PSA on MAJOR Pet Issues

Edit- Added some info to the suggestion section.

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Pets can easily be tested here... https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lion%27s_Arch_Aerodrome inside https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Special_Forces_Training_Area

Load up the walking golem and let your pets do their things.

Watch as some pets struggle to even hit the WALKING golem.

Just tested https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Rock_Gazelle and the f2 skill https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Head_Toss didn't even land on the walking golem. The golem kept walking around and the gazelle just kept chasing it.

I'll mess with a couple more pets, but any pets not being able to keep up and land attacks on a walking target is a HUGE issue that we have known since the beginning.

It's not really fair to have a built-in class mechanic that has major issues like these, while also taking away ranger base damage potential due to factoring in these pets that struggle to hit walking targets.

My suggestion is to give ALL pets STANDARD movement speed buffs and attack speed buffs so they hit more consistently. I'm sure the ranger players wouldn't care if the devs nerfed damage output on some pets... IF pets were to be a consistent source of actual damage and pressure.

Test away with standard and F2 pet attacks and report your results in this thread if you want, but regardless, this HAS to be fixed up please.

TY for reading.

EDIT SECTION-

WALKING GOLEM TESTS

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Sand_Lion F2 https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blinding_Roar... Lion stops to perform F2 and golem walk away without being affected... It's a reminder that pets were designed for stationary targets, not moving. That IS a huge issue in wvw and spvp bc players aren't standing still.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Forest_Spider... Some ranged attacks hit, some ranged attacks missed. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Poison_Gas missed by a long mile due to the spider stopping to perform the attack and shooting the cloud in a small area marked for the attack. Issue is the ground target setting for the F2 attacks.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Salamander_Drake... ALL standard and F2 skills MISSED the walking golem... ALL of them.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Whiptail_Devourer... Ranged attacks hit with more consistency, not all, than Forest Spider. F2 skill tracked and hit the target better, but barely caught the walking golem. Better F2 design than the ground target skills.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Red_Moa... Standard Peck hits very seldom and there are periods where the Moa won't attack at all due to being out of range.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Arctodus... Hit with each standard attack 1 time every 7 seconds. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rending_Maul NEVER landed. The Arctodus just kept chasing the golem in circles.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Lynx... Hit consistently with standard and F2 attacks.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Fire_Wyvern.. Wing Swip generally missed the 1st attacks of the 2. Rarely uses Tail Lash skill, Wing buffet MISSES completely. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Consuming_Flame drops an AoE (with a long animation prior) and the walking golem is long gone.

*I'm not going over every pet and every skill, just gathering some basic info. However, it's safe to assume that there are lots of tracking and missed target issues with lots of pet skills.

WHAT WE COULD DO TO FIX THESE ISSSUES...

• Edited Suggestion... Pets could be immune to AoE damage. Both direct and Condition damage AoEs.
• As stated. Movement speed and attack speed buffs to ALL PETS
• Only reduce SELECT pet damage numbers in SPVP. Ya know, those rare 2 or 3 pet attacks (out of the plethora of pets and pet skills...) that a few players are still shedding salty tears over in the SPVP section.
• ALL ranged pet skills need to be INSTANT CAST and track the target. NO MORE GROUND TARGET RANGED PBAOE skills that roots the pet and drop the AoE where the target was 5 seconds earlier.
• ALL melee attacks need better attack range. And in some cases, make skills LEAP attacks that track the target.
• ALL PBAoE attacks need to be INSTANT CAST PBAoE.

Well, unfortunately that's nothing new. In a lot of way racial transformation's skills suffer from the same issue. I've been complaining about that for a long time but ended giving up due to the lack of results.

For the melee skills the issue is that casting them root the character/pet. As for the range one, the direction is set at the beginning of the cast time, not at the end which mean that a slow projectile with a long cast time have naturally a hard time hitting a moving foe. But most of all the issue come from the rigidity of the pet's animations.

I'm not sure if it still work, but at some point you could also break some of the pet's damage by simply walking toward it when attacking it. Doing this forced the AI to reposition by moving back and thus reduce the overall attack speed of the pet. (Ironically some PvE mob suffered from this as well when fighting pets, with the pets "pushing" them back due to ANet's tries to fix the pet's unreliability to hit a foe.)

While I agree with most of what OP posted, it's gone too far now, and we'll just have to come to terms with the fact that Anet will NEVER fix these issues. A sad fact that made me lose interest for pvp in this game long time ago (and the game in general).It reminds me all to well when the same issues, more or less, were brought up in the original Guild Wars. They waited until the game was more or less dead until they started to fix issues with pets in that game that had been complained about since release.So no, I have zero hope for improvements in this area.

Red Moa's command skill is a buff, lolIt literally doesn't do damage. There is no "missing" because there's nothing for it to land, it's just an aoe buff around it.

Anyways, pet AI is horrible in pretty much every way and it hurts them as a mechanic and the game would have been better off if they were optional from the very beginning like GW1.

oh also a fun fact, pets that can't hit moving targets, including moas, can hit them if you hit the pet with Signet of HumilityIt's hilarious.

