Pet pathing is abysmally bad

Please put some attention into this! My pet constantly lags behind, only to fly on ahead of me when I stop, often right on top of a mob that's ahead (and the reason I stopped!). It doesn't seem to aggro, but it makes me jump every time. It also gets stuck behind me in some areas, refusing to follow me, even when I get into a fight it just sits back in the little gully or wedged behind a beam or what have you. Finally, in big boss fights, I often find that my pet just sits there while I pound on the F1 key, blithely ignoring my command to attack. These all make playing a Range very frustrating.

You seem new, welcome to the life of a Tyrian ranger.

I'm pretty sure redoing pet AI is a pretty large undertaking, so smart money says you'd be better off adjusting to the status quo for the time being. If your pet doesn't follow you at key points to start fights with you on time, I suggest having the pet you want to start the fight with stowed. Then, as soon as combat hits, it will either unstow right next to you, or you can swap to it. Either way, when the fight starts, it should be right near you and not stuck behind any obstacles.

I've been playing a bit over a week, yes. :-) Thanks for the tips. Too bad there's no key binding to stow the pet.

Indeed, a stow keybind might be nice. Overall though, I've rarely found pathing to be a big issue outside of pvp. For pve fights where you can control precisely when it starts, they key is to just not have your desired pet out just before you pull, if pathing remains a problem.