl can somehow make Daredevil into everything thief is currently lacking in the next 24 days, and well…

What’re you guys rolling instead, so you can farm the stubborn few who’re remaining thief?

Because I’m not ready to give up yet.

This dude’s been my main since day 1. I’m good at him, I’m good at my class. Because I’m still stubbornly trusting that it’s -working as intended- that I have to try thrice as hard as other classes in order to perform to their standards.

That I’m MEANT to blow every trick in my Batman utility belt in order to kill another player.

That maybe, just maybe, the team behind balance have got Thief as their top priority after HoT ships and they can stop focusing on Elite Specs.

Because it’s my favorite class and I’ll be kitten ed if I’m gonna jump ship, even if I spend half my time in downstate and nobody wants to raid with the de-facto wimp of the class roster.

I’ve already rebalanced my gear.

I’ve swapped in Sentinel weapons, a Valkyrie chest, and ZerkValk accessories. Basically trying to mimic Marauder.

In light of this, the need for Escapist’s Absolution becoming baseline is something which needs to be stressed further.

edit: Also, has the reduction in Dash distance resulted in a loss of evade frames?

edit#2: Why don’t you consider removing the swiftness from Dash, that belongs to Expedious Dodger, and instead bake Escapist’s Absolution into it? So it’ll remove the movement-impairing conditions but also have a chance to remove an actually damaging condition if you manage to evade with it?

This will prevent Daredevil from stepping on Acrobatics toes a little bit more, and also allow you to either cook up a new Major trait or allow a Daredevil to doublestack EA and Dash to have a greater focus on condi cleanse?

The issue with EA as-is is that it’s the only access we have on Daredevil to a reliable way to shed conditions. Baking it into Dash will make it a desirable dodge to take and make people actually consider if they wanna use it or Bound.

10s was appropriate for what we played with in BWE2. It was a snap-skill, the KD was extremely short duration and the block duration was miniscule. Popping it predictively wasn’t half so useful as popping it reactively.

If it’s to be raised to 15, it should receive a little boost to compensate. Increasing the block duration by 0.5s would give us a little more wiggle room and allow us to use it more predictively.

Karl McLain.5604:

Amante.8109:

Let’s not forget that Mantras, once pre-casted, immediately start cooling down for future use

I believe this was fixed in the July 28th release. It’s possible that they could behave the exact same as mantras. At this time, we’re going with the theme that Distracting Daggers are something you can hold over your opponents for a period of time, and then it’s gone. We’d rather encourage using the daggers and getting those interrupts off, than simply holding the daggers for hours at a time.
Please feel free to let us know how they play during the next beta event. There’s quite a few ways to go with the ability and I’m not sure they have to behave exactly like mantras.

They don’t have to behave exactly like mantras, but in the way the game is currently balanced they more than certainly need to.

As it stands, there is a LOT of things Thief can do that is subpar to the capabilities of multiple existing classes. There needs to stop being a ‘but’ after everything, and not every powerful ability needs to have an immediate downside associated with it. If other classes followed the same rules I’d be all for this, but they don’t.

I appreciate that you’re trying to consider balance in every move you make by introducing ‘if’ and ‘ors’, making us choose what we want to give up in order to gain x y and z thing, but nearly every other class out there (and especially the elite specs) operate on ‘and’.

hino.3157:

After playing on the beta events, I can’t help but feel as if though Revenant captures a lot of what I’ve originally liked about the Thief class. It’s going to be pretty difficult to drop Thief since I’ve been with it since I started playing and mained it through all of the nerfs, but I’ll probably wind up looking into Revenant a lot more, too.

This post speaks to me.

When I first made my thief over three years ago, I made him because I saw a class that wasn’t shoehorned into the usual, typical, stealthing backstabby gank role that every sort of rogue class ends up being in most other games.

I built a swashbuckler, a duellist, a sword wielding agile fighter who could (through skill and wiles) stand toe to toe with bigger, scarier targets.

