Right; since the time when I began looking at pet data it annoyed me that a bear does less DPS than other pets.
Much work has gone into analysing the skill brutal Mauling; it's a neat relic of a time when pets had different abilities, for some reason it has not been removed.
It is a 4 adrenaline skill, used by the bear when you are also attacking; as a result in normal cicumstances it amounts to about an 18% damage per second penalty. With the presence of the new ritual Infuriating Heat in Nightfall the bear can actually build adrenaline twice as fast, and uses its brutal mauling every second swing, with the result of dealing about 30% less damage than an equivalently evolved pet of another species.
People have talked about the potential advantages of the skill; as an easily interrupted skill it can serve as a way to use up enemy interrupts, as some AI opponents will bother interrupting the bear, people imagine that it has more damage (testing shows this to be false) that it interrupts enemies (also false) and so on, and now with Paragon shouts it finally has a slight advantage, Brutal Mauling attacks can trigger Paragon effects like Anthem of Flame.
The fact is though that it is a relic, and one that while it has been interesting effectively removes the bear from the arsenal of many; I know I had a bear for my first ranger until I realised how much weaker it was; changing from a Hearty bear to a Dire wolf boosted my damage about 60%.
Before the situation gets too complex, how about ANet fixes the bear; remove the outdated Brutal Mauling (which has no effect anyway) and make the pet homogeneous, like basically all pets are with the slight exception of damage type. Removing Brutal Mauling from the bear might take away some of its history, and remove the slight use it may get as a paragon trigger, but would restore it to being a usable pet.
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Notice; Please refrain from derailing the thread with requests of adding new inherent pet skills/attacks, as per the request of the OP and others; There are other threads regarding that subject, and this one is intended for a simple, single request.
