Summon/Pet Builds [Conflicts and Solutions]

[Strider.7849]

I've wrote threads and commented about ranger pets (namely pre-hot) that NEED to be updated for years now. As it stands we have only a handful of useful pets (including niche choices) and the rest sit unused.

Smoke scale is an example of a pet done well. Even after many, many nerfs, we still choose this pet because it's Active skill is useful for the player (smoke field) and for the pet itself (gives it a place to evade damage inside of). On-top of that it has a reliable CC that once you master controlling the pet, you can almost control when you want that to occur. It's tracking of a human played enemy is a million times better than any other pet - so even with its nerfed damage it still outdps' most other pets that have higher damage numbers on paper. Lastly it's resilient enough not to get 1 shorted or blown up immediately (again your active adds to that).

On the other side you have a pet like the juvenile fire drake. It can't reliably hit any target other than one that is completely stationary. It's damage is completely pitiful. The F2 active skill has a huge cast time with low damage and an easily avoidable radius, that causes it to miss even mobs in old tyria environments. It's aoe swipe/blast activates when you swap into the pet at times so it neither hits any enemies and it's blast is so random it achieves nothing. It's just awful all around and unfortunately we have wayyyy to many pets that function similarly to this one - moa's, bears, devourers, etc.

I lost hope on this being changed a long time ago, at least with necro or engineer you can swap out those things for other skills. For ranger you either choose one of a handful of useful pets and the rest have to be completely neglected. With that being said I still love my ranger, I just wish I could effectively run things like the juvenile marsh drake or some of the moa's and not be negatively impacting my character.

[Tman.6349]

Ive always thought it would be pretty cool to change the grandmaster trait to something a little more active that would work similar to SoS at the cost of Lifeforce. This would also help balance a couple of the problems this spec naturally has. Something like 'Infuse your Minions with Lifeforce to Improve their active effects (X% of LF on cast)'.-Bone minions now explode leaving a smaller version of a CPC for 4 secs-Shadow fiend teleport to target;ground target tele for Necro 900 range-Wurm now swaps places with Necro then explodes with a 300 KB 1200 rng-Bloodfiend sacrifice gives 5Quick/10Regen to Necro/other minions (still pretty passive on this one IDK)

These are just random examples to convey the idea and might cost 5-10% of stored LF on use. IDK. Just spitballing a way that it's a bit more active and not just braindead meatshield+shroud play (especially in PvP). An effect on one to move the whole group around the field could be okay too. I'd imagine something like that as an F skill on a dedicated spec as you were saying.

I do strongly agree with how disconnected minions are to the Necro making them boring to play and lame to play against. Having them remain in the world indefinitely w/o any upkeep/input is kinda lame too. Maybe they should have timers on them or health degen after a while like GW1 minions (add nova baseline maybe?).

Good convo though as it does feel like huge chunks of the game have become outdated/unusable which isn't helping the balance/diversity issues currently plaguing the game in every facet.