Making Pets Viable

Oh God Chthon I want you inside me.

I have been thinking the same thing for years. However as for beast mastery weapons, I always thought that it would be nice to have a pair of daggers tied to beast mastery that were in the shape of gloves that looked like animal paws, so that both master and pet could claw the enemy to death.

WTB inscribable pet

My only complain with pets is that they are not button-mash-friendly.

You must wait until they perform a pet attack until you activate the next one.
Pet attack should get QUEUED, so they perform them in the order you activate them. Instead being replaced all the time.

Well, it shouldn't be. As is, no one runs pets on serious teams, in PvE or PvP, despite the availability of Heal As One. Sure, I agree that Heal As One was probably designed with the thought "pet rez bar compression is elite-worthy" in mind, but that thought is totally wrong. There's an obvious problem with the status quo, and lowering the skillslot cost of bringing a pet is needed to fix it.

Just to clarify, I was thinking of adding it only to a couple of the touch-range and suckier rezzes, certainly not all rezzes. Probably Renew Life and/or Restore Life and/or Light of Dwayna.

1. Thumpers/Pack Hunters are crap in PvE. One might even argue that they aren't so hot in serious PvP either.

2. I don't consider a creature that does the same damage as a 12-mastery spear or sword with only half the attack speed overpowered. Even at zero spec, the pet should do **some** damage. Right now it doesn't. Unless you're willing to dedicate a whole crapload of points to beastmastery, you're better off bringing an asura summon, vanguard assassin, vampirism, or even bone minions.

The fundamental idea is to create a paragon out of a beastmaster. That's no more or less overpowered than paragons with their unstrippable shouts. The numbers would need to be tweaked so that the quality of the party buff roughly matches the quality of party buff you can get from a paragon, adjusted for uptime ratio.

Except that encourages barrage/pet and nothing else.

That might work.

Indeed, there seems to be widespread agreement on this.

And this too.

I agree.

Idea that will help a LOT but doesn't fix all:
[Charm Animal]EN 10 Cast 10:Charm target animal. Once charmed, your animal companion will travel with you whenever you have Charm Animal equipped. If you already have an animal companion, and it dies this skill will resurrect it with 10% health.
I know this is a BAD RES, but having a bad res is better then not having a res at all.
Having a pet res is half the problem. You can res it, so monk's can heal it.

If you want something to actually be done, let's focus on simple, lazy band-aid solutions. That basically means adjusting a few skills. Anet isn't going to overhaul pets at this point.

- Never Rampage Alone - rezzes dead pet.
- Strike as One - 5s recharge for starters. Maybe a small damage bonus.
- Ferocious Lunge - useless elite that could be reworked.

The thing about pets is that they are always best supplementing a damage build, whether it's RaOing with hammers, or churning out conditions on spears. This makes for very little space for pet skills and annoys PvErs who want the "flavor" of pure pet focus and wonder why their damage is garbage. So I suggest reworking Enraged Lunge to something like:

Pet Attack. Deals X damage. If this attack hits, your pet attacks recharge 50% faster and cost 50% less for Y seconds, and your non-pet attacks are disabled for 10 seconds.

The above are the simplest. Beyond that more can be done to rework pet attacks slightly. From a PvP standpoint though pets are already fairly powerful in degenerate melee RaO builds, as well as enraged lunge condition spam in hexway, so simply buffing their interrupt abilities or attack skill damage is dangerous. A "cyclone axe" equivalent would be very welcome for PvE though.

There's nothing in the game like "mobile wards" so that takes too much effort. But maybe we could look at the pet shouts, make them spammable and apply to allies near the pet. example:

Call of protection 5e 8s recharge
For the next 10 seconds, your pet and allies near it gain X damage reduction.

Or if that's too hard, they could be adjusted to affect you AND your pet. E.G.

You and your pet get X damage reduction.

[heal as one] isn't really compression, its just a greater [comfort animal].

