Let's talk a bit about ranger's design

[latlat.4516]

Introduction & disclaimer(s)

This is a post I'm thinking about making since the reveal of untamed. I've been really on and off about it because I'm not that sure this is the place for a peacefull and constructive discussion, but since we just got a near confirmation that the probability of having a new e-spec any time soon is low and there's a very small changes they will work on reworks, I think it's now or never.

Firstly, I'm not a professional game designer and me being a professional developper does not give much knowledge about it either. This post has not the objective to roast Anet's design choices/launch a drama or even claiming "something needs to be done". Game design is not a set of skill you can learn by merely playing a lot, even if it gives out intuitions. What I want to start is an open discussion about the design behind the ranger class. Read this more as an essay than a "rant", please.

As for my familiarity with the class, I'm at about 5k hours played in GW2, 3k8 of those on a ranger. 

You'll see that I'll speak about some vague" concepts like "fun" and "interactivity". These concepts or often used for any reason and with a vague sense of what they mean. In the context of this post I'll be using them like this :

- "interactivity" : game mechanic that is based around the player actually pressing a button/making a choice and the player seeing the effect of their choice occuring in the game.

- "fun" : I define a 'fun mecanic' a an interactive mecanic that rewards and punish the player depending on the choices they made in a certain situation. 

 

The base idea of the ranger

The base idea behind ranger is something akin to a wanderer using the environment to overcome challenges. To represent that, anet choosed to give it something that was unique to them until the mechanist : a permanent pet. We also have traps, survival abilities and summons as supporting tools (most of which actually date back to GW1). This makes the class unique since outside of elite specs, ranger must use summons to give significant support to their party - and it's the only class in this situation. All other summon core classes can choose (or not) to use their summon in group content. Ranger does not. 

The limitation of summoning/pets

Well, you now might have an idea of where I'm trying to get : there is a massive problem with "summon" gameplay interactivity and the ranger is basically forced into it for group content by its core design. We'll touch on the subject of elite specs later.

While the "spirit" skill set might be a correct design choice to control "good and bad choices" (meaning = to give options you want players to use only in PvE), it still carries the limitation of actually locking the ranger out of group utility outside of PvE golem-boss situations, especially if no other group utility is provided. And outside of these spirits, core ranger utility options do not offer much utility/terrain control... except pet skill.

The pet current implementation is an aging idea from the early 2010's. It might be interesting for new and casual players as it provides a mecanic that can buffer early "challenges" but by the end of the leveling journey and when you start to do more serious content (like WvW or raiding), you select your pet mostly for its skill. Well, good luck getting accepted as a core ranger anyway, so you don't really. Not only that but this mecanic is kinda flawed on certain aspects : it's designed to act as sixth member of the group., yet the whole system of current days GW2 is based around 5-man groups. Which delivers its own set of problems in competitive contents where stealth engagement is a thing. But, and more importantly, the mecanic of the core ranger is the only profession mecanic in the game that scales poorly with the player skill level & game knowledge, and for multiple reason. One is that boons are not reliably applied to your pet (due to support priority), the other is that AI can only scale its abilities so much by itself. And with the modification on how the pet skills work (to accomodate golem skill usage), we now find ourselves with a very unreliable f2 skill. Otherwise said : most of the time for players, the pet is more of a liability you will keep in peacefull mode in order to be sure one of your skills will be usable when you need it. 

So, to summarize : core ranger is held back in the group utility departement - base system of GW2 combat- by a skill set designed to only be used in certain specific situations and a profession mecanic that could just be absent from the game in most situations.

The elite specs

Despite this, ranger still sees play. Druid has been meta for multiple years in succession on top of recently seeing play in WvW squads, soulbeast is a correct damage dealer -versatile enough to be in the top professions to roam in- and untamed ... well is core ranger on steroids. 

While most of these e-specs are actually very good and fun, they still are held back by the core ranger class - except soulbeast. This results in an interesting mix where the viability of the ranger's e-specs is carried by a specific gimmick.

