Let's talk a bit about ranger's design

[Swagger.1459]

On 5/5/2023 at 12:44 PM, latlat.4516 said:

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") ? 

Would you really like to move around your pets like a ventari tablet when you are getting backstabbed from stealth or have a mesmer dropping 8 clones on you and chewing up your health? Think about it. 

I would much rather the devs fix fundamental issues that have been around since alpha.

We were told that pets accounted for 1/3 of our damage output and that ranger coefficients were lower as a result. This was troubling since there were so many issues with pets that went unresloved since alpha. Then after years of threads, and a couple big official ones, the SB espec was born. Non-rangers cried OP bc they were use to crappy specs out of ranger before. 

Pets don't need group utility, that will make certain aspects of this class clunky and some even clunkier. Ranger needs better utility, a non-junky staff (currently one of the top worst weapons of the game), a non-clunky druid astral form, and spirits designed like revenant facets. There are a plethora of other important issues to address as well, but whatever.  

To fix pets properly, it will take a complete redesign of the pets. That won't happen at this point. Second best would be...

 

 

Edited May 19, 2023 by Swagger.1459

[Arheundel.6451]

On 5/16/2023 at 11:02 PM, 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.

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.  

Astral pets and damage reduction traits are both old ideas thrown around for years and always ignored by Anet, who instead focuses on nerfing those "few" remaining pets that suddenly may gain usage after some random update and a new pvp build is born. Nobody cared about drakes....all of a sudden it got nerfed to oblivion...meanwhile there are dozen upon dozen of never used pets anywhere.....and everybody use HoT pets/bird because they're the only ones not insta dieing to a breeze in GW2 2023

[Bastrii.3047]

A core rework to Ranger wouldn't need to happen if they just completely reworked Ranger pets, too. Like, you don't even need to cut out the Pets from Ranger at all. Standardize their movesets so you only have several core useful abilities to choose from (and tons more variety in your pet choice instead of the same 3 pets that have the "useful" abilities), and make Pets leash to enemies extremely aggressively. This would cut down all of the dev work to balance pets, because there's just a few types of pet trees to choose from.

So I gave an unrealistic suggestion earlier, but let me give a more interesting/slightly more plausible idea. (And after reading this thread, it may have been mentioned before.)

Instead of taming Pets - why don't Rangers tame spirits of the wild? Same process - find a pet - perhaps the usual "adolescent" pets are replaced with ghostly counterparts - and you tame them the same way. There are now 5 types of Pet, and each share the same core ability. Tank, support, power DPS, condi DPS, utility. Every shape and type of pet shares these same types of core movesets, and all damage is standardized. Power/Condi does the most damage, Tank/Utility/Support have slightly less DPS. You pick a Pet from a category, the Pet gains a icon when targeted to show what kind of Pet it is (for example: A shield on the bottom left of the Pet's unity frame to show they are a Tank pet), and the Pet Window allows you to configure their core abilities a bit.

These new Astral pets (stealing the name, 'cause it's a good name), will always teleport to your current target when commanded to, or the first target you damage. They have a 5 second cooldown between teleports, and have an extremely high base movespeed. They always have your current boons, but these do not count as boons that can be dispelled on their end - essentially, they mirror your current boon status at all times. No more boon sharing; they just have what you have.

Your Pet projects all AoE effects you project as well. If you give 6 stacks of might to allies around you from Rune of the Pack, then all allies around your pet gain 6 stacks of might as well. These effects do not overlap; you can not gain 12 stacks by standing next to your Pet and entering combat.

You can now stow your Pet freely in combat. Stowed Pets have a 10 second cooldown before they can be resummoned.

Astral pets no longer follow enemies and attack with a basic animation. Instead, they float around the enemy's core position, a bit like a druid's wisp, and perform their attacks at all times. Basically, you can't just jump on cover and avoid the pet anymore; it's like a debuff, and you can only remove it by having the Ranger recall their pet, kill the pet, or getting out of range of the Ranger. This just removes pathing troubles and ensures you have consistent DPS, and you don't need to worry about your pet being useful. They will teleport to your enemy the moment you attack, and basically attach on like a condition would.

