Jheuloh.4109

Yeah, in all seriousness I get it. I've noted elsewhere that every class seem to just be a grab-bag of traits and abilities that sound cool and fill up the slots but don't really paint a bigger picture. _We_ figured that out by sorting order from the chaos of traits, abilities, and gear interaction. The results are pretty weird, as in Chrono Tank or Banner Slave. Plus there's all sorts of funky stuff like Beastmastery being the place to go for Greatsword & Axe mastery as a ranger. That stuff rubs like it should belong in Skirmishing but Skirmishing is full.

It doesn't seem like ArenaNet has a ton of manpower available to sit down and go through every single class with a fine-tooth comb to give them more direction and making their minutiae easier to read, _if_ there is any interest in such things. So every class just gets the lowest effort nerf/buff possible and anything deeper can get really outlandish from a player's perspective because nobody is on the same page about a class's kit.

I'm impressed this thread's still going!

Ranger critters seem like they would do well to be touched up ability wise.

It seems like the creatures that have survived in competitive PVE and PVP content have a gap closer (Smokescale's smoke assault, or the pouncing cats, or the iboga's pull), potent CC (like blinds or chill, which ravens & owls hit on, or knockdown which Smokescale has), or breakbar damage (as in rock gazelle, or electric wyvern, or canines, or once again smokescale; this one is closely tied to potent CC). All of these must be easily executed; Entangling Web should have brought spiders into play long ago, but their projectile speed is laughably bad. Smokescales have that nifty smoke field on top of all that. No wonder they survived an avalanche of nerfs to damage they took some years ago.

Most pets are functionally trash mobs scaled to player stats. But they still have trash-mob ability behavior, and are still balanced around launch-day principles.

It would be nice for drake breath attacks to be blast finishers, and for them to be able to turn in place while channeling their spell ala bristlebacks. Knockback on the tail-swipe would be nice, too, since their big brother electric/fire wyvern has that on wing buffet. Or for hyenas to not have a 50% base damage penalty to offset the packmate they can summon; that balancing feature seems out of touch with the whole point of summoning the packmate! Or for spider's entangling web hit to either hit 3 targets or behave like a miniature of Muddy Terrain. Or for canines and pouncing cats to have a leap finisher.

Creatures granting swiftness to allies seem to be out of touch; if it was super speed or quickness that'd be a different story, super speed doesn't seem to have been devalued as much as swiftness has and quickness is always welcome. Jungle Stalkers would be fine if it weren't for the 3 second cast time. Pigs have always been out of touch with reality. Devourer's retreat is also incredibly out of touch with how the AI uses it.

Most of the pet abilities (Forage & Devourer's Retreat excepted) seem conceptually fine, just that they need a shot of steroids; better casting properties, a more liberal application of combo finishers, numerical buffs here and there.

I think people who like him aren't really bothered by the big story beats and are more focused on the moment to moment interactions. Treesus gives credit where it's due. If he were a real person he would actually be good company, much more agreeable than the drama-mongers of Destiny's Edge.

Flipside is that he may come off too dry in the very theatrics driven story of Gw2. I'd have to play it again to really refresh myself on this but I don't recall him even having much in the way of sly banter or dry humour that would've been perfect for how Trahearne carried himself. Or maybe cranking up silly awkwardness.

"Wait what?" - Some NPC after hearing something that sounds like an innuendo.

"No wait uhh I didn't mean it like that!" - Treesus, upon realizing how he just came off

On the post above me:

I would say every class should have some kind of Healing, CC, DPS, and Tanking spec type just like how Guardian does basically everything provided you trait for it.

"Uhh, warrior healer?" - Some poster I just made up

Yeah, bannerslave to the _max_!

"Tank ranger?" - Another made up poster

This is probably the 1 thing ranger pets are consistently good at. Beastmastery even has that cool taunt GM trait.

On the OP:

Every profession certainly has their balance-ism's, though I also keep hearing and to a lesser extent witnessing that 2 players can have a literal orders of magnitude difference in their effective power level because of the way equipment, traits, runes, abilities, etc interact, along with how tuned in the players are to the fine-print of ability usage.

It seems almost futile to gauge profession differences when the aforementioned is at play. I wouldn't call it a waste of time but I can only imagine that stuff making ArenaNet's life harder rather than easier. Not fun either when abilities are the only thing that can really be seen in gameplay.

Insanity mode 3rd elite spec request:

Both pets active at once. - 30% to player stats.

EDIT: This was a joke post at first but now I actually want this.

A /petstay command for ranger pets and necromancer minions, to make for better screenshots.

When activated, the pet stays in place, using neither movement nor rotation.

For necromancer minions or other characters which may have multiple persistent allies present, there could be additional commands of /petstay1, /petstay2, to indicate which minions should stay in place if only some are desired to be rooted at a location. /petstay is effectively /petstay0 affecting the highest equipped minion skill the player has.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> Massive discrepancies between skill tiers are very much a thing in GW2. The same content can be prohibitively difficult for one, but laughably easy to another. In fact, that's one of the main problems that both balance and design teams have to face, and one of the core issues of this game.

