Guild Wars 2

I think it’d be tricky to accidentally make a skill do that, so I’m guessing it’s intentional.

I’m not much of a PvP’er, but I have tried it, and I’ve used Guard in the past to throw my pet down into the fray while remaining perched (esp. midpoints of Nifhel, Khylo, and Foefire when you jump on top of those buildings). It was good for the occasional impish grin.

In PvE I’d actually have a ton of uses for 10 seconds of protection on my pet, but the stealth component ends up working against me because a defense increase and a hatedrop aren’t exactly things I want at the same time.

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not about to look a gifthorse in the mouth.

And I don’t play those classes, so I don’t know, but do they really have 100% uptime on swiftness? If so, how practical is it to keep it up?

I don’t know much about these other classes, but to give you an idea from the ones I do; Engi permaswiftness eats up a tier 1 trait and a healing/utility slot, and the basic idea is that you equip a kit over and over again. Ranger not-quite-permaswiftness eats up an offhand and the pet slots, with the basic idea being that you abuse bird AI as your running past enemies and fill in the mobless gaps with warhorn.

Engi permaswiftness is much easier to do and far more reliable, but it can be kind of a PITA to keep up in combat without throwing more utility slots at it. Ranger’s less reliable and more fiddly to pull off, but you can spec in and out of it on-the-fly*

*(I’ve never really played with pet boon duration traits or runes or anything like that, so for all I know there’s a less flexible build sitting around somewhere that does it better.)

You don’t go into combat when your pet is hit, you go into combat when your pet retaliates. Avoid Combat or liberal use of Return to Me is your friend.

Ack. I’m derailing a thread. Bad poster me.

Yes and no. Yes, in tests versus single targets toughness seems really important, and because we can only do so much about our pet’s toughness you’d think they’re destined to never contribute in a dungeon as well as they do for you in open world pve and you’d never get make any choices about it. But in practice you can always get your pet to distract adds or lower priority mobs in a cluster by virtue of people being too focused on the high priority target to make much of a competitive impact, or taking a ‘turn’ on bosses by virtue of everybody else eventually falling back to rest or not wanting to get within ten feet of the guy to begin with.
Surviving that for any respectable length of time without crazy deep investment into a beastmaster build is another story >.>;

Oh, no real redistribution of importance just function?
I’d have to think about it. My initial concern is if they don’t have a meaty autoattack, how would they have a strong enough presence on the aggro table for managing their HP to be a much of an indication of successful or unsuccessful play? Would you need to invent a whole new indicator of successful and unsuccessful play? How would we accomplish old pet playbook standards like dividing and conquering?

Well, it’s worth talking about at least. Might wanna’ make your own thread, though.

In trying to move the ‘weight’ off the pet and put more onto the ranger, you do remove being penalized for things outside of your control, but you also lessen the actual playing. It’s only logical that somebody would think to resolve the issues caused by the mechanic by lessening the impact the mechanic has. But a mechanic without impactful rewards for playing it well, is hardly worth playing at all.

It’s that flip-flop that’s problematic, vilman.

This argument tries to lend weight and get people on board with the suggestion by listing how it would be a solution all ranger’s ills. But once it comes under scrutiny as a dissatisfying solution, people try to paint it as a mere option to try and deflect the criticism.

You can’t have it both ways. It’s either a request for an option that isn’t meant to resolve ranger’s problems and as a result shouldn’t have to come under scrutiny as such but also it’s importance is very low. Or it is the very important magic cureall people initially frame it as and should have to stand as the best choice against other solutions.

Oh god, no, they don’t rez an enemy.
Don’t tease, we’ve got more than enough genuine problems. :p

Though I’d agree the bouncing thing would qualify, and is kind of annoying.

Mostly it sounds more like the absence of a pet is a liability, not that when the pet is alive and on target it’s somehow messing things up. Doesn’t it seem kind of silly to agonize over these various bandaids instead of just fixing that problem directly?

What are you two doing exactly that actually makes a pet cross the border into ‘more harm than good’? I’ve never felt like the pet was a liability, only that factors beyond my control meant I couldn’t get the most out of it. Which is not quite the same thing.

The only thing I can think of is the possibility for aggro by the pet standing so far ahead of you…But it just seems like such a disproportionate amount of rage compared to the admittedly annoying but honestly effortless workaround. (For the record; face backwards on the last bit of your approach.)