Now fast forward to the third anniversary, we’re all but stuffed into needing to be a +1/decap/rezbot. We stealth cheese wherever we can, we zip around the map and if another class so much as glances at us the best option is to just run away because it’s not worth the time and effort required to begin a 1v1 where we’ll have to perform five times as well as the person we’re fighting just to SURVIVE. Not win, survive.

I understand that when adding a new class to a roster that already occupied a wide variety of the roles we could have even conceptualized some existing classes have to suffer through seeing something they thought was “theirs” be performed better by something new and shiny. Guardians felt the same thing watching the Herald reveal as I felt watching the Shiro reveal.

The balance team seem to have this notion that being good at +1ing and backstabbing somebody already fighting is a powerful role. That condi cleanse for us is “situational” rather than “much needed”. That the ability to stand EVEN SLIGHTLY toe to toe with the likes of a Warrior or a Guardian without needing to scurry around through smoke fields for half an hour is something that demands to be relegated to an elite spec of questionable vision.

That the thief, ultimately, is strong. We aren’t strong. Everything we do is done better (or in the best case scenario as good as us) by other classes. I don’t want to have to roll Revenant, slap some plate on, and get used to grimdark effects in order to play an agile swordfighter.

Keep going Karl, you’re giving me some hope for Daredevil here.

Can you comment on if anything is happening with the hitbox of Fist Flurry? Right now it feels like it has the same issue that the Berserkers Wild Blow had, in that its hitbox isn’t representative of the action you’re taking. It feels too narrow, somehow. If someone even slightly steps out of my direct front, I’ll end up missing a punch, even if my fist actually went through them.

In the meanwhile, I’ll think back fondly to the 2013 days of thiefhood.

Anybody remember when we were actually good at skirmising in SPvP, being able to actually fight other players inbetween decapping and +1’ing?

Roy, you’ve quickly become my favorite dev due to your interactivity in this subforum.

Go kick Karl, make him as talkative about Daredevil

Amante.8109:

Supposedly a class specific updates of some kind if coming in the next couple of days, maybe even tomorrow. Sure hope so.

Hope so. Looking at other forums, I’m kinda envious of how their elite specs devs are interacting with them.

Karl plz, give us hope.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hello,

I asked the head of the GW2 Design Team about whether we would be making changes and rerunning it, extending it, or repeating it as it currently is designed. At this time, we are not going to extend the event, nor do we have plans at this time to repeat it, either amended or in its current form.

So development time (albeit a significantly low amount, which shows) went into creating an event that was never intended to return? What was the big deal in 2013/14 about ensuring that any events added to the game will be rolled out in the anticipation of returning, in order to fill out the ingame calendar with a roster of interesting and varied activities?

This was the first and ONLY bit of content we’ve gotten in 2015 outside of the completion of S2 (which, if it weren’t for the massive break at the end of 2014, kinda would’ve happened then) and the redesigned LA. Those things were good and fun, but people were right to wonder where the Crown Pavilion events were, where Dragon Bash went, etc.

The event was subpar, everybody knew that, but I think a significant number of the current defenders of the Mordrem Invasion have been doing so with the assumption that there’d be an opportunity in the future for ANet to bring it back later in a much better state, as you’ve done before with the Gauntlet and such. Hell, even the Toxic Offshoot events are still appearing every now and then, going strong just short of two years after becoming irrelevant to the story.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I think you guys get it, and I understand that some of you are pretty “hot under the collar” about the event. But please try to give us ideas we can work with — that’s to everyone’s benefit.

I’m addressing ANet as a whole as the “you” in this, Gaile, so please don’t assume I’m lumping criticism upon your head as well. I’m grateful for your interactions with the community and I respect that you aren’t a person who’s directly able to act upon my suggestion.

That said: I’d urge that you reconsider this event not returning. You’re already leaving the NPCs up, there’s little reason to leave them running at uncommon intervals throughout HoT. Even Scarlets Invasions from Clockwork Chaos continued to run for months after they officially “ended”, Toxic Offshoot events still take place. You finally added a proper way to distribute skins and minis that previously were sitting on the gem store EXCLUSIVELY, and it’s sat behind a full weekend of grinding events that are ultimately unfun, unrewarding, and due to the time-gated nature of their existence encourage people to tag events and run in order to try and eke the most mileage out of the few days we’ve had.

