Robert Hrouda Discusses Ranger Pets in Dungeons

Over on the official forums Robert Hrouda, through the course of discussing dungeons, began to shed a small light on rangers and their pet functionality (& limitations in dungeons). Having recently begun fractals on my ranger (previously I played them all on mesmer) it's frightening how speedy pets die to agony and AOE. Even with heavy management of their attack and movement it's just about impossible above level ten to keep them alive during boss encounters.

What Robert Hrouda does discuss is a lot of the iterative processes they have done to enhance pets, with several outcomes making the profession far too potent in dungeons and hence even more robust in open world. I would envision it's a fine balancing act, without wishing to send the pet or the profession into the realms of "OMG OP!!1".

The right answer I've read was to have rangers share their agony resistance with their pet but this still doesn't fix the pets inability to stay away from AOE harm or targeted attacks from the likes of Jade Maw. How they go about remedying that must surely be done at an AI level as opposed to making ranger pets immune to AOE damage or boosting their statistics.

I've pulled out all of Robert's quotations underneath, nonetheless you could find the start of his postings here plus the remainder here.

I personally play Ranger as my principal, so I'm fairly aware of the best way to manage the pet, & do my checking as a ranger specifically. What mechanic do you feel is expressly punishing to a ranger pet? I'm more than aware of how squishy pets could be in dungeons, however if you could list out all the difficulties you are speaking of, I can try and address them.

Rangers have their highs & lows like every other class. They have really awesome DPS, yet they must work at it a bit more than other classes like warrior or mesmer. It's probable just not as easy.

As for ranger balance, we have frequent meetings about balance where we discuss that type of stuff - I go to those meetings on behalf of dungeon content and to lend my experience with ranger knowledge.

I personally accept the tradeoff of harm for survivability (Can not do damage if you are dead). I are inclined to run a condition boost making use of shortbow & sworddagger, and focus on being supportive & holding aggro while keeping a steady output of DPS by way of conditions.

Rangers have an fantastic quantity of evasion and harm mitigation should you are exceptionally focused and know when to use your skill-sets & heals (prot on dodge roll, vigor on heals) implies you can keep prot for once you mess up, & continually have evasions ready. There are quite a few extremely effective dungeon builds, although most of them aren't DPS focused.

We're working on ideas for making pets better in dungeons. There is a list of reasons we can not just tweak a quantity and call it amazing (it would not truly address the challenge), however it is something we are conscious of and working on.

1 of the items you are compelled to consider, is how the game is played. If we buff rangers just for dungeons, than they are too strong for the open world. Considering I can solo most content in the open world by letting my pet tank, I feel ranger is incredibly powerful outside of dungeons. We can't have rangers that change dependant on PvP, open world, and dungeons for the reason that that gets too baffling for Guild Wars 2 gold players and puts us on a slippery slope. Whatever we do to the ranger, it has to take place in each the open world and dungeons, so it requires more than just quantity tweaks. You see a great deal of bots as rangers for that especially reason - they are really strong open world classes, & buffing them for the sake of dungeons does not work out to being a fantastic fix.

Wow this really is getting long. I need to go to the class balance forums some time, lol. Sorry for the text wall!

Hey folks, looks like someone beat me to the punch of moving the conversation over here instead of in the dungeon threads.

As for AR resistance on pets and such, know that I am actively in the market for solutions to that. It is not something we're unaware of, & it is an issue we are trying to develop solutions for. I am at scale 52 in the fractals, & pet insta-death above scale 20 is something I am acutely aware of & trying to resolve.

As for me being a PR individual, that is just not accurate. I'm a designer just trying to interact & talk with men and women. Plus I can't think of any company would want a mouth-piece who has as countless typos, spelling errors, & grammatical nonsense as I do speaking for them.

I'm of the opinion that your pet & summon should share the master's AR. That appears like the simplest most straight-forward remedy. We all agree the AR is a difficulty that has potential fixes, it is just figuring out how finest to fix it & making sure whatever we decide on works.

"A approach to make pets dodge would be amazing" is what I took away from it. What if a button existed that could make your pet dodge roll, or gave it evasion for several frames (no animation!) It might be named the "Dodge!" button, and every time I used it I could make a DBZ Abridged joke to my mates on TS.

But that doesn't remedy the predicament. It's a cool thought that I can bring up with folks, but would not address the problem of pets in dungeons while possibly adversely affecting PvP. Making the numbers larger doesn't work either (trust me, we've attempted)

We attempted giving them lowered harm from AOE/attacks, and it opened up other troubles - more often than not that a team of 2 rangers could take on almost any boss in a dungeon by intelligent swapping of pets and letting the pet take aggro. It's unfortunate, yet we can not just expand and decrease numbers till pets are perfect - we have tried genuinely tough, nonetheless numbers are not going to resolve pets without letting them break everything. We have to look deeper into mechanics, AI, player actions, and skill-sets.

As much as they appear vestigial, the "attack" and "return" keybinds are genuinely the only thing that can give the GW2 gold player any control, and they may be a bit unwieldy. I would advise though that if you have never tried using those keybinds, attempt them out the subsequent time you're in a dungeon, your pet will thank you for it.

Also, I find that a ranged pet does better in dungeons. My typical pet setup for dungeons is Hyena (for the reason that having 2 knockdowns and another hyena is super fantastic), and a Drake (pretty much any). I know this really is contradictory to what I just mentioned about ranged pets being fantastic, though I use the keybinds a lot and that considerably increases survivability when taking two-3 hits is all you need the pet to do.

Spiders and devourers can be really good to bring on account of the reality that they are ranged. Devourers have an escape from melee capacity as well, & spiders have CC, which helps keep them alive while you reposition and pet-swap (or return) in a more favorable place. Tankier pets require more management, but once you get there and know how to use it (in combination with pet swap), you will find you are not facing the death cooldown as normally as before.

That and you could name your spiders "Cuddles" and your devourer "Citizen Snips" and get a excellent laugh out of people's reactions.

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