Why my Ranger (and her Lizard) is Ticked Off about Nightfall

omg i want to tell my lizard to stay. lol

joking, /signed, I agree with this idea.

A ranger should have control of his/her pet.

The big advantage that pets have over henchmen/heros is that they do not take any of your drops.

That being said there are advantages and disadvantages to a pet vs hench/heros. Things like taking up a skillbar slot per ability you want them to have/use and just to have them out, also things like them leveling 2x as fast as a player and the extra damage they do.

There probably should be some very basic controls. Something like a mini version of the hero bar. Passive, Aggressive, Defensive, Stay at Flag, Follow.

On another note I always thought it was stupid that my Monk couldn't rez a dead animal companion.

I agree a beastmaster should be able to have his pet "stay" or "heel" as in real life. I don't think using the flag to send your pet to a certain spot would be realistic though.

From a roleplaying perspective, it makes sense that you could tell henchmen or a hero to move to a distant spot, but you would never be able to tell an animal "go 300 yards east and stand by that tree." lol

Giving your pet a certain attitute makes sense as Imaginos said,passive, aggressive and defensive. Through training you would be able to give an animal that sort of attitude. Kind of like the police attack dog someone mentioned earlier.

WoW pets can be set to passive, aggressive, or defensive, which helps a lot.

Rangers have been waiting long enough for better pet control. And while we are on the subject, there is simply no need to take up two slots with Charm Pet and Comfort Pet when one slot would do.

Don't forget the whole mental link thing. Having a mental link with an animal in a role-playing environ(when animals are pretty smart to start with) makes giving such a command not completely unreasonable.(Imho)But at least we should be able to stick in the hero like interface.
Truth be told, I've worked around the whole 'pet delay, while henchman switches target' thing. Oftentimes I and the henchies would switch targets after doing some damage,allowing the pet to finish it off(or at least keep it distracted).
Also(while we're on this topic): what do you guys think about having the pet guard your corpse when you die? Obviously it hurts the team when they let the ranger die(seeing as they are attached), but I've always thought it was cool. They would have to be careful not to let you command your pet when you're dead (by using the ui).
Anyway, thats just my two cents

I hardly need to point out that what Gaile says and reality often seem to disagree. Best not to trust something will be implemented until it is actually implemented and live on the public servers.

I totally agree with this. While this is not a useful feature if your just going B/P, it would certainly make the idea of running with a pet more attractive for almost anything else. And it would really help those BeastMaster builds...

/signed

I like the mental link idea. I've read many books that have characters that have a link between themselves and their animal companion, allowing them to give more complex instructions or commands. The books are usually about a ranger type person or druidic type.

If Anet would expand the lore concerning a rangers deep connection to nature and his pet, I think using more complex pet commands would be a great idea.

even if the pet just followed the "all" flag it would be great, having their own special controls might be more trouble than its worth tho. Reading over this thread, I dont know if what people are looking for is 'flags' so much as just better responsiveness overall in accordance to what your character is doing. Flags would be like phase two... Id be happy with just phase one.

I agree that the whole beast-mastery system is in need of some love. I would further extend this idea to allowing you to add a "pet" to your team like you can a hero... then we could get rid of charm animal and everyone would be happy. I mean, I guess that ANet doesn't want everyone and their grandmother to use pets in this game, but realistically is a pet with DP and no beast-mastery is going to be an asset to the team?

i think this is a great idea. i would love at least a little more control of my pet, considering i play ranger most often.

If it was up to me I would turn the pets into heroes, with the exception that they only get 4 skills and can only use skills from the "Beast Mastery" skill pool, I would also add pet armour and boosts like claws, razor wings, things like that would be cool in my opinion. V_V

As I understand it from Gaile's past posts, someone (Isaac?) at ANet believes pets are already close to being over-powered, and so they refuse improve pets in any way.

Thus I am totally confused by the introduction of Heroes without any improvement in pets. Surely Koss is far more effective and dangerous than my pet. Since everyone can have up to three heroes, what point is there to pets?