Also: not all pets are affected by quickness. This needs a fix too.

@"Shagie.7612" said:Red Moa's command skill is a buff, lolIt literally doesn't do damage. There is no "missing" because there's nothing for it to land, it's just an aoe buff around it.

Anyways, pet AI is horrible in pretty much every way and it hurts them as a mechanic and the game would have been better off if they were optional from the very beginning like GW1.

oh also a fun fact, pets that can't hit moving targets, including moas, can hit them if you hit the pet with Signet of HumilityIt's hilarious.

Good catch, ty! Wasn’t paying attention.

Yeah well, pet nerfs incoming for sPvP

@"Swagger.1459" said:Pets can easily be tested here... https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lion%27s_Arch_Aerodrome inside https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Special_Forces_Training_Area

Load up the walking golem and let your pets do their things.

Watch as some pets struggle to even hit the WALKING golem.

Just tested https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Rock_Gazelle and the f2 skill https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Head_Toss didn't even land on the walking golem. The golem kept walking around and the gazelle just kept chasing it.

I'll mess with a couple more pets, but any pets not being able to keep up and land attacks on a walking target is a HUGE issue that we have known since the beginning.

It's not really fair to have a built-in class mechanic that has major issues like these, while also taking away ranger base damage potential due to factoring in these pets that struggle to hit walking targets.

My suggestion is to give ALL pets STANDARD movement speed buffs and attack speed buffs so they hit more consistently. I'm sure the ranger players wouldn't care if the devs nerfed damage output on some pets... IF pets were to be a consistent source of actual damage and pressure.

Test away with standard and F2 pet attacks and report your results in this thread if you want, but regardless, this HAS to be fixed up please.

TY for reading.

EDIT SECTION-

WALKING GOLEM TESTS

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Sand_Lion F2 https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blinding_Roar... Lion stops to perform F2 and golem walk away without being affected... It's a reminder that pets were designed for stationary targets, not moving. That IS a huge issue in wvw and spvp bc players aren't standing still.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Forest_Spider... Some ranged attacks hit, some ranged attacks missed. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Poison_Gas missed by a long mile due to the spider stopping to perform the attack and shooting the cloud in a small area marked for the attack. Issue is the ground target setting for the F2 attacks.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Salamander_Drake... ALL standard and F2 skills MISSED the walking golem... ALL of them.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Whiptail_Devourer... Ranged attacks hit with more consistency, not all, than Forest Spider. F2 skill tracked and hit the target better, but barely caught the walking golem. Better F2 design than the ground target skills.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Red_Moa... Standard Peck hits very seldom and there are periods where the Moa won't attack at all due to being out of range.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Arctodus... Hit with each standard attack 1 time every 7 seconds. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rending_Maul NEVER landed. The Arctodus just kept chasing the golem in circles.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Lynx... Hit consistently with standard and F2 attacks.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Fire_Wyvern.. Wing Swip generally missed the 1st attacks of the 2. Rarely uses Tail Lash skill, Wing buffet MISSES completely. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Consuming_Flame drops an AoE (with a long animation prior) and the walking golem is long gone.

*I'm not going over every pet and every skill, just gathering some basic info. However, it's safe to assume that there are lots of tracking and missed target issues with lots of pet skills.

WHAT WE COULD DO TO FIX THESE ISSSUES...

• As stated. Movement speed and attack speed buffs to ALL PETS
• Only reduce SELECT pet damage numbers in SPVP. Ya know, those rare 2 or 3 pet attacks (out of the plethora of pets and pet skills...) that a few players are still shedding salty tears over in the SPVP section.
• ALL ranged pet skills need to be INSTANT CAST and track the target. NO MORE GROUND TARGET RANGED PBAOE skills that roots the pet and drop the AoE where the target was 5 seconds earlier.
• ALL melee attacks need better attack range. And in some cases, make skills LEAP attacks that track the target.
• ALL PBAoE attacks need to be INSTANT CAST PBAoE.

Completely agreed, the problem right now is you have some really bad players that are screaming for nerfs which don't care about true balance or that everyone has a profession to play.

Something I hope anet sees as well is trying to achieve perfect balance is impossible without making all the different classes feel the "same".

We have a lot of useless pet.Better delete all the old pet then 5 core 2 hot 2 pof with new animation for 'attac while moving'

Made an edit in the OP.

“Edited Suggestion... Pets could be immune to AoE damage. Both direct and Condition damage AoEs.”

It’s easier for Anet to nerf or straight up delete stuff than it is for them to fix it, so don’t count on any fixes for pets any time soon or ever for that matter.

I've been having issues with my lightning wyvern for a while, mostly with the tracking on it's F2.

It's supposed to dash towards a target and put down a lightning field but more often than not especially after switching it will dash away from an enemy or screw up the placement of the lightning field which is a problem because the build I run it on uses this to take advantage of leap daze CC for breakbars etc which is a bit of a weakness on my build so when it screws up I loose a good chunk of my Breakbar damage which can be significant, specially if im soloing something.

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