Guild Wars 2

Well I made this thread so others could educate me. I’m looking for strategies and ideas which could actually make me a decent member of my team which isn’t better done by my alts.

While you are asking for strategies and tips, you’re also asking with a classist qualifier at the end. I’m more than happy to provide tips and strategies for dungeon play that’s specific to my Ranger and not my alts. I’m not interested in doing so by participating in the forum’s hissing contest over a theoretical skill-ceiling speedrun in CoF path 1.

Will you accept one of these things, without the other?

/edit: is it considered cheating the forum filter, if I made it work thematically with the censorship word?

Any Whip weapon that lacks a Devo reference is a tragic, tragic, shame.

@phys

It’s not so much lackluster as incredibly incredibly limited.

The biggest problem with that Attack of Opportunity is that it’s multiplying your next hit in a very literal sense. Drake breath, Rapid Fire? Just the first hit. Bird F2? Only half.

It’s a neat concept.
But aside from Maul and Swoop, a large swath of Ranger and the Pet’s damaging skills are delivered through multiple hits. It seriously needs to multiply all the attacks within the next skill that connects, instead of just the next hit that connects.

I am totally behind the idea of immobility stealth becoming Signet of the Hunt’s active.

It’s like,
The buffs themselves can be fairly good, but on a mechanical level they’re just really boring to work with. I’m not really making any weighty timing decisions or interesting choices between between attaining an interesting thing at the cost of another, because there’s prettymuch only one interesting thing on each of them and when it’s the passive it doesn’t require my input at all.

For example, Signet of the Wild and Signet of Stone.
Despite the fact they’ve spent some fair time on my bar and I’m thoroughly a Beastmaster, I can count one hand how often I’ve wanted to sacrifice pet regen for pet stability, and count even less fingers for how often I’ve given the 120 toughness loss a passing thought for gaining the evasion-like invulnerability effect.

Now, if Signet of the Wild had it’s own passive effect with Signet of Stone’s active; that’s suddenly much more engaging. For a dangerous situation you’d have to make a judgement call that it would be worth it to prevent damage up front as opposed to recovering it in the long run. It would be an agonizing choice, as it should be, because you want both those things.

Even if the buffs themselves can basically hold our profession mechanic together like chewing gum and duck tape sometimes. Saddling good effects with mediocre or tangential ones just makes Signets not very interesting to work with.

It’s a dang pity sPvP maps don’t have much in the way of ambient critters.

There’s already transformation tonics that’ll turn your player character into a mob. It really wouldn’t be too hard to add a stealth-like aggro drop and a nameplate swap. It would be more thematically appropriate to stealth past mobs by turning into a snake and slithering past, and there is much mindscrew potential in lying in wait around a pack of critters and going all rabbit of caerbannog on some poor hapless soul. Being that it’s not an actual stealth, you could probably justify a hearty duration and in-combat usage pretty easy.

You can even have the second press of the utility button be an ‘end transformation’ that produces a particular effect. Like, Attack of opportunity for you and your pet.

We used to.
That’s a surprisingly accurate suggestion, too. It actually was called Camouflage and it was also immobility stealth.

I kinda’ want them to revisit the concept. That and Alpha Strike with two instead of three. God, I want Alpha Strike.

Lacking a build with high power output for low skill investment is a different problem from feeling like the effort you put forth at the skill ceiling doesn’t have a proportional reward.

I mean, I guess they’re kind of related?
But, not really the same thing.

Warrior has a couple good solid first order optimal strategy builds.
That doesn’t, by extension, mean Warrior regardless of build always has a low skill to power ratio. It just means those particular builds do.

I think people tend to conflate the fact Warrior’s profession mechanic itself has a really approachable skill floor with a decent skill to power ratio (and it does), with the idea that all possible builds you could create on a warrior must run along a similar line. Believe it or not, you can make a warrior build whose effectiveness level is above your average player’s skillset. It seems like a really simple class on it’s face, but there’s honestly a good skill curve.

