Guild Wars 2

With [Leader of the Pack] enabled, and [One Wolf Pack] cast to affect allies, it never expires on the allies or pets it is granted to, only on the ranger. Relog fixes it, map change may also.

Yes, please change it. Ideally precursor and legendary armor should have cultural designs (with culturally-based gender differences where appropriate – see Wedding Attire Outfit).

At the very least, please try to eliminate tail/horn/ear/toe clipping for charr and asura characters. Custom racial boots have worked well in the past (see Ascalonian Sentry Boots on charr).

I support equal flailing for all super maces.

Just what the title says.

This would give players an easy access to documentation on items and other links, particularly those who don’t know the /wiki command (and could be used to teach the /wiki command).

The game also already has functionality for popping up a window asking to open an external browser.

Two suggestions to improve QoL with pets.

F2: when pet is downed, F2 becomes a revive (similar to GW1’s Comfort Animal ).

Details: F2 would “flip” to a channeled (2-3 seconds?) partial pet revive, allowing downed pets to be brought back into fights where they are unavoidably killed in rapid succession. The cooldown on this may be quite long, as it would be meant to mitigate the two-dead-pets state, where rangers are often left without a significant portion of damage and utility for extended times – up to 60 seconds. A long channel would make it easily countered in PvP situations.

F3: when activated, the pet gains evasion for a short duration.

Details: F3 would simply apply the associated effect to the pet for a short time (1 second or less), and would otherwise function as it currently does. Because F3 is usually used to pull a pet out of danger – usually AoEs – this would give the pet time to react and start running, without forcing the ranger to swap pets or expend a dodge to save the pet, as with some other suggestions. This could easily be on a 10-15 second ICD, to be in-line with player dodges.

(Historical note: in beta, pets could be revived by anyone the same way that downed players could, which meant they were moving revive targets, always getting in the way when you wanted to revive players. This was problematic, as you might imagine.)

(Disclaimer: I posted a variant of this idea a long time ago in the CDI, but because rangers are getting another look right now, and some QoL changes in the pipes, I figured it was worth bringing back from the dead.)

The spawn location of the arrow projectile is a result of latency compensation. The more latency you have, and the faster the arrows travel (much faster now than before), the further away the arrow will appear. It could theoretically be fixed, but it’s just a visual artifact, and the fix would likely be quite extensive. All projectiles in the game work this way.

The Astral Force bar displays incorrectly. At 50% AF (20 self-heal ticks) it appears 2/3 full and reaches the second mark. It takes another 20 self-heal ticks to fill the remaining 1/3.

Reproduction steps: Equip TU, stow pet, and cast TU twice. The bar will fill 2/3. Two more TU casts are required to fill the remaining 1/3.

Ancestral Grace does not grant any AF, whether it hits a full health or injured ally.

Possibly unintended, but outgoing heal ticks seem to grant twice as much AF as self-heal ticks. Example: one TU cast with pet stowed will give you 25% AF. With pet out, it will give you 75%.

I really do appreciate the intent, but this has some serious abuse potential – the ability to effectively (and accidentally) perform a denial of service on someone’s mailbox.

If someone has hit the weekly transfer limit for any reason, they will be unable to delete incoming mails that contain gold of any amount. I expect “Return to sender” would still work, but if they are accepting payments or donations for legitimate purposes, they will be unable to accept and delete the incoming mails, which could rapidly fill up a mail box with the 10-mail limit, denying them the ability to even see other potentially important incoming mail for periods of up to a week.

I’m not sure “just send items instead” is the most effective solution.

This was how I felt when I started playing.

People feel good about overcoming challenges. Turning the incentive to play from “overcoming challenge” to “level to unlock rewards”, while having your hand held, protecting new players (and alts) from the game and forcing them to do things in a very rigid way…

Not good.

1.5 ANet chooses – a short list of viable topics, then lets the community pick one.

If your cats are also set as your aquatic pets, they will retain their names when you re-enable them, if you swap them out temporarily for another as your terrestrial pets.

Also, yes, it would probably be best for pet names to be cached locally, and re-entered automatically when we select them.

Atherakhia.4086:

Berk.8561:

RWinter.1680:

Goal of Proposal
In situations where the ranger is using a ranged weapon, they will frequently not receive buffs provided by party members or other allies located closer to the enemy. This would allow a ranger using ranged weapons to benefit somewhat from boons applied to their pet by group members that are closer to the enemy. It would also allow solo rangers to reliably receive boons that the pet applies to itself, if the ranger is out of the short AoE range.