I don’t think a request for more fury is necessarily unreasonable. But that’s an awfully aggressive timetable. You gotta’ think more in the neighborhood of weeks for something like this.

@vilman
It’s not ‘just a harmless option’, when every last one of these things frames the suggestion as a solution.
We’re not unawares of the fact our profession resource is an Healthbar, meaning the difficulty of managing it fluctuates relative to the content and that sometimes borderlines on the impossible for reasons entirely outside of our control. But we want real genuine actual honest to god fixes that make the difficulty more constant across game modes, not a handwavy non-mechanic that’s more about bending and breaking a class so it suits a taste than engaging in actual progressive dialogue.

My alt’s an Engi.
I don’t know about PvP, but generally speaking kits and toolbelt skills makes for alot of things to play with.

I feel like you guys are talking past eachother.
One side’s all baseless hope and whimsey, Loki’s all practical grounded reality, and never twain shall these two concepts meet.

The practicalities of what currently is doesn’t affect what can be. But, on the flip side, this thread is beating a dead horse bloody so you really can’t blame your fellow forumites for biting out the politest ‘Well GTFO, then’ you ever did hear.

I mean, seriously, how many times are we really going to have to hear this same kittened ‘totally unique and original idea’?

Imo this is quite fair, I mean ANet theorized at the beginning two classes (warden and marksman) and then melted them together…. Why can’t we still chose between these two classes?

Same reason you can’t play Juggernaut. There were 12 professions worth of theory, and only 8 professions panned out in practice.

I think Traps make sense when you’re skirmishing, but I don’t think they make too sense in the Skirmishing trait line.

That is to say, beyond Tail Wind and Hunter’s Tactics, there’s not much in the Skirmishing trait line that seems to make itself exclusive to the playstyle of skirmishing. It’s more like ‘the critical hits related trait line’, than it is the ‘dart around an enemy and expertly land blows with skillful agility’ trait line.

So you really could just pack traps into marksmenship and signets into skirmishing.

….but something about that isn’t quite right either.
If you really stop to think about it, Signets with the human component trait are more the stuff of Wilderness Survival than Marksmanship or Skirmishing. An invulnerability with toughness, a cleanse, a regen with stability. It’s survival all over. But signet traits just can’t hold a candle to all the other awesome things packed in that trait line. You could rationally pack Signet traits into Beastmaster, but being that there’s a player invulnerability on there it’ll put some emphasis on taking Beastmastery for PvP which is sure to ruffle some feathers.

That’s not even touching Nature Magic. But before you can even consider messing with that the Spirit utilities themselves need to get to a good place.

I think this is why people don’t discuss this topic.
There’s not much to say about it other than pointing out the oddities and shrugging your shoulders helplessly, but you could still babble on for hours doing just that.

Because it’s his JOB. When I use to work retail, I would have people in my face sometimes, I can’t just walk away and not help, it’s my job to answer their questions and to assist them.

Technically, it’s not his job.
He’s a systems designer, not a community manager.

Gentlemen, you have more than enough places to vent your frustrations, there’s no need to hijack this poor guy’s thread for another soapbox opportunity.

That’s quite a few questions, OP. I think a deeps dungeon ranger would be better suited to answering alot of them, as I tend to fool around with more defensive and beastmaster-focused builds. I can help out with a couple of them, though.

For open world PvE Swiftness;
You can abuse Quickening Screech from Birds by using a combination of Attack, Swap and Return to keep swiftness up on yourself so long as you are running within mid-range of a mob. You do this by getting within mid-range, Pressing ‘Attack my Target’, and then pressing ‘Return’ after you’ve received swiftness but before your pet has hit the mob. You do this while continuing to run, so that you’re sort running past mobs and using them as anchor points to speed yourself forward. When you’re almost out of swiftness, swap to another bird and run past another mob within mid-range to refresh it. It’s tricky to find that sweet spot, if you press ‘attack my target’ at too far away the bird will fly closer to the mob before casting and you’ll be out of range to receive it, if you’re too close the bird will just use Swoop and put you into combat because Bird AI seems to be conditional to player proximity to the enemy. But with a little practice and you’ll be soaring through whole zones before you even know it.