It is a fair assertion, however, that some classes are seriously lacking in a nicely effective entry level build. And that is sincerely a shame.

I do, actually.
I’ve talked about carrying people on your back being satisfying because it’s one of the few things that’ll make you explore the skill curve at least twice before. This’ll make a third.

Not that I want to undermine your positive message, because it’s a good one.

But, trying to evaluate the state of a class by holding everything to the skill ceiling standard and creating ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ just breeds a neverending rotation of dissatisfaction and hysteria for half the classes in the game. No matter how trivial the distance between their effective builds or how impactful the skill curve and practical play may be on that assessment in realistic terms, it’s the same frantic sky-is-falling attitude every time. Because while people are agonizing over ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the barrel, they’ve ignored the depth of it.

I just can’t get behind a system like that.

Not to say people can’t talk about the shortcomings of classes, or that they can’t do so through comparison. But this everything-not-optimal-in-theoretical-skill-ceiling-play-is-terrible-for-everybody-everywhere attitude is Alarmist, at best. And, frankly, makes a large swath of forum discussion both irrelevant to joe blow’s everyday gaming and a neverending parade of negativity that’s exhausting to deal with.

That’s not the first time I’ve heard that, but I’ve never experienced it myself.

The only time I caught Grast missing a bubble it’s because somebody let him facetank and he took one of those knockback melee attacks to the chin and wasn’t recovering in time. Ever since I saw that, I’ve made an effort to keep the boss pointed away from him, and I’ve never had any problems on this fight.

I have a theory that the melee-knockback can knock his autoattack ‘out of rhythm’ with the boss’s ceiling attack. I don’t know that for sure, it just doesn’t happen to me, but that’s my best guess.

Whatever’s happening. It seems most of the solutions to NPC woes in this fight are based in control or support. And you know what? That’s ggggrrreeeaaaattttt. I don’t even care if it’s intentional or not, We need more problems like this.

A couple things here that seem to border more on ranting than etiquette.
But the ones that don’t are well constructed and said.

Also, Scaling was adjusted a while ago.
If you haven’t checked it in a while, give it another go.

Also also,
I think it’s important to stress ‘Communication is key’.

Not to seem critical of having a financial motivation for running dungeons, because that in and of itself is perfectly fine.

But, CoF Path 1 has gotten a bit of a reputation for being the ‘farming’ path, as I’m sure you’re somewhat aware. Despite the fact it’s really, really, easy; alot of people who go there are really, really stressed. It’s kind of counter-intuitive, that people would be so wound-up over the easiest content as opposed to the hardest, but it is what it is.

I imagine once this ‘scavenger hunt’ for legendary weapons is finally introduced, some of that vibrating in place is going to bleed out into the open world as opposed to being concentrated in a single path. But, for now, just be aware of what you’re getting into.

I don’t think we should undermine the ability of the pet to tank in order to secure steady DPS. At least, not like this.

A Pet’s HP bar isn’t just some unfair arbitrary restriction standing between you and your 40% DPS. It’s a resource you can spend on diverting attention. It’s one of the two major reasons this mechanic involves a separate entity and you don’t just use skills directly.

Any change that takes place can’t just be focused on making sure pets aren’t a DPS liability, it has to go beyond that and make the pet mechanic a benefit.

For example;
It may not be the case that pets can be diversions as we classically know them in this game. PvE higher level content and tanking being what it is, and the pet’s presence in PvP being so ignorable. Maybe they have to achieve similar results in a different way.

Maybe pets don’t have Health and Aggro to determine how long they’re up and contributing, maybe they have Energy instead. Maybe all pets spend a small amount of energy on their autoattack which has a Crippling effect, and if we choose to expend more energy and shorten the duration of the pet we can have them use their F2’s and family skills. That way the pet can do something similar to diversion by keeping an enemy snared in PvE, and has a base use in PvP. But in such a way that removes Health from the equation entirely, meaning the pet is no longer affected by the environment no matter how dangerous it becomes. Because it’s also no longer effectively immobilizing enemies, working with a pet requires some basic kiting in solo play making pets less strong in openworld PvE , less bot friendly, and less likely to automatically duo boss encounters.