I’m not sure I like the specific implementation that you proposed (I’d rather it be a simple pass-along share), but I do like the overall idea here. Since ranger pets are frequently in melee, it would be very helpful if there was a way that pets could pick up the AoE boons from other players in melee alongside them instead of the ranger having to be next to them. And that leads me to the following idea, which can also stand on it’s own:

That’s a lot of work when simply changing Fortifying Bond to work both ways would have the same overall impact. It could be overpowered because we could potentially stack 25 might on ourselves (very quickly), but our damage is so low and our burst non-existent (by design apparently) I don’t see the harm.

I would rather it simply be a pass-along share as well, but most things like that are either instant and complete like Fortifying Bond, or on the universal-ish 10 second timer like Empathic Bond. Perhaps 3 boons every 10 seconds from your pet could work, like a reverse EB, but I’ve got serious misgivings about FB working in both directions.

I was actually writing a proposal for FB doing just that (knowing that it’s probably been posted somewhere in the past 50 pages), but when I got to the “Associated Risks” section and thought about what it’d really mean for the ranger… in a stacked up melee fight, rangers could easily get twice the stacked boons, and potentially twice the boon duration of every other class.

It would be possible to check and make sure that other sources did not apply boons to both the pet and ranger at once, but potentially heavy on the server with the number of boons flying around in big fights. If you have a full party in melee, the pet would normally not get very many boons because of the AoE limit, which is why Fortifying Bond is helpful in the first place. But doubling up on the boons for melee rangers would just further encourage stacking as the dominant strategy, while not helping all that much in solo.

You’re probably right, if rangers were kept as is, and got double-boons from Fortifying Bond, there wouldn’t be much harm. But if other positive changes are made to make the class more capable, that could make rangers into nearly unstoppable synergistic killing machines. Permanent vigor, permanent protection, permanent swiftness, permanent 25 might in combat… you get the idea. I want rangers to feel good, but I don’t want them to be overpowered, or to pretend to be guardians.

Specific Game Mode
PvX

Proposal Overview
New Marksmanship master/grandmaster level minor trait (Synchronous or Harmonius Strike maybe?) with the effect: “When you strike an enemy, copy a random boon from your pet to yourself. Cooldown: X (2-3 suggested) seconds.”
Merge Alpha Training with Opening Strike and move Precise Strike down to master if necessary.

Goal of Proposal
In situations where the ranger is using a ranged weapon, they will frequently not receive buffs provided by party members or other allies located closer to the enemy. This would allow a ranger using ranged weapons to benefit somewhat from boons applied to their pet by group members that are closer to the enemy. It would also allow solo rangers to reliably receive boons that the pet applies to itself, if the ranger is out of the short AoE range.

Proposal Functionality
It would function similar to Fortifying Bond by applying boons of fixed duration to the ranger, to prevent it from being wasted by copying boons that have a fraction of a second remaining. It would only function in combat, and only when an enemy is hit.

Associated Risks
Rangers in melee or boon range could receive an extra boon every few seconds, but only if the same boon is granted to both the ranger and pet. If the ranger receives a boon this way, it should NOT be granted to the pet via Fortifying Bond, as that could cause an endless boon duplication cycle. Replacing “your pet” with “the ally nearest your target” could be interesting, but is very ambiguous and might cause boon duplication issues. Long duration boons applied to the pet would have the chance to be copied to the ranger multiple times, which could also be problematic, and might necessitate a longer internal cooldown. If the granted boons had the same duration as the ones granted by Fortifying Bond, an ICD of 3 seconds might prevent most undesirable overstacking.

Specific Game Mode
PvX, specifically regarding pets.

Proposal Overview
Additional F-key functionality for pets:
F2: when pet is downed, F2 becomes a partial revive similar to GW1’s Comfort Animal
F3: when activated, your pet gains evasion/blur/aegis for short duration

Goal of Proposal
F2: The only options rangers have to revive a downed pet involve leaving combat or forcing a pet swap, rather than pet swaps being a tactical decision. Two pet deaths in succession can mean the ranger is without a pet for up to 60 seconds, leaving them missing a significant portion of their damage and utility compared to other classes. Giving rangers another option to partially revive a pet that doesn’t involve leaving combat would go a good way to resolving the issue of pets being consistently dead in difficult content. The health percentage of the revive could scale off pet or ranger healing stat.
F3: The main reason players use F3 in combat is to pull their pet back out of danger, and this change would allow the intended effect of avoiding fatal damage to succeed more reliably. I’m sure adding evasion/blur/aegis to F3 has been suggested elsewhere in this thread.