Now, Pets should also apply a passive buff to the ranger, similar to how Melding with your pet gives a passive bonus as a Soulbeast. In fact, that should just be base kit. Additionally, I feel as if it's time that Ranger's pets get a second "hit me to feel good" button. So they have their basic move (example: pounce on cats), and they gain a secondary move (howl, or something like that) you can alternate between for variety.

Astral pets, depending on their specialization, should be able to apply core boons and conditions to you, your party, and enemies. You should be able to choose how they function, base kit, no espec needed. They should also have stats that make them stand out in their field, and apply a buff for choosing this type of specialization as your Pet.

Tank Pets: Large health pools, high defense, middling damage, short AoE daze/cripple on F2. They have access to Taunt, Blind, Stability, Resistance, and a medium Self Heal (which is shared with you) when you press F3 - but you can only choose 2-3 of these 5 options.

Power Pets: High health pools, medium defense, high damage, high damage knockdown on F2. They have access to Fear, Might, Fury, Vulnerability, and Knockback, but you can only choose 2-3 of these options on their new F3. You can choose if they focus on Cleave/Single Target damage.

Condi Pets: Large health pools, medium defense, high damage (condi), stun on F2. They have access to Fear, Might, Slow, Weakness, and Daze on F3, but you can only choose 2-3 of these options. You can choose if they focus on Poison or Bleeding.

Utility Pets: Medium health pools, medium defense, medium physical/condi damage (your choice), stun break/aoe slow on F2. They have access to Immobilize, Blinded, Confusion, Quickness, and Slow, and you can choose 2-3 for your F3.

Support Pets: High health pools, high defense, medium physical/condi damage (your choice). Their F2 pulses a 10 target heal (8 targets, will always heal Ranger/Pet), that scales off of your healing power, and gives alacrity. Their F3 can grant Aegis, Protection, Resistance, Quickness, and Blinded.

The main point of all of this is that all pets matter now, and you have a choice in appearance. On top of this, new pets can be added with no trouble, because they can just fit a preset core. In open world/PvE, pets can also be whatever shape you like, and even have their normal physical appearance - and you can just change their class to fit your fancy. In PvP/WvW, Pets come in 5 distinct forms that are instantly recognizable, and have their own design choices for their toolset. That way, you can see a Bear pet and know that the Ranger has a Tank pet - but if you see them switch to a hawk, you know they're going to be a Condi Ranger with a tanking Pet on their secondary.

On top of this, the F3 can be designed to fit some of the iconic moves we see pets use. So if you choose your Tank pet to inflict Blind, it would gain the Shadowscale's smoke assault attack.

To top things off, Soulbeasts would be more fitting, and they could still use some of the iconic abilities of their pets, too. Or at the very least, they could choose their Merged Pet abilities, and keep the Astral appearance whatever they wished them to be.

[Beddo.1907]

3 hours ago, Bastrii.3047 said:

So I gave an unrealistic suggestion earlier, but let me give a more interesting/slightly more plausible idea.

This is probably the most unrealistic (from resource and lore stand point) and overbloated idea I have seen on Ranger forum.

Going over 5 targets on skills and boon application, having both Quickness and Alacrity uptime, giving multiple high value boons with one button, no way to escape if it's on you, personal buffs for existing, multiple CC which is always in range.

All of that and more on just the core class mechanic, before adding any espec mechanics.

[The Boz.2038]

Broken core design. Pets need to be heavily reworked into at most six different types that combine stats, skills, merge skills. There should be no difference between a tiger and a panther; pick the skin you like. "This one slot can give you DOZENS of different skills, and they are not at all balanced among each other" is such a daft design idea...

[Sandzibar.5134]

Pet bloat should be addressed. Its hyper confusing for newer players to give them all that choice when in reality only 7 or so are viable choices.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 5/6/2023 at 10:56 AM, Abyssisis.3971 said:

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.

Sounds like 80% of the work for 20% of the pets.