[[heal as one] bm builds require you to bring [charm animal]+[heal as one] just like standard bm builds require you to bring [charm animal]+[comfort animal].

imo its only used a lot because, quite frankly, its one of the better bm elites.

I love the ideas. If they actually do this, I might have a reason to use a pet.

And tbh, I don't get why they can't combine Charm Animal and Comfort Animal. Why would it be so hard?

For some reason I thought this was going to be about mini pets. I feel let down...

P.S. Give my Miniature Mursaat Spectral Agony and call it a day.

Edit: Oh and..

New GvG Meta: 8 x/R. Wanna talk about pressure?

Rangers are not Paragons. That fact ALONE is more then enough proof as to why they DO NOT need to have buffs to party members. Stop talking about party buffs for BM because it makes no sense.

And I think pets definitly need to stay as they are in PvP, period. Buffing them in PvP would cause problems that I'm sure those people do not need.

I do agree that at this point, it's best to think in terms of Anet's resources, and what would be reasonably easy for them to do compared to a complete overhaul of the pet system.

And also, the next person to say Enraged Lunge is a useless elite gets punched. I'm happy with +80 armor ignoring damage.

Also, queuing pet attacks is a very good idea, same with making them more responsive to what target you are attacking

- Indeed?

Someone didn't get the memo that Guild Wars is a thing in the past. They're making a new game called Guild Wars 2. Investing hundreds of work hours to reconstruct a single attribute line of single profession with complex UI, balance, localization mechanisms just won't do. While it's understandable that you're enthusiastic about the game, you're wasting your time typing suggestions that will never be implemented.

Have you guys any idea what it's like to work on this field of industry? If you do as little as change one piece of text, you'll need to get a guy to translate it to German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and what other languages this game supported. If there's any monster using the skill, they have to check that the monster still performs correctly. If there's any dual-profession mechanisms that can potentially abuse new powerful combination, these forums will be utter ****storm of whining because PvP is broken. Simply put, it's not worth the effort to change things what OP suggested, even if ANET had budget to do so.

Sorry, I meant ferocious lunge, editing. And that skill is especially useless now compared to scav strike.

Concerning the two additional points made:

I can't remember whether the "pets don't leave a corpse" change was PvP-only, or global. Either way, I can't see this directly improving pets, so I don't see a need for it to be switched back. The people who would benefit the most are the characters bringing corpse exploitation, and the only ones I can think of that do that should already have enough bodies around to use.

The attack queue is also very important, even if it's a queue of two sorta like skills are with players now: an activating skill, and a to-be-activated skill. Managing that with the player's bar might be a bit of a coding challenge, but it would certainly make using pets easier. Overall though, this change still wouldn't make pets much more powerful, so using them doesn't get much better.

It was originally changed, I believe, because pet deaths were allowing MMs to become overpowered.

I forget exactly how though.

Barrage pet team.. that steamrolled hard areas/challenges in PVE and Heroes Ascent

Barrage Pet didn't do anything in HA, but a similar thumpers + necro build (spiritway) did.

And that's exactly why I don't really want to change that back. I have a feeling that it'll just bring back an old meta rather than actually make pets a more useful option in general.

I like a number of these suggestions it would really be nice to actually use my pet every now and again. My biggest issue is the need 2 skills just to have the pet out. Maybe a new Pet rework when menagerie comes out?

some really good ideas there would be interesting to see a few implemented... although I dunno whether a-net would spend the time doing so at this stage :S

Really pets should stay as they are.

They take little to no skill (just spam) and therefore shouldn't be as rewarding as playing more skillful templates.

Also with skills like Otyugh's cry they are either under or overpowered, that skill needs to see a nerf before we consider buffing pet damage.

I would rather anet fix the broken stuff before they break something else (Water Eles, Fire Eles, Foul Feast, various Curses, healing, party healing, deep removals, mass removals etc).

Edit: Spelling