Proposal Functionality
The F2 skill would “flip” when a pet is downed, and give access to the partial revive skill, which would then show its associated cooldown (if any) if the pet were to be downed again. F3 would just apply the associated effect to the pet, and would otherwise function as it currently does.

Associated Risks
The changed F2 would probably be a 1-2 second channel, which could be interrupted and which would prevent the ranger from doing damage for the duration of the channel. It would probably require an ICD to prevent partial revive spamming. The changed F3 could be spammed or abused if it did not have an ICD.

(Historical note: in beta, pets could be revived by anyone the same way that downed players could, which meant they were moving revive targets, always getting in the way when you wanted to revive players. This was problematic, as you might imagine.)

1. Ranger
2. Necromancer
3. Elementalist

^ This. Unintentional consequences in game design are a pain in the butt. While killing your pet and leaving it dead forever would be valid, from a min-max point of view, it really does go against the theme of the class.

If pets are required, then the game design should support us trying to keep our pets up and active for as long as possible, and encourage us to rez/swap them when dead. This is where the design still needs some help.

(even if the boost was 5-10% in damage, people would still kill their pets for it, because it’s 5-10% guaranteed damage, rather than the RNG component of the pet.)

Pretty much. That’s why Suddenflame said:

Suddenflame.2601:

We can not come up a build for you. It is on you to make it for your play style. I can come up with like 3 builds but all 3 of those builds could be bad for your play style. Play around in PVP and make a build that you like.

Look in the ranger build thread, I’m sure something will catch your eye.

A power AND condition build is going to be very squishy, not very good at either, and no use in WvW.

  ________________________
/                                                          \
|  It looks like you want to play a  |
|  Warrior. Would you like help     |
|  with that?                                       |
\________________    _______/
                                        \|

All kidding aside… You’re probably not going to be able to run one build for both PvP and PvE. You often can’t run the same equipment, unless you mean WvW and not sPvP, but even then you won’t probably want to run the same gear for WvW and PvE. WvW is primarily about not dying while doing reasonable damage, where PvE is primarily about dealing as much damage as possible.

Longbow is primarily a power weapon, and MH axe is one of the lowest damage power weapons in the game, because it requires bounces to do anything like full damage. Conditions on axe are a little better, but still somewhat lackluster, while warhorn is also primarily power.

Are you looking for a high power squishy PvE build? A tanky power WvW or PvP build? Tanky conditions?

Tyops: +1

Another issue with the low hanging fruit approach is that when the big problems are eventually tackled, there will be new problems to deal with – an entirely new set of low hanging fruits. The fastest way to solve those is the hard way.

Not to say the current issues don’t need to be fixed, but from an efficient use of resources standpoint, it seems to me that you’d want to solve the core issues ASAP. Or else you’re just polishing kittens.

Instead of taking Signet of Renewal, I put a Sigil of Purity (generosity is strictly better, but much more expensive and not available in sPvP) on my primary weapon. Only works well if you have decent critical chance though.

Re: Zenith, Killsmith – Yes, good points, hadn’t thought about it like that.

Also, thank you Jon Peters, for finally opening up some dialog on the ranger forums! It’s like an early Christmas present!

P.S. Would totally not mind if this was the norm rather than the exception, even if it only ever happened once per balance patch. Or even every other balance patch.

JonPeters.5630:

It would come at no cost to Swoop, it would come at the cost of updating the chain. Also the added benefit that you aren’t taking into account as this skill could now be part of your rotation and used when you see a big attack incoming to avoid it.

Usually when I want to avoid a big attack, I also don’t want to run far away, or get right up in the face of the enemy. Using swoop as an evade seems like it would be very situational, and I don’t think it fits well with the idea of a gap closer. Extender, maybe.

Vox Hollow.2736:

Would the WvW folks feel as though greater damage on the autottack chain would offset the loss of the evades, or does something like that not really matter to you guys?
I know that’s something us PvE folks would be delighted to see.

No, more damage would not offset the loss of evades. When all you can do is move and autoattack, anything on auto that saves your bacon while doing damage is welcome. The primary goal in large group combat in WvW is not damage, but staying alive. If GS had damage comparable to MH sword, there would be very little reason to use MH in PvE. However, I would not mind a slight damage increase on the GS, though. And maybe more stacks of vulnerability, or weakness replacing vulnerability on maul.