Spirits:
There are people who swear by them, so if they look interesting to you you should give them a try. But, there’s alot of little odd hang-ups to working with them that keep them from really gaining popular traction. Like the vulnerability and stationary aspects can encourage this sort of ‘stuffing the buff-dealer into a protective hidey hole’ gameplay, but range limits and the inability to control where they are summoned in relation to you don’t allow you enough space and precision to get really clever with it. There’s a few traits that can encourage you having them as sort of traps or mobile traps, but the cast time is hard to work with and it’s a bit functionally redundant to our actual traps. They’re utilities with alot of different possible playstyles, but all the concessions made to keep it from being overpowered with one trait, keep them from really reaching their full potential with others. The mechanic needs to resolve it’s identity crisis, or embrace it fully by making the necessary balance tradeoffs for the benefits of taking a trait on each trait independently and not the mechanic as a whole.

The general rule of thumb with survivability in dungeons is that everybody has to do it to some degree, but where you draw the line is personal.

This is not only because much of defense is active so how much you need depends on your individual skillset, but also because as time goes on you learn about the fights and need less to begin with. That is to say; your first time fighting subject alpha you’re going to end up kissing the floor, the fifth time you’ll be able to avoid and heal the damage you receive, and sometimes you come across people who don’t even bother moving out of the massive red circles because they can just time the dodge like clockwork and don’t end up taking any damage at all.

Before you go about making any concrete plans, give yourself some time to figure out where you stand on your survivability needs. Grab yourself some disposable level 80 armor off the trading post, and get a taste of each dungeon. Stat-wise while you’re feeling things out, you can grab armor that’s ultimately similar to what you’re after and keep adding survivability until you no longer think your teammates are rolling their eyes about plucking you off the floor for the upteeth time, or you can build tanky and start venturing off into other areas when you find yourself the last man standing in hilariously dangerous situations. I’d recommend the latter, given that you don’t seem to have your heart set on anything.

As for builds, the only ones I seem to hear about are Traps/Conditions builds, Beastmaster builds, and Tanky builds. You might want to wait and see what’s happening on the Sniper build front now that Opening Strike is working.

I think it’s preference and context when you really get down to it.

But something to keep in mind that avoiding damage while standing in place and avoiding damage while moving both have their own sets of pros and cons. Sometimes moving is just not an option, sometimes it’s the best option.

Eh.
My natural curiosity’s been somewhat dampened by watching the emotional roller-coaster the forum went through last time. Heck, it’s been weeks and there’s still a few people hunched over the nearest trash bin trying to get it all out of their system.

Well….
Not to undermine injecting a bit of positivity into the atmosphere of doom and gloom that seems to have settled over the forum. Because god is that ever needed.

But, while success stories are uplifting, educational and good for the meta; I’m not sure how I feel about using them as a larger indication of where Ranger stands. I know this kind of flies in the face of standard PvP conventions; but the larger concern seems less what the fantastically awesome players can do, and more making sure even average players can have an approachable and satisfying experience. And I just don’t think Ranger’s quite delivering in that department as well as it could be.

This is a touch too contrived to be a good and proper commiserating thread.

I like GS moreso, but for purely subjective reasons.
There’s really no verbal substitute to just equipping the thing and playing with it.

What’re you trying to ultimately accomplish?
I ask that because you’ve got defensive signets, investment into wilderness survival, and mention tanking. But you also have alot in skirmishing, and bemoan the loss of pet as a loss of damage.

Are you trying to survive long enough to make it easier to put the hurt on things?
Or are you trying to survive the longest and want something productive to do between bouts of pulling teammates off the floor?

I mean to say, ‘why don’t people ask developers to help make pets more survivable in the first place’ (how Raege answered it), not ‘why don’t people ask other people how to survive better’.

Not that I’ve got anything against the latter.
And, actually, I can dole out some advice on that boss in particular.
That vine boss loves to spit at what’s farther from them. Try and get your pet in melee range and, if you can, not stacked on top of another player. (Even if you have to return your pet, run around to another ‘side’ of the boss, and send it to attack from that angle). If you feel like going the extra mile and helping out your group as a whole, if you’ve got some mad kiting skills or feel like being the mole in a game of whack-a-mole on that ledge thingy to the left, you can use yourself as bait.