Something more like that. So that we’re not just focused on ‘getting our 100% back’, but making the pet itself something we want to work with and use.

Again, these morons youve invented for the sake of a poor argument are not diminishing my point. I feel like im swapping between two major points here. Rangers cant do anything better than war mes guard, and this only is relevant to decent players. Each time I explain one you forget the other.

[deadpan]

Oh, yes,

How dare they make broad sweeping generalizations of classes by grossly oversimplifying combat and player skill while parading around cherry-picked, wildly impractical, hypotheticals as standard play.

For shame, fellas.
For shame.

[/deadpan]

Akisame’s spot on.

A pet mechanic is a control mechanic, at the end of the day.
You basically have an immobilize that lasts as long as the pet’s HP bar does; so it’s good for crowd control and holding bosses still in controlled bursts so that ground-targeted effects can pulse their full duration. It’s just that it kinda’ doesn’t work out too well in dodge-heavy content unless you’re BM. Which is terrible, and needs to change.

That’s not to say you can’t go in other directions. Like how a Guardian has a support profession mechanic, but they aren’t limited to only playing support roles, they just happen to bring a bit of support to the table no matter how else they specialize.

People don’t come up with a class to hate on just for the sake of hating

Hahahaha. Ahh~

I feel more like I’m setting a trap when I put down a Spirit w/ Nature’s Vengeance than I do working with our actual traps, I feel like I’m providing more support to my allies with a Trap than I do laying down a Spirit. Honestly, I just want somebody to really dig in and give these two a purity of purpose, because right now it’s a horrible mishmosh of functional redundancy and identity crisis.

Personally, I think Spirits should have Combo Fields as their activated effects.
Traps shouldn’t be these spammable pressure things, they should be sections of ground people immediately regret stepping on that hurt like bloody blazes on par with AC Ranger’s Spike Trap.

Support contributions aren’t just limited to defensive options, so viewing the situation as a 1:1 group survivability for group killspeed tradeoff is a flawed premise to begin with. There’s also a hidden offense in defense, just like there’s hidden defense in offense. Support-wise insomuch that the defensive options extend the time people can apply pressure before they start to fallback and delicately flitter around. Tank-wise, insomuch that a tank spec sporting the same dodge mastery as a glass cannon results in survivability that’s so many orders of magnitudes greater it can be traded as currency for immobilizing the boss. (Mind, that’s not a consistently viable tactic across all boss fights, which is why you’ll often see people split their spec between tanking and something else).

None of combat is happening in a vacuum, as much as we’d like it to be for easy comparison. It’s all an indistinct blob of cause and effect that loops back ’round again and blurs lines between our carefully crafted definitions.

Mostly the problem with specs like these and efficient grouping is that the spec overlaps with what we commonly consider a safety net for the DPS skill curve. Meaning, players stack varying degrees of defensive stats as a safety net while they learn content and become more skilled at the game, with the ultimate goal being able to survive as a Glass Cannon, because defensive stats are so tailor-fittable they just so happen to make an awesome progression system for a DPS character.

So you’ve got baby DPS guy sitting there just barely holding his own, and then you have Tanky/Support guy whose holding everyone else’s own, and the community has a bad habit of mashing them together conceptually because of all the surface similarities.

Hhhhhheeeeeyyyyyy.
Now that we’re talking longbow buff and survivability increase, can we rehash the wintersday scout conversation? I still really think Snowblind and Snipershot would just make Ranger Longbow.

If the recent interview is anything to go by, they have Metrics and Analytics. If they really wanted to know how something is panning out – they can just check.

I think Subject Alpha is the common use of that tactic, and that’s mostly just because Alpha doesn’t technically have a standard melee attack.

I guess there might be some other fights you could get away with it on. But for every one of those there’s a boss that’ll split it’s face with a grin six meters wide the moment you and your snack sized morsel friends stack together for it’s dining convenience.
So, bear that in mind.