Raven.9603:

Heck yeah, Norn all the way. Like its even up for debate?

I like to think so!
(But yeah, if style is your main concern… probably female norn.)

That means that when the “Enlargement” trait is triggered by the ranger crossing a health threshold (currently 25%), it will have the same effect as if the player had just activated Signet of the Wild. As such, if you have the “Signet of the Beastmaster” trait, the ranger will be enlarged along with the pet. If you also have SoW equipped, and reduced signet cooldown, it’s possible to receive the effects of an activated SoW twice in every 48 second period.

edit: ninja’d

To answer your initial question, yes. Norn or charr ranger!

As for aesthetics… that’s somewhat going to depend on your gender selection, as well. Remember that all charr wear the male armor sets, and the medium trenchcoat look -can- be a little silly looking on larger characters, including norn males. I would recommend creating one of each (including male and female norn, if you are uncertain) and checking out the PvP lockers in the mists. You can preview most armor sets there. It’s tedious, but it works.

Major caveat: there are a limited number of medium armor sets that work well with charr tails, and don’t have serious clipping issues (unfortunately most or all of the dusters have this problem). I made a list a while back, and here are the ones that work best:

All medium cultural armors, PvP Leather (first occurrence in the list, there are two sets), PvP Duelist’s (one of the Karma armors, and one of the only non-trenchcoats), PvP Ascalonian, PvP Priory, PvP Inquest, PvP Nightmare, PvP Orrian. These come close, but have slight clipping issues: PvP Rascal’s, PvP Dredge, and PvP Vigil.

I wouldn’t mind having a thief as a pet option.

Xsorus.2507:

protect would work also, couldn’t think of another good defensive thing besides it and aegis.

Retaliation?

A post was made in the main thread about the dodge-locking of sword 1 (thanks, Solandri!), because of the leaps. I rarely use sword for this reason, and only recently realised that the dodge prevention lasts for a good fraction of a second after the actual leap has finished, into the next skill. I fully understand not being able to dodge out of a leap, but preventing dodge in the gaps between leaps certainly feels like a bug. There’s a bug report thread here.

Regarding changing the greatsword, I’m apprehensive. I love how ranger GS feels, primarily because it’s a defensive weapon, and each of its attacks seems purposeful. The evade on AA helps the ranger stay alive in skirmishes, even if the damage is scaled back to compensate.

While a finisher on the auto might be nice, I wouldn’t want to give up the evade for it. The evade is always useful in solo and group encounters of all kinds. A whirl finisher would be very situational, and only have a tiny chance of any effect in solo combat. In PvE, it could even pull unwanted mobs…

It would arguably be better in group encounters, when there are lots of fields around, and you want to hit everything, but to have a variety of fields while solo, a ranger would have to spec traps, or slot certain pets.

I never realised that this is what was preventing dodges after ranger sword 1 attacks, very good to know, and this should be fixed.

The ranger is not immortal underwater – very hard to kill 1v1 and very slippery, but not immortal.

The downed ranger and pet must remain stationary and in close proximity for the pet to continue healing. If you force the ranger or pet to keep moving, with sinks, floats, etc. or keep the pet away from the ranger in any other way, it cannot heal.

The pet rezzing after its death is a bug, and cannot be justified as balanced.

P.S. Ranger vs Ranger is balanced underwater. Dawn please!

Thoughts on the Ranger specific changes: (x-posted from general thread)

• Longbow damage is welcome, but traiting to make bows effective is prohibitively expensive; consider merging two of the bow traits, Quick Draw and Piercing Arrows, to be like warrior’s Crack Shot.
• Natural Vigor: vigor got a serious in-combat nerf recently with the change to healing spring, is this reduction still necessary? If 50% is too much for an adept minor, consider moving it to master minor.
• All the Nature Magic changes seem good.

Things that should probably still be addressed:

• Sword 1 root – I understand it’s a leap, and game mechanics prevent you from dodging out mid-leap, but the movement lock lasts much longer than the actual leap animation. It should be possible to dodge or move slightly between each of the attacks.
• Traps being in skirmishing. Much has been said on this.

Wish list:

• An option for rangers to revive their downed pets, like Comfort Animal, automatically swapping the downed pet’s F2 for this. Chained 60s periods without any use of our profession mechanic is punishing. No other profession can have theirs taken away.
• Pets that don’t root when attacking. In PvE this is fine the way it is, but players move too much, which is why pets with leaps, tracking attacks, and cleaves are far more useful in PvP/WvW.