On 5/17/2023 at 5:39 PM, 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.

This is actually a big part of the problem. Pets having their own stats mean pets need to be balanced on the assumption that the ranger is a support druid, lest they create a healing druid that also does a lot of damage through the pet... again. Stat sharing would allow DPS rangers to also have better DPS pets.

[Beddo.1907]

6 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Stat sharing would allow DPS rangers to also have better DPS pets.

And support rangers to have mediocre pets, cause support stats are not very useful. Perhaps after pets are patched up, it would work, but not as is now. I'd rather not have a part of a core mechanic that doesn't work outside of DPS.

And let's not forget that if a pet overperforms with the bonus stats, the pet would be nerfed, meaning if you didn't use the bonus you get a worse pet for free.

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

3 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

And support rangers to have mediocre pets, cause support stats are not very useful. Perhaps after pets are patched up, it would work, but not as is now. I'd rather not have a part of a core mechanic that doesn't work outside of DPS.

And let's not forget that if a pet overperforms with the bonus stats, the pet would be nerfed, meaning if you didn't use the bonus you get a worse pet for free.

I think it would be pretty easy to make stat bonuses a core thing and then modify the boons given by support pets if the support stat sharing isn't up to snuff, to the point where if you take the pet concentration bonuses, your pet gives 100% uptime on that boon (at least in pve) when reasonable (100% white tiger aegis uptime? Bad idea. 100% blue moa protection uptime? Good idea.)

Adding onto this, they could just shuffle the stats and/or stat sharing to where it lines up fine. Eventually this would hit a point where they literally never need to touch it again, since they could just find out what the highest of whatever stat they're looking at could ever possibly be (assuming without boons similar to how mechanist shift signet works) and nerfing or buffing accordingly (i.e. buff river drake f2 so its not a dps loss and then work from there to help river drake specifically, or buff drake family tail swipe and work from there to help the whole family) to help give pets some more oomph in their respective roles. It might require species specific stats in pve as opposed to family stats, but I think it could be pretty easy to implement using the family stats as a baseline.

[draxynnic.3719]

5 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

And support rangers to have mediocre pets, cause support stats are not very useful. Perhaps after pets are patched up, it would work, but not as is now. I'd rather not have a part of a core mechanic that doesn't work outside of DPS.

And let's not forget that if a pet overperforms with the bonus stats, the pet would be nerfed, meaning if you didn't use the bonus you get a worse pet for free.

Oh, I'm not saying it's a panacea, but I think it would have to be part of the mix. At the moment, all pets are basically balanced at a 'don't give too much damage to healers' level - in other words, pets are already at the lowest common denominator you're afraid of. Stat sharing could be calibrated so that healer pets remain at roughly their current DPS, but perhaps make healing and boons from healer pets better.

[The Boz.2038]

13 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Stat sharing would allow DPS rangers to also have better DPS pets.

I honestly do not understand ANet's reluctance to give in-built stat sharing to Ranger and Mechanist and Necro.

[Arheundel.6451]

On 5/23/2023 at 6:50 PM, draxynnic.3719 said:

Sounds like 80% of the work for 20% of the pets.

This is actually a big part of the problem. Pets having their own stats mean pets need to be balanced on the assumption that the ranger is a support druid, lest they create a healing druid that also does a lot of damage through the pet... again. Stat sharing would allow DPS rangers to also have better DPS pets.

I can play support DPS with ele and guardian, with revenant...necro and warrior even and ofc engineer, which can support mode and switch to grenades for DPS. It should not be a problem anymore for a druid to be capable of dmg through dps pets, simply because everybody can already

[draxynnic.3719]

17 hours ago, Arheundel.6451 said:

I can play support DPS with ele and guardian, with revenant...necro and warrior even and ofc engineer, which can support mode and switch to grenades for DPS. It should not be a problem anymore for a druid to be capable of dmg through dps pets, simply because everybody can already

Support DPS is fine when that's your build, but I don't think Arenanet wants a situation where a healer in Harrier, Minstrel, or a similar full heal set is able to get boonDPS or celestial damage just by bringing a DPS pet.