I know you’re feeling impatient. We all are. But stop-gap measures are not the answer.

If Mr. Hrouda wants to share more, that’s great. But, he’s already basically given us an idea of where they’re at in the process so we can frame our discussion more relevantly. There’s really nothing stopping us from moving forward with suggestions.

Since we received none of the promised fixes while other classes have received fixes (and buffs), and Mr. Peter’s has been non-existent in this forum while very active in others, it’s conclusive: Rangers are not a priority for ArenaNet.

Eh, that’s a very simplistic view of things.

Software design is iterative. Just because they don’t have a solution that works, doesn’t mean they haven’t had their nose to grindstone all this time. There’s also a frustrating menagerie of ‘hurry up and wait’ and ‘too many cooks’ to contend with, that means getting all hands on deck and banging it out faster just isn’t much of an option.

I mean, I understand where you’re coming from.
I’m squirming in impatience too. But, I don’t think the time frame is necessarily indicative of anything sinister.

If everybody’s flittering around like delicate little glass cannon butterflies and letting Grast facetank, then yeah, you’re playing the RNG game and Grast might take a knockback melee at an inopportune moment. There’s alot of other options that end up panning out better; coordinating stuns, granting Grast Stability, or having somebody get in the boss’s face and positions themselves so the Boss is pointing away from Grast.

Frankly, I wish more boss encounters were designed so that control and support actions were more relevant like this.

Quirks with concentration training really kind of pales when you start to consider that Traits as a whole are in need of revamping.

Support-wise I mostly just think Moas could do with an AI tweak.
I honestly get better healing returns with Drake Tail Swipe’s blast finisher than I do Moa Harmonic Cry. Because I can easily manipulate the heck out of Tail Swipe, but effectively wringing a Harmonic Cry out of a Moa is an obnoxious experience. Keeping it at your side and sending it to the front lines in emergency situations so it can overreact to stubbing it’s toe in a somewhat less wasteful fashion.

In theory, I get how it’s supposed to work. The parameter ‘If Pet HP is less than Full; Then Harmonic Cry’ should exist as a way to recover your group from AOE, while also simultaneously allowing your pet to mind it’s own health in solo play….But it’s just not panning out in practice.

I mean, you look at your first skill tray while you’re levelling, and you suss, “Huh, obviously a lot of my damage must be balanced out in my pet”. So I just tried to figure out how best to manage it, and as it turns out you can make liberal use of the call/return commands to keep them out of harm’s way, as well as using your heal if only for them and less for yourself.

When people say Pet Survivability it’s not so much referring to the pet surviving, per se’, but that they have the survivability necessary to stay on target more often. So yeah, it’s true that F1 And F3 can handle alot, but relying on solely this ultimately causes the pet’s to spend way too much time in transit.

It’s not enough that the pet just stays Alive, they need to stay Productive.

I can’t say for sure how your system will pan out.

But, I’m on 4GB ram, Intel Dual Core P8600 @2.40GHz, NVIDIA GEForce 9400, and I can wander into any dungeon and manage to dodge things that need to be dodged, even with my crappy old lady reflexes.

Granted all my settings are on Low in order to avoid a framerate drop, but in general this game is optimized pretty well and designed in such a way that microsecond mistakes aren’t punished too heavily.

Yes.

You can hold an Axe or a Sword in your Main Hand, and a Warhorn or a Dagger or another Axe in your Off Hand. Right now Axe and Warhorn is a popular weapon combo, but the other ones are still viable and used.

Ranger is very strong soloing in Open-world PvE levelling content. There’s some difficulties with pet management in Dungeons and WvW, but soloing in the open world Ranger does spectacularly.

I’m sorry, dude, I just can’t.
It’s nothing personal, as Rhaps said, you’re very articulate and you present your points well. It’s just that it’s been months of this. Months. I just don’t have the energy and patience to deal with it anymore.