Why is ANet introducing super-pets (heroes) if simple controls would make "normal" pets too powerful? It just doesn't make sense. ANet has addressed the weaknesses of henchmen, so why not do even a little bit for pets?

And no, the new Nightfall skills aren't much help. Only four new Beastmastery skills, and one of those is a spirit, and two are elites. None add any new features to pets.

Of course, my ranger will soldier on. I have effective pet builds, and take Fluffy everywhere, and will continue to do so. I just wish ANet would play fair and give my pet at least a little love.

you dont have to guess, look at the spell recharge, doesnt it last about 25 seconds and recharge in 30 seconds?
and yes your dead pet shows up on the radar, its a blackened circle just as if u were to died or a henchie.

Koss doesn't have an elite that costs 5 energy and does +80 dmg every 5 secs, and doesn't have a shout that make him have -15 dmg reduction all the time for 5 energy every 2 minutes or so, or a shout that makes him move AND attack 25% that can be kept up all the time for 10 energy every 30 secs. He also cant be rezzed with a 1 sec cast time resurrection spell that gives him 61% health back on rez.

Etc, etc etc.

Thats where they are coming from. Its sort of to "balance" out the fact that they otherwise suck.

If Pets were like Heros they would have to have skills comparable on a balance level to those that the heros can use.

Agreed, /signed, and for some reason this
really made me laugh. Thank you, sir, and good night.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...76&postcount=5

It’s best to read the whole post to get a better idea, but I just wanted to show that ANet is aware of the need for pet controls and have plans to add it (along with pet DP).

And yes, I know this is a quote from Gaile, but this information is stated to come from James Phinney .

As to why ANet hasn’t added pet control yet when they have controls for npcs is anyone’s guess. My assumption would be that perhaps pets are coded a different way than normal npcs and so in order for them to add in controls to the pets would mean getting deep into the pet code, which would yes be time consuming. Assuming this is true, then at this point in time, with the desire to release Nightfall on time, I don’t think ANet would want to get deep into code to make changes to something that doesn’t need “urgent” (in comparison to bugs and new features planned in Nightfall) fixing, especially when they’ll need to test it out to try to find any possible exploits or bugs after making major code changes.

But as the quote stated, pet controls will happen. We just sadly donno when

Giving even minor control to Pets would imbalance them in PvP.

Heroes don’t count since you would be fighting against a PvP team with other heroes.

“Balance” only comes into play in PvE when something is way out proportion, like the original 55 monk. While pet controls would make a lot of PvE easier and far more enjoyable, I doubt they would break the PvE game like the 55 monk did. Unfortunately, being able to control and direct your pet more easily in PvP would have a far greater effect on the game, and PvP balance trumps PvE in this game every time. If we are given pet controls, it would most likely come with some severe nerfing of the pet.

Just like to point out one flaw in Former Ruling's post. The 1 second res on pets, that's AFTER your skills were disabled for 10 seconds because of your pet dying. And the one that resurects all pets in the area, Revive Animal, has a 6 second cast time, if you had someone else use it for you. So pet ressing isn't actually overpowered.

Can you take your hero into Random Arenas? No. Can you bring your hero into GvG? No. Can you use your heroes in anything (either than hero battles) that is PvP? No.

Now just think, your pet acts as an extra party member. They have skills that deal high amounts of damage (80 damage anyone?), can be given 15 damage reduction, and ressurect in about 1 second. If your heroes were like that you wouldn't need to even fight, your heroes would kill almost anything.

Now about the idea of being able to send your pets using the flag system. I am strongly against the idea. When you die, you can still command with the flags. This means you could then send your pet all over the place while you lie there dead.

As it stands, the pets' poor controls balances out their otherwise overpowered abilities.

EDIT:
I guess you've never played as a beast master. Once you get to 16 Beast Mastery, the amount of time your skills are disabled for gets reduced greatly.