Making Pets Viable

Communing says hi.

The devs make mistakes, shocker I know. The players really are the best at finding the most powerful combinations and builds in the game (since we sink so many more man-hours into it than them), and if beastmasters aren't part of the metagame, it's because they're simply a poor choice. Of course, I think the main issue with pets is their slow AI, but I don't think there's much you can do about that. Strike as One was changed to help compensate for that, but that's the best they can do, I feel.

Now that you mention it, I agree. I've been totally against pet differences, but now that everyone can pretty easily get everything and switch on command, that'd be pretty cool. They just need to make the prestige pets not actually better than normal pets, since they're rather difficult to unlock, and prestige stuff isn't supposed to be better in this game.

Just have 2 skill slots for your pet,then they can spam them without you having to worry,then compress res into charm animal and voila. A BM weapon would be coolies, it would make much more interesting possiblites....

I'd like it if Brutal mauling actually did something, and each pet had a similar attack, like what mithran said. Make brutal mauling maybe apply DW, give the lizards a "caustic bite" that causes disease, have the birds have a talon flurry that blinds foes, maybe gve the phoenix the ability to set a foe on fire for 2 seconds, let the warthogs cause daze, crabs crack armor with their claws, that sort of thing.

Also to restate, Bar compression, I like the idea of any skill requiring a pet should bring that pet, or even investing points into BM should bring the pet. Charm should just be there to aquire the thing.

I don't think pets should auto attack faster though, because I do recall IWAY and mass thumpers and all that crap, throw in MoP or barbs and that breaks. Make the attacks queue and maybe make it so the shouts add an effect "your pet's next attack occurs 66% faster while affected by this shout" so as to make the interrupt and chasing attacks viable.

Yeah. Now the only problem with brutal mauling is that doesn't add any kind of extra, just slows down, it's way easy to interrupt, and only really useful for 3 Anthems, since pets do not use energy, don't cast spells and are not considered part of the party.

About the attacks of pets, they seem to have as if they had 10 different weapons, with 2 different types of damage (piercing and slashing) and 5 different ranges of damage (17-29, 17-27, 18-30, 15-25 and 20-32), but always the same speed: 1 hit every 2 seconds.

I won't mind if the different 'kinds' of pets had a wider range of attacks, more like the weapons we already have: Minimum piercing or slashing damage attacks that may deliver double strikes, big and slow attacks that deal blunt damage, average slashing attack with medium speed, etc...
Of course I won't go as far as giving swords to pets, which have a speed of 1.33s, but having the base attack speed at 2s, we could go a bit around that. Faster than that would sacrifice damage.
If the animal is a weapon for the Ranger, now that can be changed, why to keep always the same weapon?

Balancing this is a pain. So for now I'll just go with noting clearly the two existing damage types in the dialogs of the Menagerie NPCs: piercing and slashing. And maybe adding blunt instead slashing to some of the pets, namely bears.

I think they could go a long way toward making pets viable with a few decent skill balances. Something like this maybe?

"Your pet shadow steps to target foe. That foe and all adjacent foes are struck twice for +...X damage."

Takes care of two big reasons pets suck:
1.Pathing
2.Lack of AoE damage (or damage in general, barring [Enraged Lunge])

Don't hold your breath. Anet has made it clear beastmasters are their bastard children. Throw them a bone (menagerie) every now and then just to keep them around and then lock them back under the stairs. Doesn't stop me from running my BM whenever I can. I have a blast playing it and it seems to embody the very nature (no pun intended) of the ranger itself, using pets. As for the BM weaponry...no way. There are ways around that. Also for the people screaming imba, only in pvp would a powerful BM be imba, which is why we have pvp versions of skills now. Its very simple to keep everyone happy with this.
But, like I said, don't hold your breath

I think once you have a pet, you shouldn't need to use charm animal to call it. It's yours. Why would a charmed pet, simply not follow you around. Any beast mastery skill in your skill bar, should call your pet to you. Then you don't waste that slot.

On the rest of it, for PVE anyway, I have some very powerful beastmaster characters, without any real alternation. I agree more could be done, but I think that using a pet as a tank, has worked very well for me.

I think a lot of changes have already been made that have been overlooked to some degree as well.

Certainly Never Rampage Alone has done a huge amount for Beast Mastery, particularly since with a high expertise it's not 15 e to use.

As for the Beastmaster weapon, I dislike the idea immense. Beastmasters HAVE a weapon. It's called a pet. Giving them an additional weapon, would be giving Beast Masters two weapons.

In any event, I have no problem putting points in marksmanship, Beast Mastery and expertise. I don't know why you should have this problem.

I know this thread hasn't been touched in a month, but my suggestion probably doesn't need its own thread.

I have no idea what to do with Beast Mastery in PvP (that shit is just dead), but I have a couple of ideas for PvE.

Idea #1 One idea I've had that would actually make the Zaishen Menagerie useful beyond the short-lived euphoria of a "Gotta Catch 'Em All" obsession, is to add inherent conditions to pet attacks. I think this would add some excitement to actually collecting different types of pets and would allow people to run different builds based on what their pets inherent condition would be.

• For example, the Spider models could cause poison, Wolfs and Cats could cause bleeding, Bears could cause weakness or cracked armor, Birds could cause cripple, Rats could cause disease, etc. You could scale the time based on either Beast Mastery or the level of the pet and make the length short (such as 1...4...5) so it would be more of a bonus and not too exploitable.

Idea #2 Oh, and another idea would be to make the shit skill Ferocious Strike something like Hundred Blades and give your pet (and possibly you) adjacent AoE damage. Something low so that it's not too exploitable with MoP and Barbs, but non-physical so it's not worthless in HM.

I sincerely doubt the Live Team would even consider either of those, but I think it would be interesting. Neither would make pets that much better, but they would be more fun for a while.

Better control over the pet would surely help too.

A way to switch AI so your character is taken over by the server and acts as a hero while you control the pet directly would help too.

The more points in Beast Mastery, the more time you can take over the pet before having to go back.
Charm Animal could be used to do so, and activate instantly instead in 10 seconds when having a pet, to posses it.

Don't forget about the pet death disabling skills thing. I seriously think that is the main thing preventing most rangers from bringing a pet along, "just for the heck of it". A pet without a whole skillbar attached is a liability at present. Removing that weakness would go a long way towards making pets viable.

i agree with the idea of giving pets inherent condition effects, this would make pet build more interesting and viable.

I love the idea too (obviously), but there would still need to be some way for pets to be useful for damage in PvE. That's why I think there should be some skill that causes adjacent, pet AoE. Then they wouldn't be quite so useless in HM.

Oh, and the idea to possess pets would never happen....and sounds too much like WoW.

Never played WoW. And you'll be actually switching AI. The character won't disappear so it won't be a real posesion, just a control change. You take over the pet, your character behaves like a hero, and you can only activate pet skills.

The other day I was messing around with a heal skill instead of bringing comfort and that only worked out till my bear kicked the bucket. Made me somewhat sad because having that in costs me another attack skill I really wanted.

One thing I'm having gripes with is how the targeting system works. While you have to call target, it seems you must do that before you can even set it to target primary which otherwise makes it difficult to focus on otherwise it just switches back. I rather prefer pet being able to just attack as you call them openly like heroes.

Also I come to gripes with the aggro range being just outside of player circle, you'd think it would know enough to just start fetching after things you see on radar.... ohhh boy that ain't happenin! More or less that adds the chance of becoming the target yourself.

That's essentially what WoW does, except that your character is useless during the time that you do it and I think that the pet can't attack (it's more of a scouting thing, I think).

I could be wrong. I never really played.