We know where the dialogue with the developers is at now,
anything else is just navel gazing.

You’re welcome to navel gaze to your heart’s content, just don’t be surprised when alot of people don’t really engage you, because anyone whose been on this sub-forum for any appreciable length of time is pretty much navel gazed out.

I do not believe asking to explore something closer to my favorite profession’s predecessor is in any way unreasonable, nor game breaking however. We could certainly use that kind of versatility once more. =)

Then take a moment to organize your thoughts, and distill the appealing elements of what you were familiar with in a way that works within the framework of the discussion.

For the record, that discussion is;
- Ranger must work with pets
- Solution should work for people with varying levels of multitasking skills.
- Pets must be made more survivable in dodge/kite heavy content but not more survivable in dodge/kite lite content
- Ranger mechanics can’t change from one game-mode to another.
- Solution should not involve changing a stat across the board (AOE resistance), and try to involve Pet AI, Mechanics, or player actions.

If you’re current desires seem at face value contradictory to the framework of the discussion, step back for a moment and think of approaching the problem from a new creative angle that isn’t. It isn’t in the best interest of the class to have one side of a viewpoint contributing, and another side refusing to engage entirely.

I’ll third Wispy’s sentiment.

Take a moment to reflect and collect your thoughts, and start making some suggestions in Mr. Hrouda’s thread. We could use some solid clever suggestions from the non-micromanagement side.

Truthfully, I think the bunker and burst extremes would need to come down a bit before you could pull something like that off.

Between your idea and improved AI for pets, Vox, Rangers could avoid their pets being insta-gibbed (assuming the Defy Pain did actually prevent going 100% to 0%) as it would allow the Ranger to see their pet’s health drop to almost dead and the icon for Defy Pain pop for 2-3 seconds. That would let them know that they have 2-3 seconds to swap their pet or tell it to get it’s butt back to them or it’s going to likely die very soon.

That’s also an alternative worth considering.

As far as I can tell Defy Pain doesn’t work on one-hit KOs. And what I was intending was something that prettymuch just needed to weather the storm of something multi-hit long enough to successfully communicate a “Master, help me!”, and give you enough time to execute whatever helping entails (F3 dodges, Super speedy Return, Swapping, etc).

It could work for one-shots, I think, it’s just the message would change a bit. Into “Master, I was able to scrape by this time, but pay attention to this in the future because it hurts like hell!”. Kind of less of a warning system, more of a learning tool in that case. But I kind of wonder if this would make it kind of imbalanced?

If 2-3 seconds seems like a reasonable enough reaction time for non-micromanagement people, I am all for that.

A sound cue might be better than an icon, especially because I’m suggesting this specifically for helping people who aren’t multitasking wizards and need something automatic happening to help a pet survive. A sound cue can be picked up no matter where your attention and eyeballs are. Also, being that these are all mobs, they do have ‘hurt’ sounds for all of them. Just remove the existing sound cues (which are kind of random), and move the hurt sounds over to Defy pain.

Give all pets Defy Pain.

Defy Pain is the Bear Family’s signature skill. At a certain health percentage (sub 40%, I think), Bears will automatically activate their Defy Pain skill which gives them invincibility frames. And frankly, it’s shocking how well that very simple behavior generally pans out most of the time. For anything that’s not a straight one-shot, it gives you enough time to realize something bad is going down and enough time to get your pet out of there. Maybe alter the duration a bit so it’s more sensible in respect to player reaction time, play with the percentage it activates, and give us a more obvious visual/sound cue when the pet is activating it; and it’s essentially a second chance mechanic and pet health warning system for the non-micromanagement folks.

Bots and Boss-Killing-Duos can choose to take Bears now. So, it’s not really adding anything to Pet AI survivability that isn’t fundamentally already there. It would just be fleshing out a good pet survivability skill to be an entire facet of our mechanic ,and proliferating it across more playstyles/builds/ approaches.