    For the druid, the gimmick in question varies depending on the content you're in. The support version is carried by its support bursting ability. The WvW roaming/condi version is carried by ancient seeds. Much like entangle, ancient seeds ability is not that fun to interact with, either destroying players that don't know how to counter it or rendered useless against the rest (I'm mainly mentionning PvP/WvW here because AS is not that usefull in PvE). But druid has a big problem that prevents it from getting higher in the tier list ladder, especially in WvW : the ranger pet. It can provide smoke field, but you have to stow it away before blasting (which is not bindable btw). It can provide some utility, but at the cost of being a killable independant unit. Which is highly problematic compared to the utility it actually brings, and brings up the actual cooldown of most pet skills to 60s -a cooldown comparable to the 3rd profession mecanic of guardians, but with much less impact. In PvE, it held its ground for very long - due to not having alternatives mainly- but now that real alternatives exist, we can see how it really fares, especially against AM. The irony in the situation is that AM has the same pet mecanic as the untamed EXCEPT that it is pulled up by the base engi kit. 

   The case of the untamed is clearer for most people when you see recent posting on this very forum : fervent force is just too powerfull of a passive trait to pass over it. And most viable builds of the untamed are actually enabled by its very existence. The untamed is supposed to be the "pet e-spec" of the ranger - and it at least partially fixed it. I use the verb "fixed" and not "improved" mainly because it actually allows the pet abilities to scale with player skill, which for me should be the baseline behaviour of a profession mecanic. And it's mostly with the spec you see the problem with core ranger : even that is not enough to save it. You can go to some high level performance after some training in PvE, and have some success in small scale WvW content/sPvP. But here's what we see : except the spirit + Fervent force combo, the untamed brings near nothing to a group. In other words, outside of PvE untamed are useless for their allies. Because it's made to enhance the core class gameplay, which is mostly built for solo play.

    The case of the soulbeast is very different from the other e-specs. And if you've read until now, you might have an idea as to why I have this idea : soulbeast takes the pet out of the equation, and the "leader of the pack" trait allows to bring some group utility even when not playing support. This is not yet perfect, as the risk of making the soulbeast an unstoppable power house of damage and support mandated the devs to balance the beastmastery trait line and the command skills. This could be quite common as you cannot ask someone to see a problem with interactions not yet in the game when they designed the base profession to begin with - example with the first willbender beta and the aegis ball of death. But I do find interesting that the most popular ranger e-spec with the least limitations is the one taking away the pet and not needing spirits to bring real utility to the group. Color me surprised.

 

Conclusion and my 2 cents on the possible solutions

If you've read up until here, I think I've been clear : the pet - the very thing that set the ranger appart from other classes in GW2- is the main reason the ranger is held back in group content. The pet existing is what justifies the few "non-summoned group capabilities", and this absence is what locks the ranger e-specs into very specific locks when the e-specs can completly change the way the base profession is played. 

Now let's see what's at the core of why the pet is a problem. There are 2 points : one, the pet is an independant unit (which means non-scalable) with its own life pool (which means unusable in competitive contexts). I see two kind of solutions for that : either we keep the pet as a permanent world object, but do something about skill scalability and stealth share, either we transform the whole mecanic.

There multiple possible solutions, here are some I've already though about, but these are probably dreams :

• making the pet untargetable, share stealth with the ranger, lower its non-skill damage and re-balance/revamp skills that rely on the pet being killable. This is the most simple solution yet
• changing the mecanic completly. A solution I like is to make the pet like Ventari's tablet -f1 is moving it, f2 is "species/beast skill" and f3 is "archetype skill", f4 is switch. It would no do anything passively anymore. 
• doing something that would be a mix of Kalla's stance and the engi tool belt : two pulsating AoE skills we can select amongst a choice with more possibilities with unlocked pets

 

The advantage of the two last solutions is that it opens the mecanic to be modified by e-specs. It would open the "command skills" to be more of a supportive set. Druid could finally be freed of its "burst or nothing situation" with small cleansing/buffing cooldowns (at the cost of nerfing the CA and ancient seed maybe ?). Soulbeast can stay basically the same. And untamed could maybe get one more skill (so, second species sill for the ventari and a third selection for the tool belt). I'm purposely taking already existing design in the game and keeping the choice-from-unlocking-pets, in order to stay at most inline with things and ideas I know the dev team know. 

 

Maybe some of you have differing opinions on the matter ? Are the pet and the lack of group utility not that much of a problem to you ? Do you see other ways to adress the problem (outside of "just play soulbeast") ? 

[Zyreva.1078]

3 hours ago, latlat.4516 said:

Maybe some of you have differing opinions on the matter ? Are the pet and the lack of group utility not that much of a problem to you ? Do you see other ways to adress the problem (outside of "just play soulbeast") ? 