Everytime this comes up, I can never quite figure out how “My pet dies alot in dungeons” leads to “I should get a buff when it dies” as opposed to “We should make it die less often in dungeons”.

I do like Attack of Opportunity on Signet of the Hunt.
Signet of the Hunt is the only Signet I do actually use the active of on a regular basis. In fact, I’d almost say I use it too much, because 10% movement speed seems like such a small price to pay. But, I do also tend to think Attack of Opportunity itself could use a bit of revising. There’s such a small selection of weaponskills and pets it feels worthwhile to synergize with, and it’s just not available enough to make much of a playstyle or build around (..contingent on whatever the holy heck Moment of Clarity actually does when it’s working).

I think Signet of the Wild’s passive would be better if they worked with the Healing Coefficient, and reconsidered the active (which I’ve basically never used). It’s pretty key to getting pet survivability in Dungeons if you want to use your pet more like a standard Beastmaster, but you need to invest a good 500-700 Healing Power before you even start to see some real HP equilibrium. You can’t even comfortably bring anything other than a bear until 800-1,000, and even then it still needs to be a beefy pet. Personally, I think you should be hitting the Equilibrium point around 300 Healing Power, so that by simply going 30 deep into Beastmastery you’ve automatically got some guarantees about the survivability of your investment, lower level rangers doing dungeons would have an option for pet survivability, and the option for further healing power investment might make a broader array of pets viable for dungeon-play.

About the only problem I have with Signet of Stone is that it sort of only works in dungeon play when you pair it with Signet of the Wild. Up front invulnerability at the cost of long term defense does make for some interesting choices…once your pet survives enough for ‘long term defense’ to actually mean something. But all by itself that thing feels like using a pebble to stem the flow of a raging river.

Jaguar is probably right up your alley.
He’s nicely vicious, and his F2 turns him invisible.

Supposedly toughness is a factor, with more toughness meaning more aggro. I don’t really know that for sure, but it’s worth playing with at least.

…I’ll admit, there kind of isn’t a good answer here. Pet aggro is currently managed with all the finesse’ of a claw crane. Given how different the aggro in this game operates because of the lack of the holy trinity, this was really an area of pet mechanics that was begging for an innovative approach.

It’s kind of weird?

Because you can build yourself tanky, and then you can also build your pet tanky. There’s alot of overlap in utilities and traits, but your stats are split between Vit/Tough for the you-tank and Healing Power for the pet-tank. It’s a similar enough general build direction that you can kind of choose how far you want to lean one way or the other.

If you lean more on the you-tank side, it’s about what you’d expect from a ranger tanking. If you lean farther on the pet-tank side, you use stupid pet tricks to force your pet into harms way to the tune of limited boss tanking, keeping part of a group of enemies distracted, and soaking up projectiles. If you’re somewhere in between, it’s a mix of these two things though a pet can’t hold it’s own without some key elements (SoS, SoTW, some of the Beastmaster traitline, some Healing power)

I don’t know about PvP, but I’ve tried Master’s Bond out for dungeons.

On the one hand; It’s not as bad as you think it is, in that it positively reinforces itself, so the more stacks you have the easier the stacks are to keep. Even if you can only keep a few stacks on at a time, it feels way more impactful than some of the other Tier 1 options.

On the other hand: It’s exactly as bad as you think it is, because only largely invested pet builds can manage the kind of HP equilibrium needed for stacking, there are handful of times you’ll run headfirst into environment obstacles that are frustrating no-win situation stack-wipers, and there’s the occasional odd stack counting (like nearly the entire bloody 2nd airship part of storymode arah counting as one.)

Somebody needs to invent a word that means both ‘awesome’ and ‘frustrating’.

Ah! I see now.
I could done a better job of being more clear.

I’m not really trying to say ‘L2P’.
That is to say, I was hoping to offer some advice without necessarily trying to blame all people’s current woes on it. I’m actually pretty critical of certain elements of ranger in other threads, so I kind of just assumed that would carry over here, and it would go without saying what I was talking about wasn’t some kind of miracle solution and that I agree people have some legitimate reasons to woe. (Generally I’m pretty moderate about this stuff; I believe firmly Ranger’s conceptually sound and a small selection of builds are solid, but I’m not about to downplay the seriousness of the obvious menagerie of bugs and hiccups either.) So, hopefully with that background, my post seems less like an accusation and more just general normal advice?