This can be either a stand-alone suggestion, in conjunction with an F3 dodge mechanic so that there is macromanagement and micromanagment ‘dodges’, or an addendum to my previous suggestion. (As a behavior that occurs automatically in the general Macromanagement mode, that becomes suspended and executed manually with’ 3 – Pet Dodge ’when you have the Micromanagement Bundle equipped.)

Generally speaking, I don’t mind the survivability/sustained versus burst perspective.
Thief has initiative, which is all about using skills in quick succession, and lends itself pretty logically to burst. Warrior’s profession mechanic outright calls things Burst Skills. Being about the burst is part and parcel of how these classes play, and to expect every class to be capable of that on equal terms is to tread on their identities.

There are, however, a couple problems with that sentiment.

In PvE, dungeon content is skewed towards damage and support/control roles are being undervalued. Generally speaking, Glass needs to be more Glass, or the survivability benefit of Support/Control and by extension Ranger’s control-centric profession mechanic has less merit.

In PvP nobody has a justifiable reason to target the pet, and trying to loop around the other way and make survivability traits and utility skills dependent on a living pet to satisfy that ‘pet protecting the master’ theme, serves to act as an additional restriction to our survivability skills instead of the pet being a survivability benefit.

While we can’t put out the same burst as these other classes, and never should, it’s difficult to coordinate what burst we do have. F2 casttimes and the fact pets positionally reset everytime you swap really lends itself to melee play. But being glass cannon in the thick of things comes with a pretty dang high skill floor on Ranger, doubley-so in PvP. There really needs to be better burst recourse for ranged play especially as it pertains to pet burst.

This might be a bit radical;
But what if instead of trying to come up with four button presses that finds a compromise between the ease of automation and the control of micromanagement, why don’t we use the Bundle feature of this game to create an actual gameplay distinction between Macromanagement and Micromanagement? That is to say; Your baseline pet would act and survive automatically with a certain competency level, but you’d have an option to go into a finer control scheme anytime you want.

Function Skills
F1 Toggle Attack, Return
– “Attack!”/Aggressive mode (pet is on aggro table, attacks anything that hurts the player or it, paths towards and starts attacking any enemy that is selected when you press it and prioritizes finishing it off before reacting to other threats)
- “Return!”/Passive mode (pet off aggro table, does not attack anything that hurts the player or it, paths back to the player).

F2 Individual Skill

F3 Micromanagement Bundle

F4 Swap

Pet AI:
- Pet AI uses Family Skill automatically as it currently does.
- Pet AI automatically moves out of Pulsing AOEs. In the Beta Weekends, AI was tested that had Enemy NPCs moving out of a player’s AOE. Grant this to the pet, but omit AOEs that don’t really present a high threat (omit ones within a certain HP threshold, or omit ones that only apply conditions.)

Micromanagement Bundle
Replaces your weapon skills with finer pet controls.

1 Family Skill 1

2 Family Skill 2

3 Pet Dodge

4 Location Toggle
- “Go!” – Gives a targeting reticule where the pet will move to stand.
- “Relax!” – Ends location mode

While in Location mode;
*The pet does not move at all. No pathing to any targets. F2 and Family Skills fire off at this location, even if they’ll miss.
*The pet is facing the direction the player is facing (much like how in the game right now, spinning your character in place after telling your pet to “Return” will cause your pet to spin in place).
*While traveling to the location the pet will not attack things on the way, even if F1 is toggled to “Attack/Aggressive”
*If Micromanagement Bundle is dropped, this is automatically toggled off.

5 Resurrect Pet
Ranged Channeled skill with an obvious visual indicator (like Mesmer Greatsword #1) and cooldown that only allows you to attempt it once per Swap.

Pet AI while using the Micromanagement Bundle;
- Pet Family skill automatic AI use is temporarily suspended.
- Pet no longer automatically moves out of AOE.

Not only does this handle pet management more like how our brains manage it with degrees of focus, but it makes better use of already existing pet survivability options by giving us control over family skills.

back on topic, fellas?