A lot of the problems with pets could be fixed without turning pets into a copy of other classes' mechanics and therefore taking away what makes ranger unique. Anet simply never tried to do so. Same with lack of grp utility (also being a bit more selfish and less grp oriented kinda fits the archetype).

[latlat.4516]

41 minutes ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

A lot of the problems with pets could be fixed without turning pets into a copy of other classes

I'm not against this idea. Do you have any idea on how anet could do such fixes ? I'm interested in hearing them.

 

41 minutes ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

(also being a bit more selfish and less grp oriented kinda fits the archetype

it may fit the archetype, but the idea is actually something that was ok in 2012. The thing is that ranger builds are becoming less and less relevant in any situation of competitive play as soon as you have more than a 1v1 involved. And even in 1v1 situations, it does not especially shine. Soulbeast is not even an option anymore in the 15v15 format. And druid is barely accepted in these format because of sic them. 

I can see one e-spec being more "open world oriented". But saying the whole class is doomed to solo play because it fits the theme is kinda hard to accept.

[Zyreva.1078]

1 hour ago, latlat.4516 said:

I'm not against this idea. Do you have any idea on how anet could do such fixes ? I'm interested in hearing them.

As a start they should fix all the issues and bugs added during last year that made pets a lot less responsive.

Then there are options such as baseline boonshare (while removing pet->ranger boon copy mechanics to not grant more free boon spam to the player), reasonable stats for all pet (20k hp miniumum in PvP/WvW), invuln when passive, more useful pet skills , full pet controls for all specs, ... just a few things that come to my mind.

Edited May 5, 2023 by Zyreva.1078

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

I want pets to be good. I picked ranger because I like pet classes, and the Wildman concept took a sideline for me.

 

An easy solution? Stat scaling with the ranger, even if it's just on beastmastery, tied to the minor traits. 50% sharing of xy stat max per minor trait, could even be turned off for pvp/wvw or severely neutered (5-15%). Same as mechanist, just significantly weaker. Core nerfs to compensate if Core ranger is doing too much over other Core profs, but there's a few good Core builds that are above other professions in pve, so making some other professions have this possibility would be nice. Maybe Core DPS alacrity would be viable!

 

Pets need some fixes as well, such as alacrity and quickness fixes. Felines had this for quickness, so it actually functions now, but plenty of pet families don't have these boons even function, such as drakes, so even if they have it they don't get the benefits.

 

Another easy fix is making pets have actual good DPS with ALL of their skills. For example, the River Drake's F2 is a DPS loss, because the F2 doesn't bounce- make it do more damage. Even if it was a huge jump from level 79 pets to level 80 pets, I'd take it at this point.

 

Cooldown decreases and cast time decreases would be wonderful as well, even if it's done before their family receives their quickness and/or alacrity fix, as a precursor to those changes (and letting us know what gets fixed next!), and they could be left as is or reverted if alacrity and quickness provide enough for them.

 

Boons are a weird one- I think the trait Fortifying Bond (share boons you get with your pet) should be moved to Beastmastery (as this makes more sense) from Nature Magic, and then have a new trait that gives massive concentration bonuses and stat sharing for concentration and healing power in its place.

 

Finally, give Core ranger what they should have had to begin with- the full pet skill control. I can save my electric wyvern's F2 and Wing Flap for CC and leave their tail swipe on auto on untamed, so it does damage and I can control when it uses the CC, but not on core or druid, where its more important (ish, CC good). Give Untamed some ACTUAL bonuses, like proper scaling of the unleashed F1-F3 and more benefits for the pet, as well (also please make unleashed ambushes have a 10s cooldown so you can make a weapon swap based rotation plz and ty, I'd like to use hanmer/axe/axe more easily and hammers ambush sucks but axes is actually worth it).

 

These changes hopefully don't push Core ranger too far overboard but also provide actual benefits from the pet. Don't treat it like a 6th man, treat it like half a man, because it's less than half a man right now. If they want pets to remain your jack of all trades option, make having them worth it.

 

[Abyssisis.3971]

There are too many pets and no chance anet will work on them all so any pet rework should just remove all but 1 pet in each type and just give us the option to select its skin. Pets should come default with only its auto attack skills and we the players should be selecting its utility skills from skills based on its type and archetype.