/sigh.
I’m sorry I likened your discontent to childish behavior. I’m just getting kind of irritated with the negativity around lately. I think I hit my ‘urine-soaked cheerios’ limit like a week ago, and I’m a handful of ‘overly-dramatic doomsday hysteria’ posts away from telling somebody off.

It made me a bit defensive to make a stab at normalcy and say something I thought was normal banal helpful stuff just to sudden get involved in the topic I didn’t think I was actually contributing to. It was a completely reasonable take on your part, though, and you were just trying to continue the conversation I didn’t mean to start. I’m sorry I reacted so rudely.

@Clara
I don’t like being the semantics person. But those aren’t roles, or mechanics, or identities, or aesthetics, or whatever game design word people’re peppering their opinions with these days. That right there is a wide variety of things somebody happens to like about each profession. And it just seems kind of hopeless to try convince somebody to put something they don’t like, on their big list of things they like about stuff. I’m sorry if that seems handwaving-y, but going along with that just seems like an exercise in frustration.

My point was; How a very common mechanic which is accepted as the whole complete package in other games, suddenly be considered a empty cavernous maw of absence and lacking in this one? How can it possibly the be the subject of such broad-sweeping doomsday hysterics?…it just so….normal.

And yeah, it’s okay to be dissapointed Anet didn’t do anything too terribly innovative here. But I don’t know if I think it’s right to go treating lack of anything amazing as lack of something entirely.

@ Joiry
I didn’t say it was Ranger specifically, just the mechanic itself has been around the block a few times. I think the earliest iteration I can remember was called a Beastmaster or a Summoner.

I kind of don’t get your angle either, Joiry.
How can something be legitimate points when you’re talking about something else entirely? Unless you’ve got some really salient arguments for why doing two things at once is specifically a Bad Idea, it just seems like all you did was drag the discussion off onto a tangent because it was a prime opportunity to rattle your saber about the current hot button issue.

I haven’t heard much of anyone in PvE say that about any class, really.

I get that GW1 ranger must have been this very different thing, and starting up a character with the same class name and finding a difference experience can be kind of disappointing. I can even sympathize up until a point. But the sky isn’t falling, everything isn’t on fire, and ranger is not lost to some gameplay-less vaporware limbo.

This might be pretty new to GW1 players, but for the rest of us the basic structure and control scheme of this class is some pretty standard stuff. This sort of thing is genuinely An Actual Thing That Really Exists which people have been playing as a class mechanic for years and years across dozens of titles.

It’s alright if you don’t like it and you think it’s got some issues, but it is a thing.

How is ‘play to your strengths’ ever bad advice?

I understand you feel like crossing your arms over your chest and grumbling under your breath while you absentmindedly kick the dirt around. But other than stepping aside and letting you make grand show of it for the developer third party viewer there isn’t a whole lot I can actually do for your discontent.

What exactly are you hoping I’d say?

/edit; eh, not going to type that. can’t assume I know why you’re unhappy.

Well, I’m glad you’re trying it at least, Electro. Even if I stare at my traits page and grouse, when it’s all said and done, it is pretty fun.

That sounds so tempting, Unspecified. But I’m always so all over the place in dungeons. I’m usually sort of Designated Rezz’er by Virtue of Not Dying the Best, and when I have FB it tends to have me strafing around trying to gobble up as many friendly particle effects from the floor as I can, so I never seem to get as much out of Healing Spring as I want to.
….I dunno, maybe I personally just don’t have the chops to juggle it along with everything else. It might be awesomesauce for others.

- Yes. Buffs that hit both your pet and you will stack once for the source hitting the pet and once again for the source hitting you and transferring them. But +Boon Duration is supposedly a factor (not that I ever seemed to see much difference).

- Yes, Companion’s Defense will hit the pet once for the trait effect, and once again through FB.

- I honestly never tried. Kind of interested in hearing the answer to this myself.

- Supposedly, but I’ve never actually hit it during a dungeon run. I am not at all shy about sicc’ing my pet on something way over yonder or wandering pretty far away from it while handling something else, so it must be pretty darned forgiving.

It’s okay.
I’m pretty heavily pet based, and it’s something I keep going back and forth on.

