[Rangers] - pet usage

Which pet do you use? you need at least 2 skills for your pet, which is asking a lot since you only have 8 skill slots.. are they worth it? if you do use your pet what skills do you bring along?

Unless you are willing to use atlewast 6 skills and 12 points in beast mastery (thus build around your beast) you wont stand much of a chance with your beast in PvP or PvE, if you are willing to use only beast mastery skills with a few support skills then (E/R could work for this, fire+beast mastery) then the pet is a decent companion, though not excelling, you dont take any risk either.

Beast Mastery isn't worth it. Like you said, you need at least two skills just to HAVE a maintainable pet, let alone the extra skills to make your pet good. Add that to the fact you have no strategic control over your pet's agression, and you will soon find it more of a crutch to keep alive than really worth it.

That being said, Beast Mastery is not a gimped build as you can still kill things with it, but any ranger that wants to be at the top of his own game will not be choosing beast mastery.

If the beast mastery skills that state animal companions instead of your animal companion actually affect all the pets in your group, then a party with several pets and each peson taking a different beast mastery skill that affects them all would be worth it. I'm not 100% sure if those skills affect all of your groups' pets, but a buddy and I were running around with two pets, I had call of haste and he had call of protection, and I must say, Wart Da Hog and Fluffy were kickin' some butt out there both seemed to be moving faster and neither were taking much or any damage? Does anyone know for sure?

Personally, as main ranger pets take a back seat after say...yaks bend. Possibly earlier on than that. A sub ranger might use it like a healing monk to provide a little 'dot' effect or something other than that I can't really see a value in them. I think the underworld spider you can tame supposively (is this proven?) causes poison on it's own so maybe even more value as a sub then.