[xXxOrcaxXx.9328]

The Ranger would benefit greatly from having more control over the pet. I've made a lengthy suggestion to that end that I still absolutely believe in. The gist of my suggestion is to rework the F1 (Attack) key, to also function as a ground-target or to allow the Ranger player to send its pet to allies in order to support them. This will allow much more intricate control over the pet and in turn enable new and exciting™ gameplay opportunities, such as being able to pre-position the pet before commanding it to use its skills. It also allows for even better integration with the elite specs.

 

The Druid elite specialization ignored the pet entirely and instead gave the Ranger a completely new energy system. With my suggestion, the pet could toggle with the Druid into Celestial Avatar, copying every skill used and thus allowing to support your team at range.

 

The Soulbeast elite specialization could get the ability to decide where the pet will end up when unmerging, as well as porting to the pet's postion when merging.

 

How the Untamed could benefit beyond the better pet control as part of the Core Ranger update I am not so sure yet. But I think the possibilities a more controlable pet would bring is already worth the opportunity cost for implementing it.

[Beddo.1907]

The biggest issue for Anet is probably confidence in the pet rework, since it might kill the class till it's fine tuned or result in wasted work if the direction turns out to be incorrect after testing.
As for the provided solutions:
-Untargetable pet would be perfect for pet utility value, if it didn't remove the ability to use the pet for tanking and aggro manipulation.
-Full control makes the pet more manageable, however it also adds a lot more work and attention to get full efficiency. (It has some potential, but I'll talk about it in a bit.)
-Same at the first one, except more work.

The best solution in my opinion is probably a mix of your solutions and a few other things:
-Pet is stealthed only when you receive stealth or it applies it with it's own skill.
-Pet does not receive boons from outside sources and instead gets a copy of the boons you receive. (WHAS and other boon related mechanics would need to be adjusted)
-When at a certain hp threshold, healing from other players will partially heal the pet. (It's mostly here due to pet having close to 0% chance of being healed in a large fight.)
-Players have higher target priority when hit by an aoe and cleave, resulting in pets taking less damage when besides multiple players.
-A 3rd pet "mode" (aggressive/passive) where we get the control you mentioned in 2nd idea. It would help with getting accurate placement for aoe pet skills, leaving the pet out of the fight or simply moving it for something like leading the mobs away.
-Fix animations, AI, hits on moving targets, elevation differences and other pet related technical issues.

[Batalix.2873]

On 5/5/2023 at 6:23 PM, xXxOrcaxXx.9328 said:

The Ranger would benefit greatly from having more control over the pet. I've made a lengthy suggestion to that end that I still absolutely believe in. The gist of my suggestion is to rework the F1 (Attack) key, to also function as a ground-target or to allow the Ranger player to send its pet to allies in order to support them. This will allow much more intricate control over the pet and in turn enable new and exciting™ gameplay opportunities, such as being able to pre-position the pet before commanding it to use its skills. It also allows for even better integration with the elite specs.

 

The Druid elite specialization ignored the pet entirely and instead gave the Ranger a completely new energy system. With my suggestion, the pet could toggle with the Druid into Celestial Avatar, copying every skill used and thus allowing to support your team at range.

 

The Soulbeast elite specialization could get the ability to decide where the pet will end up when unmerging, as well as porting to the pet's postion when merging.

 

How the Untamed could benefit beyond the better pet control as part of the Core Ranger update I am not so sure yet. But I think the possibilities a more controlable pet would bring is already worth the opportunity cost for implementing it.

 

Hard agree on F1 movement and CA pet.

 

I would even tolerate Druid having "DPS" if it were tied to the CA pet.

[Arheundel.6451]

Conclusion: Pet Mechanic is God Awful and soulbeast is the saving grace of ranger..otherwise there would be zero reason to even slot this class

[ventress.4879]

Meh honestly there is no way to make the pet any stronger without tones of people complaining that either they got killed by a pet in PvP or its a lazy afk class in PvE (Mechanist was a good test case). 

The best you can hope for is just more/better pets or reworks and then just having more controls. Some more keybinds for them would help. 

The pet is also not to hard to control, its just frustrating. 

[Bastrii.3047]

What I think the best solution for Pets is a re imagining of what they should be compared to current state of the game. As it stands, nearly every other profession is an Active profession; their profession abilities either have minor passive effects and great active effects, or are strictly an active effect.

Reapers have shroud, which can passively charge through damage, but when active - grants them a second health bar and a new move set, making it a highly potent ability.

Warriors have Adrenaline, which builds passively in combat/through certain actions, and is released for impactful burst attacks.

Engineers have tool belts that contain a slew of useful, actively used items within them that impact the game in a variety of ways.