On the one hand, it’s interesting because standing in the AOE others create suddenly bumps up a few spaces on your list of priorities, a double party buffed pet can be a scary pet sometimes, and the synergy with Rampage as One is super nice. On the other hand, it can be kind of disappointing because it just doesn’t play well with other things, like +Protection/Regen Duration on Runes or Nature’s Bounty. I always end-up taking something I don’t need in tier1 Nature Magic to get to it and that just feels awful.

/edit: whoops, read you wrong. corrected.

I’ll agree it sounds awfully fluffy talking about it.
It’s so hard to imagine there’s an excel spreadsheet somewhere that hashes something so seemingly ephemeral down into concrete evaluations of whether or not a thing is balanced. Kind of blows my mind, really.

I can’t connect how ‘I think Ranger does less damage than Warrior’ really factors at all into ‘Use your pet to do two things at once’. As far as I understand it, those two concepts have nothing to do with eachother, other than some tongue-in-cheek humor using the same phrase.

Yes, we call them ‘pet classes’, but there’s not all that much meaning in that shared categorization. The mechanics of pets, minions, spirit weapons, illusions, turrets are all different beasts. They don’t offer the same advantages and disadvantages to the player, they don’t force you to make the same choices, you don’t even interact with them in the same way. The common thread in ‘pet’ classes and builds is mostly visual treatment, when you get down to it some of these things are more like AoEs and DoTs than our Pets.

It’s kind of silly if you think about it, calling something the mechanical victor in a visual category based on criteria some folks decided to value over others. It’s like comparing Hallowed Ground and Ice Shards because they’re both blue and naming Elementalist the clearly superior product based on cooldown.

(And no, this is not somebody’s cue to melvin out and painstakingly write up a list of bullet points about how these things differ, I’m exaggerating on purpose).

Not to downplay the fact some things need a fixin’, they do, and I’ve been calling for them too. But the way the common census thinks about balance strikes me as really weird sometimes.

I’m also kind of surprised people don’t seem to be talking about opportunity cost all that often. But I suppose, opportunity cost is kind of a tricky thing to understand. So, maybe the relationship between opportunity cost and Ranger does need to be fully pointed out.

If you remember energy from the pre-release hype days; you’ll remember there was going to be at third bar between health and endurance called energy, and every skill was going to require a certain amount of energy to execute. But they eventually iterated to balance around opportunity cost instead. That is to say, the game is balanced around the Time it takes for you to do something, and the idea that while you’re doing one thing you can’t be doing another.

As a Ranger you get to mitigate your opportunity costs during combat. It’s kind of like the cousin concept to Thief Initiative, insomuch that they get to casually sidestep the major balancing mechanism of cooldowns for as long as initiative allows, and we get to casually sidestep the major balancing mechanism of opportunity cost for as long as our pet health allows.

If you don’t play to these strengths, understandably, things aren’t going to go so well. A Ranger is pretty awful if you’re not using your multitasking skills to abuse simultaneous action and be in the two places at once, just like how a Thief would be pretty gosh darned awful too if you assigned cooldowns in your head and arbitrarily made yourself obey them. I’m saying, in order to get the most out of the mechanic, you should be trying to do two things at once as often as you can.

Not that this isn’t kind of difficult sometimes, pet survivability in dungeons and WvW really does need to be looked at, pets need to be more threatening in PvP. But that seems like the general idea.

It’s not like building a car.

Like, sitting there with a plan in hand and the only thing between you and a functioning product is time and elbow grease. It’s mostly problem solving type stuff, trying new things until something works. That sounds kind of easy, but it’s not. A systems designer isn’t just taking your desires as a fan into consideration and making sure the solution they come up with isn’t horribly OP; they operate under all sorts of technological and practical constraints. It could it take months to find an answer while taking all that into account…or they could hit on it tomorrow.

I think that’s what ’it’s done when it’s done’ means as a slogan.
That’s not them covering their kittenbooties in case something goes wrong while they were mindlessly working through a finite and predictable amount of required labor, that’s them giving themselves enough time to come up with good solutions that actually work.

Personally, I think that harping that little catchphrase again would be the most honest answer to your question you could receive.