Jos.8793:

For those who did not saw it, warrior’s crack shot will be moved to adept trait while we still need to spend 40 points in 2 differents trees to get similar bonus…

Weird Way to promote ranger’s power build ^^

Trait parity is a serious issue, and this ought to be looked at. This isn’t the only place where rangers have to invest more to get similar effects to other professions.

Xsorus.2507:

The Biggest change Anet can do right now is removing bloody Signet of the Beastmaster and making that baseline.

Absolutely silly we have to invest 30 points in a line to get the same effect as everyone else.

+1

Ranger:

• Longbow damage is welcome, but traiting to make bows effective is prohibitively expensive; consider merging two of the bow traits, Quick Draw and Piercing Arrows, to be like warrior’s Crack Shot.
• Natural Vigor: vigor got a serious in-combat nerf recently with the change to healing spring, is this reduction still necessary? If 50% is too much for an adept minor, consider moving it to master minor.
• All the Nature Magic changes seem good.

Things that should probably still be addressed:

• Sword 1 root – I understand it’s a leap, and game mechanics prevent you from dodging out mid-leap, but the movement lock lasts much longer than the actual leap animation. It should be possible to dodge or move slightly between each of the attacks.
• Traps being in skirmishing. Much has been said on this.

Wish list:

• An option for rangers to revive their downed pets, like Comfort Animal, automatically swapping the downed pet’s F2 for this. Chained 60s periods without any use of our profession mechanic is punishing. No other profession can have theirs taken away.
• Pets that don’t root when attacking. In PvE this is fine the way it is, but players move too much, which is why pets with leaps, tracking attacks, and cleaves are far more useful in PvP/WvW.

Been suggested many times, and discussed to no end. While possibly easy to code, it could cause all sorts of issues, gameplay-wise. Requiring the player to dodge to save the pet, especially when not in the same place, is probably not a good direction to take the profession. I do think something needs to be done, though. Increased health pools on pets was a good start.

One of the simpler suggestions would be a short pet evade instantly on pressing F3 (with ICD), so you can recall the pet and actually have it avoid the thing you were trying to get it to avoid by recalling it.

Probably only applies in combat, like most traits like that. Enter combat with your pet panel up, and you should see its healing numbers rise. Same thing for expertise training (increased pet condition damage).

sminkiottone.6972:

What do you mean with stressing vigor too much ? Natural vigor and vigor do not stacks ?

Natural Vigor is 50% faster endurance regen, Vigor buff is 100%, which replaces the 50% from Natural Vigor. You don’t get 150%.

I’ve long wished for LB to have a skill like Sniper Shot, or the similar one from Southsun Survival. It would be nice if it could be charged and fired on the run, but even if it rooted, I love the idea of a chargeable long range nuke on the bow.

I wouldn’t normally want to give up any of the other major skills, but I quite like Bri’s idea of merging LRS and RF – if LRS applied vulnerability and had a smoother or flat damage/distance curve, I don’t think there’s much reason to keep RF, except for its ability to track through stealth.

If LRS and RF were merged, RF could be replaced with a hypothetical new LB2 skill. In the grand tradition of borrowing skill names from GW1, maybe Called Shot (in GW1, the arrow that moves 3x as fast), since warriors got Pin Down?

Perhaps something like this:

Cast time: 0.5-2.5 seconds. Rooted for 0.5 seconds when the skill is released. A quick tap would be a 0.5s root/cast, and if you charged it for the full 2s, the root/cast would happen at the end.
Cooldown: 10 seconds
Damage coefficient: 1.0-4.0 (386-1158 @ base power, LRS is 0.9 @ 1000+ range)
Distance: 1000-2000 (1250-2500 traited)
Projectile speed: 1.0-3.0x
Immobilize: 1-2 seconds

Examples:
LB auto @ 1000+ should do about 342 DPS @ base power.
Tap and release: 0.5s cast, 1.0 coefficient normal speed arrow, with 1s immobilize.
(Used on CD, average DPS ~362)
Hold 1 second: 1.5s cast, 2.0 coefficient double speed arrow, with 1.5s immobilize.
(Used on CD, average DPS ~364)
Hold 2 seconds: 2.5s cast, 3.0 coefficient triple speed arrow, with 2s immobilize.
(Used on CD, average DPS ~366)

With the increase of the coefficient by 1.0 per second, it won’t change average DPS much, but you trade off the cast time for a longer immobilize, faster arrow, longer range, and higher initial burst.