These are just three examples, but you'll notice that in each case, when the Profession activates their core mechanic, they gain an immediate and responsive effect that has a large influence on the way they play. Compare every single class in the game against this, and you quickly learn that Ranger has essentially nothing like this in its core.

 

It has a Passive profession skill. It requires little to no interaction from the player, it provides nearly no immediate effects, and rarely has any impact at all. The Pet is not a threat, and only works to passively - and poorly - increase damage. And even then, if you're looking for raw damage, you have to choose between a minuscule list of "viable" pets, and nearly none of them have a good active skill. The only exception being the shadow scale, which gives a single smoke field that you can use to pop into and out of stealth on occasion.

 

If you couple this poor Passive skill with the fact that it can be easily killed and made worthless, you begin to see the major problem behind Ranger.  The Pets aren't the problem. It's the fact that Ranger is designed around Pets to begin with, which relies entirely on an AI to be functional.

 

IMHO the best way to fix Ranger is to remove Pets as the core mechanic, and instead they should be a mostly aesthetic follower that adds maybe 2% of your DPS, that can't be harmed nor apply any major effects without the Beastmastery tree selected (so no major changes except they are no longer targettable and don't have a health pool, lol). With Beastmastery, the damage is increased massively and they return to old Pet functionality, that includes their own health bar, and they gain their old 1 extra button to hit.

 

Instead, Rangers should get a new core mechanic that puts them in line with other core classes. Perhaps something similar to the ol' boys in blue - something like Virtues. Maybe call 'em Unities? Like, Unity of Nature - Recover a small amount of health passively, when activated, recover a large amount of health and gain Stealth for 3 seconds. Unity of Beasts - Chance to apply Poison with every attack. When activated, lash out at the target and inflict Bleeding, Poison, and Blind immediately. Unity of Wilds - Remove 1 Condition every 5 seconds. When activated, break all Stuns, Snares and Slows and gain Superspeed for 3 seconds. Unlike with Virtues, which each have their own Cooldown, Unities can share a recharging resource pool to spend at will, with the strongest Unities draining most/all of the pool, and the weaker unities draining some of it.

 

I feel like a lot of changes would need to be made, but this is just for the better overall. Pets are what truly hold back the Ranger, as they are what's preventing Core from having anything more than just a majorly passive ability. Pets would still be important, as they could still be used for Beastmastery and by Soulbeasts (and Untamed would also enforce a Pet Health bar), but they aren't a major source of the toolkit anymore. This also means that they could buff other parts of Ranger that have been lagging behind under the presumption of pet damage being core to the build, like how Druid can finally have some more damaging traits baked in to their spec.

[Bastrii.3047]

2 minutes ago, Bastrii.3047 said:

I feel like a lot of changes would need to be made, but this is just for the better overall. Pets are what truly hold back the Ranger, as they are what's preventing Core from having anything more than just a majorly passive ability. Pets would still be important, as they could still be used for Beastmastery and by Soulbeasts (and Untamed would also enforce a Pet Health bar), but they aren't a major source of the toolkit anymore. This also means that they could buff other parts of Ranger that have been lagging behind under the presumption of pet damage being core to the build, like how Druid can finally have some more damaging traits baked in to their spec.

I'd also like to add in that this would just make the Ranger more viable in every aspect. Removing the Pet as the core of the Ranger and instead focusing on the actual player, the player who is behind the keyboard trying to have fun, should be the main priority. When you're dealing with AI, it's more frustrating than not - and it's why Pets are often the target of Ranger hate. to make this rework function, I'll type up my thoughts on it.

 

Reduce Pet DPS to be the same across the board, and be incredibly low (100 DPS at max level). Remove the passive abilities on Pets, limit them to Auto Attack. Remove Pet health bar, and allow them to be stowed permanently, even in combat, unless if the Pet has its old functions restored via Beastmastery or a Profession with Pets at its core.

 

Implement cool, impactful, core abilities. This can be my suggestion prior, or anything the devs deem necessary.

 

Change some of the functions concerning Pets to instead function either off of using your new core mechanics, or rework them to just be Ranger Focused instead. The Command ability reworks should look like this (this is assuming Beastmastery isn't taken)

Search and Rescue: Pet temporarily gains a health bar equal to 100% of the Ranger's health. Search and Rescue now has a small channel time, where you can walk around and attempt to find a target first for 2 seconds, before the Pet initiates the effect. Pet abandons reviving if the player dies, or if their temporary health bar hits 0, at which point they abandon trying to heal and return to your side.