[Arheundel.6451]

22 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Support DPS is fine when that's your build, but I don't think Arenanet wants a situation where a healer in Harrier, Minstrel, or a similar full heal set is able to get boonDPS or celestial damage just by bringing a DPS pet.

Even as full minstrel ...druid support still lags behind other support specs by 100x miles, which also has access to actual DPS that doesn't disappear as soon as more than 2 people show up to face your team, I still have to see a single commander in the whole game to drop anything to favour even a single druid....taking druid in your 50 man zerg is more of a charity act than actual necessity

[Beddo.1907]

15 hours ago, Arheundel.6451 said:

taking druid in your 50 man zerg is more of a charity act than actual necessity

It's role equivalent of "is pepsi ok?".

[Psycoprophet.8107]

They could rework beastmaster traitline to somthing similar to mechanist, pets would have 3 skills controlled bybplayer and those skills are determined by the traits picked, of course those skills would have to be impactful, May be to big of a rework for the dev team tho given the amount of pets. 

Edited May 31, 2023 by Psycoprophet.8107

[draxynnic.3719]

On 5/29/2023 at 9:34 AM, Arheundel.6451 said:

Even as full minstrel ...druid support still lags behind other support specs by 100x miles, which also has access to actual DPS that doesn't disappear as soon as more than 2 people show up to face your team, I still have to see a single commander in the whole game to drop anything to favour even a single druid....taking druid in your 50 man zerg is more of a charity act than actual necessity

Sounds to me like a situation that could be helped by having support pets that inherit at least some of the minstrel stats.

Not saying it'd fix druid in competitive modes on its own, but we've had the situation in sPvP where druids could be solid bunkers while their pets dealt out damage. Pets inheriting stats from their owners would provide a means by which DPS builds could have DPS pets, while support builds could bring something that's going to boost their support.

[latlat.4516]

On 5/29/2023 at 1:34 AM, Arheundel.6451 said:

Even as full minstrel ...druid support still lags behind other support specs by 100x miles, which also has access to actual DPS that doesn't disappear as soon as more than 2 people show up to face your team, I still have to see a single commander in the whole game to drop anything to favour even a single druid....taking druid in your 50 man zerg is more of a charity act than actual necessity

Support druid out cleanse any other viable support class in the game (the only other class that can rival with it is tempest). 

 

I agree for 50 men zergs. The thing is nowadays, if you bring any other support than a vindicator, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Any argument you can make up to exclude druid, you can make for any other healing spec in the game compared to vindicator. 

 

But when "zergs" go below 30 men, coms can actually find very high value in druids. Scrapper is only better than druid in fights that are less than 10 seconds long -heal or cleanse metric- and bring the same utility. Tempest is better at healing -and has a rez- but is just a bit better than scrapper at cleansing, don't offer smoke fields and much less projectile denying ability from the moment and control if you don't play staff (if you play staff, you're worse than scrapper at cleansing - which is still enough but is not at the level of druid) and the druid is actually using the quick draw correctly. 

 

My guild -20 men- played 3 scrapper and 1 tempest until a month ago. We started testing with 1/2 druid - 0/1 tempest and 2 vindicators, and we won't go back anytime soon. Actually, we also tested a bit with double supports to use more reapers in the dps slots, and found out groups with a druid didn't need it as long as the druid was a bit carefull with its cooldowns. Which I agree is not your every day Joe.

[InsaneQR.7412]

I agree completely with your analysis/statement but i disagree with the solutions.

I agree that pets and rangers should share their buffs and boons. They should work like a single unit. I also agree that pets need to be more effective and that they are the biggest problem with ranger atm.

I think a good solution would be to design each pet in a similar fashion. Give each pet a CC, a utility and gap closing ability. Some of them can overlap but dont have to. I would also give pets an Archetype skill and passive for two reasons:

1. Designing 5 good skills is easier than designing 1 for each pet family (these could be PbAoEs btw)

2. The archetype passive could predefine the pets stats and allows you to customize your pet.

Then some core skills rangers use would need updates to make pet gameplay more interactive. Mechanist for example gets a repositioning tool with shift signet. Core ranger doe snot get anything similar. I think commands and signets are very good skills to give pets new functionality.