As for gear I currently am using Magis + clerics because I can’t craft armor so I just bought it with karma. I wish I had clerics though because I have like 0 benefit of going crit.

I also split Cleric’s and Magi, and I use Sigil of Water and Companion’s Might.

Granted, Companion’s Might only just barely avoids being completely pathetic because I’m BM and I make an effort to force my pets to manage adds and whatnot, so my pet rarely wastes the buff waddling it’s way over to a mob somebody else is kiting, and anything I can do to help keep hate nailed firmly to my pet is always nice.

But Sigil of Water should work out for prettymuch anybody. What are you using instead?

Be careful with the temple stuff.
While the accessories each vendor sells have the same stats on each, the armor pieces have stats spread all over the place. If you want to get all the same stats on temple armor, you might have to visit several different temples.

The big 3 nomenclatures you’d be looking into for a high Healing Power build are Apothecary, Cleric and Magi.

Apothecary – Healing Power/ Toughness / Condition Damage
Cleric – Healing Power/Toughness / Power
Magi – Healing Power/ Vitality/ Precision

The question’s really what else do you plan on doing, so you know what secondary statistic you would like to specialize in. I’ve always found spirits to be pretty lackluster, so I’ve never really been too successful going whole hog in the support direction, ending up as a kind of BM Tanky/Support split. I have a certain appreciation for the power of quickness when it comes to picking my glass cannon allies off the floor, I find all sorts of ways to use my Sigil of the Wild’d meatshield-pets to manage adds and aggro, and I think the way I abuse Healing Spring just might be criminal. But beyond that I really don’t know what to suggest to a support-type Ranger to fill their slots with.

Truth be told, I’m using Radiation Field at the moment.
/wince. Not exactly a proud day for Ranger Utilities.

Hmm.
Just a thought, but maybe look into revising the Swap and Return functions so they’re fluid to work with and help us manage the spacial element better?

I kind of think there’s a bit of functional overlap between Swap and Return. Swap and Return can both be used to help guide your pet away from harm, but Swap does it far better than Return does while also being married to the functionality of changing to the next pet. I wonder if Swap should just be Swap, and Return should handle all the defensive elements by itself.

That is to say;

- Change Swap so pet #1 replaces pet #2, but pet #2 appears in the same physical location as pet #1. If pet #1 is dead, pet #2 appears beside you as it does now.

- Change Return so the pet teleports to your side, and is temporarily suspended from the aggro table (much how stealth now works). The pet stays within 150 range of you and no longer adopts the pathing AI of trying to ‘stay ahead’ of where your character is facing.

It’s not very fluid or intuitive to work with Return as a defense.
Because of the time it takes your pet to travel physically, it’s more effective when used proactively than reactively. So it works best on the kind of cyclical static predictable boss encounters the dungeon revisions probably shouldn’t be aiming for anyway.

Swap is a very fluid defense, it happens instantaneously, it clears the pet from the aggro table, and returns it to your side so you can manually manipulate the pet’s movement on the field. But marrying that functionality with access to the second HP bar/the next set of pet skills is also a bit unwieldy and necessitates a 20 second timer that doesn’t always align with how often you’d like to get a pet out of harm’s way. Additionally, our defenses need to be more sensitive to space, and honestly I kind of think there’s just no better way to control how your pet is handling space than to manually do it yourself. I think this could be accomplished by making the Return mode involve a tighter, firmer, closer handle on where the pet is located in relation to you – so that when you move to avoid an AOE your pet is close enough to your heels to avoid it too.

As an aside;
Swap causing your pet to spawn at your side has always really mucked with the flow of combat when you’re ranged. When you’re in melee of your target, you move from one pet to the next without missing a beat. When you’re ranged, you have to pause your output and wait for the pet to path to the target. This is more problematic when the target is on-the-go, because a good amount of offense in that case is trying to hold a target still or slow it down enough that the pet can capitalize on the opportunity. Except that Swapping is part of how you offensively capitalize on an opportunity, by accessing the next F2 and the immediate-use family skills. So when you’re ranged, you often can’t capitalize on offense opportunities that open up because somebody else slowed the mob down, because the process of doing so causes your pet to become so far away from the target the opportunity slips by.