Guard: Pet gains a temporary Heatlh Bar equal to 100% of the Rangers health, and the effect persists until the Pet reaches 0 health. Can not be healed by healing effects, excluding We Heal as One! Effect ends after 30 seconds. Cooldown begins after effect elapses, or the Pet runs out of health. 45 Second cooldown.

Protect Me: No Changes.

Sic 'Em!: Reveal the target. Pet rushes at the target with Super Speed and inflicts 6 stacks of Bleeding, raw damage, and dazes the target for 3 seconds (1.5 seconds in PvP). No longer a 25% damage buff for soulbeasts, but will grant bonus damage on the next attack and inflict bleeding. Bleeding/Damage scales off of your own Condition Damage and Power both. Crit chance is based off of your Crit.

We Heal as One!: Heals the Ranger and fully heals the Pet when under the effects of Guard or Search and Rescue. Also fully heals the Pet when Beastmastery is selected as the main tree. Revives downed Pets instantly with 50% health when Beastmastery is selected.

 

Pet Swap effects: Moved to the new core mechanic, whenever the new mechanic is used. Scaled to fit the new mechanic.

 

Boon sharing: Baseline. Pets do not gain boons if they can't die.

 

Druid: Gain +15% damage when under the effect of Regeneration. Staff skills deal more damage.

 

Untamed: Return normal pet function. Pet stats scale partially off of the Ranger's.

 

Soulbeast: Merging with the pet grants baseline stats and access to new abilities, but you lose access to your core toolkit. Unmerging loses these stats and abilities, but you gain the core toolkit again. Remove all boon sharing. Add more support options baseline into the tree.

 

Sorry for overkill on the post. I know no one cares/thinks it's a dumb idea, but it's just my own brain at work.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

For PvE, yes, I believe 'just use soulbeast' is the answer due to how stacking mechanics work for any content that isn't open world.

For competitive, believe all that's needed is scaling damage reduction.  That, or traits that can be slotted to reduce damage to the pet.  

Having only a select few useful pets is another matter, but that is solvable by making sure each pet has a CC ability, getting rid of the AoE casts (or at least making them faster / always apply to ranger then AoE for anyone else near), and yes, fixing all the responsiveness issues Mechanist introduced.  

In competitive the pet is extremely useful, at least the ones that have CCs are.  Of course they lose effectiveness in zerg combat, but we do have soulbeast, and maybe modify druid to turn the pet into an astral form as well if you are in CA (it takes no damage but can't do damage either or something).  Untamed could always just reduce pet damage when the ranger is unleashed...

The tldr; is pets aren't really up to par with the current state of boon/mobility spam this game has, but they are definitely not a passive ability.  

[Batalix.2873]

I'd just like to point out that the devs are never going to remove pets as Ranger's core mechanic. To think any other way lies somewhere on the spectrum of hypothetical to delusional. They are part and parcel of the job identity and without pets Ranger might as well be removed altogether for lacking a central conceit.

 

Some player suggestions, like new core weapons, new playable races, etc. would require so much restructuring and retro compatibility that the effort needed to justify it would just be put into implementing those changes carte blanche in GW3.

 

Personally, I err toward believing that unique aspects of jobs should be *amplified* and made *more distinct, specialized, and powerful*. I think pruning away mechanics altogether just trends toward homogenization and bland design.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Batalix.2873

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

5 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

For PvE, yes, I believe 'just use soulbeast' is the answer due to how stacking mechanics work for any content that isn't open world.

This shouldn't be the answer, though. There isn't a single other profession that ignores their profession mechanic by "working around" the issue like how Soulbeast does it for Ranger.

 

Mesmers always use their clones in some way (even virt, it's replaced by a similar but different system but virtuoso still interacts with it). Some shatter, some keep them around a bit, but all mesmers use clones.

 

Engineers always use their toolkit (or the mechanist mech). If you need something, you get a little extra oomph from the toolbelt addition.

 

Warriors always use their adrenaline, whether for primal bursts, full counters (seeing a spellbreaker full counter Deimos mind crush is really funny), or dragon slashing.

 

Guardians always use their virtues, guardian rarely leaves them as passives/signets+. Firebrand especially loves their 15 extra skills they can choose from if needed.

 

Necromancer doesn't ignore shroud or sand shroud.

