Guild Wars 2

For starters, the pet shouldn’t account for much real damage. A ranger without a pet should do maybe 5% less damage than another DPS class and a ranger with a pet should do maybe 5% more damage than another DPS class. This way the pet is properly balanced for periods of inactivity.

Secondly, they will need to do the same thing that WoW did to their Hunters. Make AE’s do about 95% less damage to pets, make pets always attack from behind a target to avoid the bulk of AE’s, and make the pets amount to next to nothing for the class as a whole.

In WoW, a pet was little more than a taunting machine and a DOT. In this game it should be about the same, but make the bulk of the Hunter’s group utility come from the pet’s shout. Since this class has horrible burst potential, they should also consider making the pet do the rangers burst damage in a way that won’t mess up it’s PvE damage. The way to do this would be to make the pet consume condition effects like bleeds, dazes, and stuns and convert this to large amounts of damage. In PvE you would’t want to remove bleeds till the very end because they’ll do more damage and things like the dazes and stuns don’t work on a lot of stuff in PvE.

If they’re worried about another pet button, that’s easy to resolve too by simply making the attack pet button (F1) a toggle so if the pet is active F1 will make it return. If the pet isn’t attacking, hitting F1 will send it out.

When you said scout that really brought back memories as Shadowbane is still the best PVP system I’ve seen in an MMO yet. That said, the thing these games have that GW2 doesn’t is that the thief doesn’t have anytime/all the time stealth. Stealth in this game is much more limited than Shadowbane and WoW.

And remember, Shadowbane had Rangers, Huntresses, Scouts, and Warriors; all of which revolved around shooting with a box/xbow, and not all of them having full time pets and while many could track, only the scout could actually reveal.

The thing about Hunters in WoW were the pets were worthless. They were effectively DOTs with limited/no real value to the class. This is how they should be in this game too. Make them a little DOT that doesn’t amount to much of the ranger’s overall damage and give them some valuable group utility so the ranger can be brought along for pvp.

But I don’t feel this game needs a real reveal. Perhaps a “spidersense is tingling” indicator when the game knows a thief is within XX yards just to alert the ranger that he’s being watched but the thief is too good to be seen, but not so good that he hasn’t been found out.

Honestly wouldn’t get your hopes up. Will very likely be these 2 changes and nothing else.

Given all the doom and gloom I can’t bring myself to make this class until there is some honest effort to show ArenaNET can be relied upon to balance their game. Off to the elementalist or warrior for me I think.

Sounds like the problems with Rangers in this game are identical with Rangers in every game. The Pet AI is horrible, the pet utility is horrible, the class is balanced around having 100% active uptime pets, and the class is given poor survivability because of the idea that max range is some how a benefit to a class when every other class in the game has numerous tools to close the gap.

They should just give pets a 95% reduction to AE damage globally, pets should always try to move to the back of a target to DPS from, and they should remain corporeal while the ranger is outside of combat so they can always stay at the rangers side.

These are changes many MMO’s end up incorporating before too long because of how terrible the developers always do with this class. I don’t see why we shouldn’t just cut to the chase and do the same thing here. That will fix the pet problem.

Then you need to work on the DPS issue. The pet DPS needs to be reduced and the damage given back to the ranger. 80% of a rangers damage should come from the ranger itself. And that damage should be on par with other classes. The remaining 20% is where the ranger should get their burst damage from. Have the pets become moderate low damage DOTS and allow the ranger to tell their pets to consume a stack of bleeds for XXX damage * [stack] for example. Have the pet consume a daze/stun to do XXXX damage etc etc.

The problems in PvE is utility and the class legitimately doesn’t seen to have any.
The problems in PvP is lack of burst more than anything.

And my highest char is only 10 and I managed to figure all this out by simply playing other MMO’s.