There’s a hidden behavior mode within ‘Guard’ (the pet UI, not the shout)

When a pet is first activated they will treat any weapon skill used while an enemy is targeted as ‘Attack my Target’. This is true even for skills being used while out of range and buffs which don’t normally put you in combat. Pressing ‘Return to Me’ once will stop this effect for the rest of the pet’s activation.

It’s kinda’ handy when I’m running around in open world PvE, and I’m feeling exceptionally lazy. F1’s just so faaarrrr for my dainty little lady fingers. I’ll just sort of target something and halfheartedly bat at the air with my greatsword, and my pet will roll it’s eyes and proceed to humor me.

Seriously, though, it’s mostly a good thing to know so that you’re not accidentally sicc’ing your pet on things you don’t want to be.

For lack of a better comparison,

There’s lost of little landmines in building a Ranger right now. Little bits and pieces not functioning well, not functioning well with eachother, or not functioning entirely. People step on those landmines during the process of build creation because they don’t know to avoid them or can’t find a comfortable playstyle working around them, and become dissapointed with the results.

Having these restrictions while building in PvP is alot more trouble than PvE, because the Meta is a thing that shifts relative to the tactics and discoveries of other players, not a controlled experience balanced against ages ago. People will say Ranger’s weak in PvP, because the meta is currently shifted into a place that a Ranger has to navigate alot of hidden landmines to build into, and being so restricted means we might have a hard time building into the new meta when it gets around to shifting again.

If you have a build you like and you don’t feel like there’s any problems, congrats! It’s entirely possible you’re just exploring an area of the Ranger’s Build structure that’s entirely landmine free.

You’ve managed to avoid some bugs spoiling your picnic; feel blessed, not bad.

I can keep my pet up against Subject Alpha decently well.
Admittedly, he is of the handful of non-final dungeon bosses I haven’t quite managed to keep it up throughout (master’s bond stack wiping son of a-), I think my record was making it a little over halfway before having to swap. Return is not too much help in this fight as the spread of his AOE is a bit on the crazy side, but Companion’s Defense is good stuff because you’ve got plenty of time between seeing the red circles and the actual damaging effect (heck, it’s so much time I actually have to make a concerted effort to keep myself from dodging too early).

That said (and back on topic), I don’t think cutting down on the penalty of mismanagement is the way to make the pet experience more comfortably relate-able to the experiences people may be familiar with from other games. Just like I don’t think wonky anti-pet options are much of a solution either. I think pets could just use a change specifically targeted for these more problematic game modes that makes them easier to manage for more kinds of builds and levels of player skill in the first place.

Every class can mismanage their resources.
(And for the record; every class has to manage their resources.)
A Mesmer can miss/mistime shatters and phantasm generation, a Thief can spam themselves into a corner, an Ele can easily lose track of cooldowns. Everybody can hurt themselves somehow, even if it’s in the easier-to-hide-more-PR-friendly manner of opportunity costs.

What Ranger’s particular caveat is isn’t so much that resource failure is an option at all, it’s that it’s so gosh darned likely sometimes. The difficulty in managing our resource is pretty heftily affected by external influences, being that it’s an HP bar. So managing your resource in something like a dungeon is orders of magnitudes more difficult than something like open world PvE for reasons entirely beyond your control.

If you don’t want to make the trait/utility/stat investment to circumvent this, you always have a swap-heavy use-my-pet-for-it’s-cooldowns gameplay alternative to fall back on to avoid the HP problem. But while it makes perfect sense mechanically it runs so counter to people’s expectations of a pet class. Even if people do understand the option is there, that doesn’t means it’s a particularly satisfying alternative.

It’s kind of two pronged issue.

The obvious one that should go without saying at this point, and then the kinda’ irritating one. As if by some grand conspiracy, a good number of our general bugs and hiccups somehow managed to converge on the direct damage dimension of our possible build structure with the malicious intent to generally screw with us.

Our power line has minor traits so counter-intuitively structured to one of the weapons likely to be used with it (Longbow) people mistake them for bugged (900 range). One of our other meatier weapons that’s more in the general vicinity of reliable manages to be unpopular due to the general feel of using it (Sword). One of our three vicious pet families is outright ignoring half it’s skills (Drake). On the two methods it’s used to apply the buff to the Ranger himself, our class specific damage multiplier is missing in action (Signet of the Hunt and Moment of Clarity). And, of our Utility direct damage multipliers 3/4ths of them just so happen to land squarely in the ‘up for immediate revision’ category (Frost Spirit, Sic ’Em, Signet of the Hunt).

