Showing Posts For sjarulfa.2496:
One of the reasons why the Ranger and pet are built the way that they are, is because if we gave the ranger all the power, then the pet would have to be useless and vestigial
I, for one, would love a useless and vestigial pet. Then again, I am a fan of the GW1 ranger, despite its flaws. Those of us who like wilderness oriented skirmishers but don’t like pets got screwed. When Anet revealed the ranger and mandatory pets, the justification was it would allow Anet to make GW2 rangers the premier MMO pet class. I think even the die-hard pet supporters would have to chuckle a bit at that original goal, given the current state of things.
Even take Robert’s repeated examples – he only uses spider and drake. Yeah, great for the small number who thematically like those pets. I don’t, and I suspect a lot of other rangers don’t want to be forced to use only certian effective pets.
Fiddling with the F1-4 skills will not turn rangers into anything close to resembling a “premier” pet class. A much deeper and meaningful rework of the pets needs to occur, even though that would take more time and effort.
Imo, GW2 pets need to be more like GW1 heroes. They need customization, so players can choose the pet they want and can adapt them to situations (ie meaningful trade-offs between damage, survival, utility, etc) to get around that pets too powerful for PvE or too weak for Dungeons, etc.
A configurable pet skill bar should:
* have just a few species specific skills (just for a bit of flavor)
* a larger pool of cross species skills so you can adapt any pet for the various situations (open world, WvW, Dungeons)
* roll the pet shouts into this bar. Its a bit silly that one of the big complaints about GW1 pets was you needed to devote skill slots to their abilites. Yet, the supposedly improved GW2 pets have the same issue – to get much more utility out of them, you need to waste skill slots.
* maybe have more animal spirit pets – ones you can load up with utility and support, for those who don’t really care for pets
* (very long term) eventually spirits could be rolled into this system, since they are in need of love as well. They could have a level of uniqueness with a lot of the current spirit powers converted to spirit pet specific skills.
Also, another long term thing, would be a pet behavior thing in pet management. Creating player scripts for pet behavior is probably beyond most players and too much effort on Anet’s part – but a set of behavior check box things (like heal at 33% of health, always return if in more than 1 red circle, etc).
Yeah, I know, sounds like a lot of stuff, both for ranger players and the devs. But honestly, the difference between GW1 and GW2 pets is basically pet swap and the F2 skill. Not much in return for making pets mandatory.
I think Anet is amongst the best MMO dev teams, but they’re going to have to pony up a lot more time and their skill to really make rangers a “premier” pet class, which is what was promised for making pets mandatory. Otherwise, just remove pets as a lost cause.
PS – Robert, could you ask whoever deals with pet stats to see if the white raven (HoM) and regular raven have the same stats. Its often reported the white has less vit with no corresponding increase elsewhere.