This is not unique to rangers, no class can dodge out of leap skills, to the best of my knowledge.

What is unique to rangers is that the “leap state” in the sword AA chain lasts quite a bit longer than the actual attack, so even if you have AA off and spam dodge during one of the leaps, the leap is long over before you’re able to dodge. I might even say that’s actually a bug, it certainly doesn’t look intended.

Pet F2 could be made to cancel other pet attacks and cast immediately.

Pets could be made able to attack while moving, like players can. As it is, (almost?) every pet attack roots the pet, so they will infrequently hit a moving player. Not an issue for PvE, but a huge issue for PvP and WvW. Looks like a simple fix, but would probably require some pet damage rebalancing, and a lot of animation work to not look dorky*.

(*Pet animations are generally “full body” animations, which are based around the pet remaining in one place as the attack takes place, like a bear’s maul attack. A player’s attacks are generally limited to the upper body, so the legs can display a running animation while the upper body wields a weapon. Most pet movement animations could not be played at the same time as their attack animations. This is why pets with ranged and leap attacks hit players more often.)

Drakkon.4782:

They want you to swap pets when your pet is downed. They don’t want you to waste time trying to revive him. If you’re out of combat, your pet will revive anyway, but in combat, they want you to switch him out and keep fighting. I wouldn’t mind that ability with some of the players I’ve seen lately…

I know, but if you swap out a downed pet, and then can’t keep the second one up for 60/48 seconds, then you end up petless for the remainder of that time. Ideally, we should be able to keep our pets up all the time with 20/16 second swaps and heals, but in practice, they often die in content where we need them most.

I have used a rampager’s (with a few rabid thrown in) set in PVE. The damage numbers can seem a little underwhelming, especially compared to what I’ve seen from full berserker builds, but the consistent crits and high condition damage are not bad. It works nicely with shortbow + piercing arrows, and bleed duration runes. Would probably also work decently well with a trap build but I’ve not tried that.

If you have a condition build you like that is built on something like apothecary or settler’s gear, but want more damage and can stand to be less durable in PVE, you can do the same thing atop a rampager’s set and do just that much more damage, and be somewhat effective with power weapons.

Attack is a fairly useless number, better to look simply at power. So it’s a decent enough rough number, but doesn’t really indicate anything, and is never used in any calculations.

This is because “attack” is the maximum weapon strength of the equipped weapon plus the character’s power, but all damage calculations use the weapon strength multiplied by the character’s power.

Remember Comfort Animal? I suggest turning a downed pet’s F2 into something like this, a channeled partial HP pet revive.

For the cost of leaving a fight for several seconds to perform the channel, rangers would be able to restore their class mechanic in the case of missing a swap, or pets being blasted by AOEs they cannot avoid.

Dropping combat state performs the same revive, but is extremely clumsy, and often impossible in cases where pets die repeatedly, depriving rangers of a good chunk of their damage for up to a minute.

(A little history: during beta, it was possible to revive pets – unfortunately they showed up the same as downed players, and anyone could revive them, so it was a source of frustration when you wanted to revive an ally but ended up healing a pet instead – so this ability was removed.)

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Barrage is 360 radius, the tooltip has been wrong since the start of the game. Use ele meteor shower (with ground targeting), then compare to barrage. You’ll see the same very big aoe circle. Healing spring (clearly visible after cast) that’s what a TRUE 240 radius is, a lot smaller thus then barrage.

Oh, I never noticed… I guess that shows how much I use longbow!

ilr.9675:

Yes it does … and don’t forget it’s damage was stealth nerfed in half this summer

I don’t know about you, but my barrage tooltip says 240 radius… Maybe I have better aim?

Belzebu.3912:

I still didn’t watch the video, anyone can tell if the reveal will be applied on cast or on pet hit in the target?

It’s applied on cast.

pho.9412:

is sic’ em going to be single or aoe reveal?

They said it requires a target. So likely single.

I also went over the ranger section of the video very carefully, and found the following differences from live:

• Barrage radius increased from 240 to 360 [edit: radius apparently not changed, just a tooltip fix]
• Mighty Swap granted might increased from 10s to 15s
• “Sic ’Em” range reduced from 3000 to 2000 (shouldn’t make a difference, considering we can’t send our pets out past 2000 anymore)

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.

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.