That’s gameplay counterproductive to the manifesto you presented to us a long, long time ago, and whilst sweeping it under the rug and eventually pretending it never happened is one way to handle this backlash, another is to take the words of the community to heart. All this time we’ve felt like our words are falling on deaf ears, the only intervention taking place at the very start when the event was literally so broken people didn’t even get rewards.

People have issue with these unrewarding events (which also, by the way, have no value in terms of karma, XP, or even silver coins) reward you with a pitiful number of blooms, and are then expecting to shell out GOLD to spend these blooms! An event which has nearly zero income associated with it expects me to spend my gold (earned elsewhere, obviously) to try and get SOME sort of reward from my time invested into these invasions? What? Although I know it’s the nature of MMO communities to whine about their porridge not being how they like it, this is one instance where I feel that shrugging it all off as such is going to be a very, very negative thing.

But hey I’ve already bought HoT Ultimate Edition some months ago, so feel free to just gloss over my post. You’ve already got my money after all.

I’m going to simply paste here a post I made a few days ago on the reddit Daredevil feedback thread. I have additional input after having finished the whole beta with this spec, but I’ve yet to properly convert it all from gut feelings into something resembling speech.

“Initial criticisms:

I am having so much fun being a Daredevil, but I’ve decided to make this a feedback post on what needs addressing, rather than what’s currently awesome. I think I’ll be able to give a better review of what they got -right- after much more playtime.

The dodges need work. I think them being tied to the Grandmaster traits is a bad idea, because I’ve found myself actually preferring to play WITHOUT any of the new dodges, because they either have an undesirable level of clunkiness, take too long to finish or take me too far away from melee range to the point where it’s almost as beneficial to my opponent that I dodged their attack. I shouldn’t feel encouraged to simply not choose a GM trait in order to maintain a the dodge I know, love, and enjoy.

There could, perhaps, be a new UI element similar to ranger petswapping that lets a Daredevil ‘slot’ which dodge they want to be using. This would open up the actual trait line to further balancing. Powerful current traits can either be moved up to GM or currently subpar ones can be buffed and brought up to GM, leaving room for more choices along the line.

Also: Fist Flurry could do with being a 3-target cleave to benefit from PvE. The DD playstyle lends itself to S/P really well but the singletarget nature of Fist Flurry makes it almost feel like a necessary sacrifice to have to use that skill to access Palm Strike. If it hit multiple targets it’d fit the theme a lot more, and also be far more desirable in builds. This would also, naturally, have to come with a change to its currently wafer-thin hitbox.

So far that’s all I have. I’ll likely come back with more thoughts after I play around a bit more."

So would you say that we aren’t allowed to RAID the party uninvited? Eh? Eh?

“Evon takes it to eleven!”

Intentional or otherwise, people and entire guilds came to rely on it for Roleplaying.

For a long while something about the Sword for Warrior has bugged me, and only right now have I figured it out. Most other skills give solid feedback upon landing a strike, a thud, a subtle camera shake, all those things that really make it so fun to play melee classes. Only today did I work out that the Sword has felt so wrong to me because the majority of that feedback is actually missing.

Now I know I’m not the only person to notice this because this is the internet and nobody ever is, but who else he is actually bothered by this? Do we think it should be changed a little bit? Is the lack of feedback even intended?

Great, one issue.

It’s called an elite not an ultimate.

Ryan Diederich.8179:

A fix for part b) is in the works. This should also help mitigate the issues of part c) since you won’t have to mash F2 so much, though I am also aware of this issue.

Part a) varies depending on each pet, so perhaps a list of the ones that are particularly troublesome could help to get them looked at =)

So far I’ve encountered this issue with the following to a severe degree:

All birds (Haven’t checked Moas yet)
Both wolves
All drakes

I’ve not tested any others yet, but I will shortly. The pets listed above all took several seconds and several prompts to even begin casting their skill, and if I would swap to one and quickly try and use the skill then it would simply go on a shorter cooldown without doing anything, but the opportunity for which I swapped for will still have passed.