Lastly, i would allow customization between families such that you can pick the F2 skill independent on the pets visuals as long as the family is right.

Ofc i could ramble on about how i think certain pet control skills like attack my target for exampue should interact with traits but that would blow up my post tbh.

[draxynnic.3719]

Ironically, there was a time when some of the skills now known as command skills did allow for repositioning of your pet, but they were reworked because they weren't seeing much use.

[Arheundel.6451]

On 6/1/2023 at 4:56 PM, latlat.4516 said:

Support druid out cleanse any other viable support class in the game (the only other class that can rival with it is tempest). 

 

I agree for 50 men zergs. The thing is nowadays, if you bring any other support than a vindicator, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Any argument you can make up to exclude druid, you can make for any other healing spec in the game compared to vindicator. 

 

But when "zergs" go below 30 men, coms can actually find very high value in druids. Scrapper is only better than druid in fights that are less than 10 seconds long -heal or cleanse metric- and bring the same utility. Tempest is better at healing -and has a rez- but is just a bit better than scrapper at cleansing, don't offer smoke fields and much less projectile denying ability from the moment and control if you don't play staff (if you play staff, you're worse than scrapper at cleansing - which is still enough but is not at the level of druid) and the druid is actually using the quick draw correctly. 

 

My guild -20 men- played 3 scrapper and 1 tempest until a month ago. We started testing with 1/2 druid - 0/1 tempest and 2 vindicators, and we won't go back anytime soon. Actually, we also tested a bit with double supports to use more reapers in the dps slots, and found out groups with a druid didn't need it as long as the druid was a bit carefull with its cooldowns. Which I agree is not your every day Joe.

You are missing the biggest element in your analysis:  lack of active defence.

This keeps Ranger out of zerg fights and I will make a thread soon to explain why this is a big deal.

[InsaneQR.7412]

On 6/2/2023 at 5:46 PM, draxynnic.3719 said:

Ironically, there was a time when some of the skills now known as command skills did allow for repositioning of your pet, but they were reworked because they weren't seeing much use.

Yeah but it was a skill that placed your pet in a single location with a cool down. Imagine a spamable skill taht would allow for reposition like in a RTS or MOBA.

It would be tedious micro management but honestly as long as it is optional i think it couldnt hurt.

Further i think attack my target should be removed and the pet should attack your personal target or the called target you are giving. I think that would ease up the keybind chaos and it would be something you could do for all summons and not just pets.

 

[kharmin.7683]

1 hour ago, InsaneQR.7412 said:

Further i think attack my target should be removed and the pet should attack your personal target or the called target you are giving. I think that would ease up the keybind chaos and it would be something you could do for all summons and not just pets.

 

Please, no.  I like being able to target one thing with my pet while I focus on another.

[Acyk.9671]

3 hours ago, InsaneQR.7412 said:

Further i think attack my target should be removed and the pet should attack your personal target or the called target you are giving. I think that would ease up the keybind chaos and it would be something you could do for all summons and not just pets.

 

Removing aggressive stance is more interesting.

[InsaneQR.7412]

15 hours ago, Acyk.9671 said:

Removing aggressive stance is more interesting.

Yeah the stances never made sense. I normally use aggressive because i dont have to order my pet. But i think an aggression level in between these two available would probably be the go to.

17 hours ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Please, no.  I like being able to target one thing with my pet while I focus on another.

And i dont use tab targeting so i could freely do it. From the perspective of someone using tab targeting i can get that point though. So i think having the option to bind it to another function would already open up a lot. As mentioned before this could be universal for all summons.

So i think having universally an option that allows you to command your summons and pets woul be fair. So attack my target and reatreat could be a universal button, as could positioning your summons or auto attack on called targets. 

More or less i want the pet commands to go into all professions and declutter the Ranger UI. It would also allow for more quality of life for all professions using summons.