Holy bugfixes, batman!
That is one unkittenfortunate collection of problems. Objectively, none of that is particularly earth-shattering, as you can build a good ways around the problem areas and just suck up the feel issues. Subjectively, it’s got more than enough rusted-over moving parts to make building into this area feel somewhat restrictive and unrewarding. Class concept misunderstandings aside, it’s no wonder people just aren’t feeling teh deepz love.

/edit: ack. Never you mind that momentary brain fart.

I’m with Jaruel,
Really take a moment to watch your gameplay and see how often you leave out a pet long enough that Speed Training and Commanding Voice comes into play. And if you do, how often is this the better option than swapping it?

I have used Speed Training in the past, but that was only when I was making an effort to keep a Bear pet out so that it could tank for me. In most other cases, I find making the effort to swap ASAP was more productive than Commanding Voice and Speed Training combined because all the pet’s cooldowns reset on swap.

Oh hush. I think he’s pretty. :p

Actually I was pleasantly surprised to learn the F2 has some up front damage comparable to Salamander Drake’s F2. The AOE reflection is kind of a neat idea for the F2 underwater skill.

Still can’t get a Chomp or a Tail Swipe for the life of me, though.

Ranger needs some love, it would be dishonest to say otherwise.

…but that’s not because it just somehow magically got more worse off in the PvE content that’s been sitting around unchanged for months and months. The ranger’s the same state in PvE it’s always been. It’s just that the forum’s in a bit of an upset, and there’s no short supply of gloom tinted glasses right now.

Truthfully, dungeon running is the only thing I really do in this game, and I’ve never had a hard time with Ranger or been turned down a slot. That said, there are areas of concern you should be aware of. A good number of utilities and traits are a bit lackluster leading to problems with build diversity. There’s a truly unfortunate collection of bugs and hiccups that seem to be conspiring against glass cannon damage-centric builds specifically. And managing Pet HP swings drastically from incredibly easy to incredibly hard dependent on game mode.

So, ultimately I think it depends on what you want to do and whether or not the current problems with the class present an actual obstacle for you. For example, if by saying ‘ranged aspect’ you’re hoping for Sniper-esque gameplay, I’m afraid that’s just not in the cards right now. If it’s more like you just sort of want a character that can comfortably operate at a range – that’s a different story.

You have something to the effect of #2 in Companion’s Defense.

It is some pretty nice gameplay if you get around to playing with it. It’s interesting finding the dodge rhythm of some of the more clockwork bosses, there’s a decent skill ceiling, and it’s fairly challenging to manage both your own dodging needs and your pet’s protection needs. (Though, being next in line right after Natural Vigor and Vigorous Renewal surely does help). It was really the edge I needed to make my beastmaster build work in dungeons because the things that once one-shotted my pet and seemed to do damage I could never hope to surmount…simply didn’t anymore.

If it’s not feasible to make that gameplay available to everybody. At least I’d want that trait looked at, even if it’s just manipulating the pet portion. 2 seconds sounds like alot but in practice it’s really pushing my old FPS sniper reflexes sometimes, so I can only imagine how that feels to other people. You can get it up to 4 seconds with fortifying bond which feels better, but it’s sort of just too much trait point investment and there isn’t anything worth synergizing with in Tier 1 nature magic. 3 seconds would really be the magic number, in my opinion.

Well, I mean, it is an o-board.
It’s not like a fan forum, the implication of developer eyeballs makes posts less about players communicating to other players and more like players filing a complaint to the complaints department under the guise of conversation. It’s kind of the nature of the beast.

The disparity between Overpowered and Underperforming is alot less than many other MMORPGs I’ve played. So, it’s possible that ’I’m personally not having too much difficulty’ and ‘rangers are in need of the most love’ to be both be technically true at the same time. Ranger might be skirting the bottom of the barrel, but, you’re not going to feel too weak because it’s a pretty shallow barrel.

They’ll do the animation for chomp while underwater sometime around 40% HP give or take. But as far as I can tell, they don’t actually get any health from it. Much less do much of anything on land.

Would be awfully nice if this got hotfixed. It’s kind of bummer getting a broken present.