 

Elementalists that don't attunement swap, modern day, are not going to do well. Weaver, catalyst, tempest, all want to swap attunements. For different reasons, sure, but they swap regardless.

 

Thieves always use their initiative (at least I hope they do). Specters don't ignore shadow shroud.

 

Revenants always want to be swapping legends. Power and condi both hate sitting in shiro/malyx for too long since their energy requirements can't be sustained from Impossible Odds or the elite I don't remember the name of respectively, and the elite spec legends are too good to pass up as well. Also, jalis stab go brrt. You never sit in one or the other too long, however.

 

Ranger is the only profession that all but ignores or actually just works around the problem. No real solutions for boon uptime on pets, no real solutions for outgoing pet boon uptime (there are a lot of pets that might see even some use if their boons were worth using. Jungle stalker, red moa, and blue moa are 3 easy core pet examples), no solutions for low pet dps (even on the "pet spec" of Untamed or when using Beastmastery), no solutions for pets being unable to hit moving targers, no solutions for pets being blended in zergs, nothing.

 

Easy solutions exist. I think the ranger player base would literally not care how it was done if pets were made useful enough.

 

Stat sharing on untamed, while sort of lazy/"copying mechanist" (as if it didnt rip ranger's mechanic and stitch it to engineer), is a great way to actually make the pet spec have... good pets. Any Ranger espec's pets fall short relative to mechanist, if anet just did this it would unironcally be infinitely better for Untamed. Side note: please make PvE unleashed ambush cooldown 10s so I can weapon swap with it please and TY, I don't want to accidentally use hammer ambush when I mean to use axe ambush 😞

 

Damage reduction in wvw. It literally already exists in PvE, pets have damage reduction from AoEs. Just let cleave do full damage (to force rangers to play smarter and not just stand next to their pets), but make AoEs like Barrage or Meteor Shower do less damage to pets. Maybe in pvp too, but pvp has a "healthy" mix of pet outgoing and incoming damage imo. 

 

Pet boon sharing in PvE could easily be made baseline. Fortifying Bond should be reworked to actually be a supportive trait as opposed to a budget version of another budget version of another budget version of shift signet stuck onto a minor trait.

 

None of these solutions are getting implemented, sadly. Partially because Ranger is "getting on by" without them, partially because Anet can't justify the changes due to other balancing issues at hand from a cost/time investment perspective. June 27th, prove me wrong, or at least let Anet tell us "we're working on/thinking about how to fix it"

[Beddo.1907]

4 hours ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Stat sharing on untamed, while sort of lazy/"copying mechanist" (as if it didnt rip ranger's mechanic and stitch it to engineer), is a great way to actually make the pet spec have... good pets.

Unfortunately, unlike Mech, pets have their own stat dispositions and if you play druid, you'd like a dps pet rather than support, so sharing support stats is not effective.

4 hours ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Damage reduction in wvw.

Personally I think aoe DR is not the healthiest for WvW. While pets might survive with it, it also causes enemy damage to scatter more and result in squad becoming effectively tankier. The moment ranger is great in zerg, having 10 to 30 rangers would have huge impact. 

My personal idea was to lower AoE priority for pets, causing the aoe to hit players over pets, so the pets won't die, while not increasing damage scatter.

4 hours ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Pet boon sharing in PvE could easily be made baseline. Fortifying Bond should be reworked

Agreed.

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

6 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

Unfortunately, unlike Mech, pets have their own stat dispositions and if you play druid, you'd like a dps pet rather than support, so sharing support stats is not effective.

The reason druid takes DPS pets right now as opposed to supportive pets is specifically because supportive pets (despite there being plenty of them) are pretty bad. There are a few instances where you want supportive pets because their support is useful, and as a druid you always prioritize support over trying to hybridize, such as the Siege Turtle pet for Boneskinner (as the projectile bubble helps for the adds) or White Tiger on Deimos (CM or not, as it gives Aegis for Mind Crush).

 

If you could take a protection pet for 100% protection uptime, you could drop stone spirit in favor of sun spirit, for example. Having healers be more flexible is always better, and druid is pretty rigid in its options in a vacuum.

[kiwituatara.6053]

Just wanted to talk about ranger from power build (WvW) perspective

 

As much as I enjoy playing Soulbeast. I think the elite spec has ruined all other rangers specs. Most ranger damage multipliers used to be in core ranger traits, when Soulbeast came out, they either nerfed core ranger mulitpliers or moved it into Soulbeast.