Mr. Hrouda just did a wonderful job giving us a framework for discussion.
Let’s try and stay within those limits, to try and keep the discussion productive.
I’ll try and summarize what I’ve caught for clarity;

- Must improve survivability in high dodge/kite situations like Dungeons, without improving the survivability in low dodge/kite situations like open-world PvE.

- Can’t involve changing or adding a statistic across the board (AOE reduction), the solution should try to involve Player Actions, Mechanics, AI, etc.

- Pet Mechanics must be the same across all game-modes.

The spec specific solutions are always interesting but kind of missing the problem.

Dungeon Pet survivability when you spec into it is actually very good. Maybe even too good, if I’m being honest. The problem is how miserably pets perform if you don’t.

I’ve done it a few times, but, I’ll be honest, I’m sort of lukewarm on it.

It’s, like, 10-12-ish healing bolts and each one gives 2-ish seconds of Regen. In theory that’s awesome, but in practice that randomized scattering property is just painful to work with. Sometimes I’ll stack a mighty 7 bolt streak on some lucky SOB, sometimes I’ll only land a pitiful 1. It’s like there’s some kind of randomized internal limit that dictates x number of bolts must go zipping off into the void regardless of ally position.

Whirl finishers in general could use a bit of love.

All in all, I’m glad they’re looking into it.

I don’t fully agree with him. But, he answered the question in what seemed to be an honest response. Also, he didn’t throw in a bunch of promises. It didn’t have a PR feel to it.

Mr. Hrouda is awesome like that.

What does “hold aggro” even mean?

I can’t speak for the guy, but, it’s likely he’s abusing the same principal I am.

It’s easy for your pet to be the highest damage dealer, when it’s the only damage dealer. Judicious use of Target Calling on the mob you don’t intend to put your pet on, can make your pet keep an impressive array of nasties (or group of nasties) otherwise occupied while your party and you personally burn through the rest.

You can even sic your pet on most minibosses and sic your party on the adds, and by the time they make their way back to the fight the inertia your pet has built up will carry it’s hate-holding through the rest of it. Especially since a pet tanking a target is by far the easiest way to keep it still enough to land a damaging F2, and further secure the target’s hate.

This is assuming you’re specced for it, else your pet’s about as useful as wet tissue paper trying to hold back bullets.

When you think about it this way the problem starts to seem more obvious.

Harder PvE has it’s damage output tuned so that the player feels compelled to dodge and kite, which is something a pet can’t do. Pets were mechanically lifted from tank n’ spank games and put into an active combat game without adding new mechanics to support that transition. So the more content demands dodging and kiting from the player, the more the pet mechanic starts to feel disjointed and out of order.

And just to be clear; this isn’t to say ‘your pet is broken because it can’t survive the 1 hit KOs’. It’s not the 1 hit KOs; having to manage those is realistically approachable, reasonable for balance reasons, and dare I say almost fun. It’s having to manage the 1 hit KOs on top of having to micromanage all the other incidental white damage hits that truly drives you to the point of frustration.

For what it’s worth; adding pet regeneration into your build aligns the stars and snaps everything into place, causing Ranger to start to play like how you’d expect it to even in harder content. That’s because the regen begins to compensate for the missing dodge and kiting. So it’s not a problem that lacks a work-around, just a very restrictive and unfair one.

/edit: clarity

Yeah, I suppose there’s really nothing catering to the Sniper demographic in this game.

Thief’s got the sneaky, but lacks the ranged beatdown. Warrior’s got the ranged beatdown, but lacks the sneaky. Wintersday Scout had it nailed, so I know Anet’s got it in them to marry the two somewhere. But for some reason or another that’s apparently just not in the cards for any class to inherit.

It’s a shame you can’t really find your niche.
I’m not really sure what else to say, really.
Good luck to you.