ArenaNet:Skill feedback/Ranger/Animal Companions/Beast Mastery

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Beast Mastery Beast Mastery

William Wallace Issue -- 05:27, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

Issue: Beast Mastery/animal companions are more of a liability and a waste of attribute points than actually being useful. Animal companions only serve as a means to attract new players to the game and are eventually discarded due too: low damage even with additional shouts, all of your skills are blacked out if it dies, having to sacrifice five of your skill slots to actually make use of them, easily taken out by burning, dumb AI even with the user interface, healers mostly hate animal companions and will refuse to help them due to it wasting energy when in comparison to the other party members, and very slow attack time (once every two seconds).
Suggestion: Base the amount of damage off of what type the animal companion does (ex. if the animal does blunt damage, make it have the same attack time of hammers and do the same amount based on how many points you have invested into beast mastery - also keep in mind animal companions do not have the strength attribute so it will always be lower then an actual player using a weapon). OR When your animal companion dies, make it where only your beast mastery skills are blacked out and not your entire skill bar. OR Condense more of the beast mastery skills (having to sacrifice one slot to have a companion and another slot to res it is not viable) so it will trigger two different things. For example, make it where it's next attack has X amount of armor penetration and does plus amount of damage if the target is under an enchantment- will not be overpowered at all due to them having a slow attack speed. OR Introduce a rune/mod system for animal companions so you can customize as to what type of pet you want (making one type of rune making it deal more damage but has minus X to their max health or a rune/mod that makes them receive less damage but decreases their attack speed/or damage). OR Increasing the amount of skills that help your pet stay alive since the majority of them are very weak.
Alternate Suggestion - (Skill blackout time): Make the skill blackout time scale 15..3..0 based on a ranger attribute other than BM, and only non beast mastery skills are blacked out. Give all pet reses conditional recharges if a pet is resed (30 seconds maybe?). This is a reasonable nerf to gimmick builds that are dependent on animals, while being a significant buff to ranger primaries. Marksmenship would probably be best balance wise, but doesn't make much sense from a flavor perspective.

Buff Pets

Issue: needs 2 skills just to use a pet- ressurect pet and charm animal; Skill blackout when pets die

Suggestion: Make it so that pets cant die, when their hp drops to 1 they become non hostile and stop fighting and become "useless", and to make it fight again it needs to be healed manually back to full health (no natural health regen), this solves the problem of needing a quarter of your skill bar just for a pet. The skill blackout on pet death is not needed as pets are too weak.

Karate Jesus's Issue 14:23, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Discussion

Issue

In PvP, pets are more useful dead than alive. Short of gimmicky thumper builds or R/P Enraged builds (which aren't near as popular as they used to be), pets are better at dying and fueling IWAY than doing any real damage. In PvE, pets are not useful because they do single-target damage that is only worthwhile if you invest large amounts of att points into Beast Mastery and in HM their damage is minimal at best.

Suggestions

In PvP, I have no idea how you could possibly fix Pets.....I just don't. Gimmicky shit will probably always be around for pets in PvP.

However, in PvE pets could be more fun and useful.

1. One idea I've had that would actually make the Zaishen Menagerie useful beyond of the short-lived euphoria of a "Gotta Catch 'Em All" obsession, is to add inherent conditions or effects to pet attacks. I think this would add some excitement to actually collecting different types of pets and would allow people to run different builds based on what their pets inherent condition would be.

For example, the Spider models could cause poison, Wolfs and Cats could cause bleeding, Bears could cause weakness or cracked armor, Birds could cause cripple, Rats could cause disease, etc. You could scale the time based on either Beast Mastery or the level of the pet and make the length short (such as 1...4...5) so it would be more of a bonus and not too exploitable.

2. Another idea I've had that would make pets more viable in PvE is to give them some sort of AoE, either through a skill or an inherent effect.

If they had a natural AoE, it would definitely need to be adjacent range and very low so that it could not be too easily exploited by skills like Barbs or Mark of Pain, and it could scale based on Beast Mastery.
If a skill was created to give them AoE, it should be no larger than nearby (I would prefer adjacent) and should probably be an elite (hell, use Ferocious Strike. No one uses it anyway). You could scale it similarly to Hundred Blades.