It is now difficult to build viable power builds for core, druid, and untamed.

I think they need to move the damage multipliers back to core ranger and further define the elite specs more clearly:

• Soulbeast: stance and boon generation
• Druid: healer and soft CC
• Untamed: boon ripper/steal and hard CC

Other things I'd like to see:

• MH dagger rework
• Staff #2 rework. Staff #3 evade

[Beddo.1907]

1 hour ago, kiwituatara.6053 said:

they either nerfed core ranger mulitpliers or moved it into Soulbeast.

Do you mind saying which core multipiliers were nerfed, cause I don't remember anything besides Sic'em, LB 1 and 2 and unblockables change.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

On 5/16/2023 at 11:20 PM, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

This shouldn't be the answer, though. There isn't a single other profession that ignores their profession mechanic by "working around" the issue like how Soulbeast does it for Ranger.

From anet perspective it seems to be the answer, because they have nerfed pets multiple times--and have given reasons in PvE for doing so in that they don't want Ranger to have advantage in solo'ing content.  Who knows if this is still the stance, but in general they really seem hesitant to buff the AI itself.

10 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

Do you mind saying which core multipiliers were nerfed, cause I don't remember anything besides Sic'em, LB 1 and 2 and unblockables change.

How I read it was that anet pushed all damage into soulbeast; but do agree it wasn't necessarily through multipliers. 

It may seem that way, but it's how BM behaves with slb doing it, in that they can't buff core anything because slb will be way out of line when merged.

[Beddo.1907]

3 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

It may seem that way, but it's how BM behaves with slb doing it, in that they can't buff core anything because slb will be way out of line when merged.

Technically they can change merge numbers, like they did in the past. If they buff X and then keep the merge effect the same, it should work just fine.

But I kinda doubt BM is the way to buff ranger, before pet is dealt with.

3 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

hesitant to buff the AI itself.

That's probably because it takes time and needs to be nailed on the first try. It needs to be done, but can't blame them honestly. If they do other buffs and changes before AI, I'm ok with that.

[Zyreva.1078]

14 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

Do you mind saying which core multipiliers were nerfed, cause I don't remember anything besides Sic'em, LB 1 and 2 and unblockables change.

Attack of Opportunity got nerfed from +50% to +25%.

[kiwituatara.6053]

17 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

Do you mind saying which core multipiliers were nerfed, cause I don't remember anything besides Sic'em, LB 1 and 2 and unblockables change.

Hmmm I'll have to go back to past patch notes but the most obvious one was that sic'em was not a burst for rangers before. Burst skills used to be signet of hunt and signet of wild. I mean it was no where near the current sic'em LB meme builds, but I think we can afford to lose that build anyways in exchange for more diversity.

Basically I want them to reduce the high burst of one elite spec to help boost the burst of other elite specs by a bit.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

14 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

That's probably because it takes time and needs to be nailed on the first try. It needs to be done, but can't blame them honestly. If they do other buffs and changes before AI, I'm ok with that.

Right, yeah, I wasn't clear on 'AI'; meant the entirety of the pet not just the logic it uses (i.e., awful pathing). 

They really have never wanted to buff damage, mobility, or utility of any of the pets, which is why the EoD ones remain broken 1.5 years after release.  Sure, some of them (siege turtle) are marginally useful in specific situations, but by and large they have all been untouched for this very reason of hesitancy.  

But if we do look at 'AI' being the example of mobility, we can see the dancing around this problem by looking at arguably the most useful pet in smokescale having a teleport closer it casts before anything else, and also in untamed having the ability to teleport any pet to a target. 

Essentially, they have addressed the pet mobility problem in two ways, but neither works broadly.  That is, SS is just one pet and not a general behavior, and Untamed port has issue of you really don't want your ranged pets being melee....ever.  There is also the matter of quickness not applying to 90% of the pets...

The question then becomes why not just fix the quickness bug and make teleporting to target baseline / fix behavior (melee teleport in with effect, ranged teleports out with effect)? Or if teleporting is not baseline, make pets way faster than they are now?

Just increasing movement speed and fixing quickness bug should alleviate a lot of pathing issues they can't fix because someone way back in the day tied pet AI into global enemy AI or something crazy.

The long and short of it is, if someone or something can target the pet and take away 50%+ of a non-soulbeast's utility and damage, then the pet should be buffed to warrant targeting in the first place.  Otherwise, it's just an unfair disadvantage to the Ranger.