>

My take on this is that Gw2 has a lot of fine print on its traits and abilities. Nowhere near as much as there could be (Gw1 veterans laugh at Gw2's relative simplicity), but for someone who doesn't immediately "get" the way things are supposed to go together I can appreciate it being prohibitively complex. Some fresh faced player is having to pour through the fine details of 45 traits per class, and then 5 weapon skills & the other 5 skills.

A grand total of 55 things to understand with an extremely high probability of "Wait, my build actually sucks?" after spending potentially hours on it.

Were I able to adjust these things I would think to heavily simplify traits. Cut the "Pick 3 of 9" aspect entirely to make it so that all a player needs to do is just have the trait line. Also label their role on the end like "Tactics [support]", "Beast Mastery [Tanking]", "Illusions [Debuffs]" and adjust functionality to be more strongly focused on the listed role.

For abilities and the actual combat, Gw2 makes itself out to be like a typical MMO where combat works best where you stay planted in 1 spot until the game tells you to move. In practice I would describe Gw2 fights as having more in common with shooters of all things. It behooves you to stay mobile at all times. Except for if you have a channeled ability, and the game isn't consistent about whether you can move while channeling abilities or not. Plus, it's easy to cancel a channeled ability on accident through fat-fingering or just not realizing that it even can be cancelled.

People who like the high mobility play-style Gw2 promotes will gravitate to it naturally. People who aren't drawn to high mobility have no real alternatives.

> @"Drizzt.1796" said:

> > @"Jheuloh.4109" said:

> > On one hand, Trahearne does give the player credit where it's due. On the other hand, he's basically the narrative face of increased scope. Not bad on its own but necessarily hit or miss by tying the shift to a character's personality.

>

> LMAO

Gw2 starts with "Lets get the band back together boys!"

Then the power level skyrockets at Claw Island and the story starts turning into the development of Cool Magical Things

Except with Treesus it was some weird half way world between that and "Grow a spine and some powers, son!"

Super exhausted story arc that didn't break the mould even a little bit. Which for how front and center that was, made me want to eat my non existent hat.

I'm trying to be even handed with my posts for the sake of discussion but full disclosure - at the end of HoT I was one of the psychos sharpening the veggie knife. :P

I'm partial to the reef drakes. Their scales are so detailed compared to most other drakes (Frost Drakes are a close second) and the rounder, bigger head combined with the way drakes carry themselves gives me bearded dragon vibes. Helps that I have a bearded dragon right now.

On one hand, Trahearne does give the player credit where it's due. On the other hand, he's basically the narrative face of increased scope. Not bad on its own but necessarily hit or miss by tying the shift to a character's personality.

On the OP:

The way the player comes to the title of Commander does resemble "Chosen One" style of storytelling. I know that technically it's not, but the distinction doesn't seem to mean a whole lot in practice.

On the Narrative Power Creep discussion:

In Dungeons & Dragons terms I would describe Core Gw2 as a mid level D&D campaign and escalated to high level. The pen and paper lets you inject you and your group's ideas into it, Gw2 has to fill in all the blanks and lighting can't be struck every time.

Were it me implementing this idea I'd be inclined to have the first 1/4th of the achievement chain being the unlocking phase to where you have it and can use it. The latter 3/4th being more about getting achievement titles and equipment skins.

Translating 1/4th to an hour minimum's time-slot, that would be 15 minutes to acquire the spec, and then 45 minutes for the flair stuff. In a 3 hour scenario, that'd be 45 minutes of unlock time, 135 minutes of skin/title unlocks.

Altogether what OP is thinking would do wonders for giving each class a little more signs of existing in the game world beyond _Super Special NPC Cutscene Moment_

Ok, reading through the counterplay section more closely:

I would say as a conceptual alternate to AOE abilities seeking out minions to blast or dealing boosted damage, perhaps have CC abilities with innately increased potency vs minions, to the tune of +50%. Possibly spreading between 2-3 minions by default. (1 minion is stunned, 1 or 2 others are KO'd with the original target in, say, a 300 radius bubble.) With existing stun breaks for the owner being allowed to break minions out of stun.

Minions and turrets seem rather easy to splatter with focused fire, without any real thought from the attacker's part or consequence unless I'm underestimating how much health they have. More than half-way into a fight (whatever that means) seems fair to have the minions drop off. Earlier than that seems like it's thoroughly in the "Why bother?" territory unless they're treated like Team Fortress 2 turrets.

Team Fortress 2 turrets are oppressively high damage but have a reaction time that allows an observant demo-man or soldier to take the turret out and resume contesting territory. The turret is little more than a glorified distraction on its own, but it has to be dealt with. If backed up by players (that aren't the Engineer) it's still helping the Engineer's team hold territory by its mere presence, and the Engineer's dispenser is servicing the team in other ways.

> @"draxynnic.3719" said:

> I see where you're coming from, but... pretty much every time that pets have ended up being broken has been because it was possible to make the summoner extremely tough while the pet dished out the damage. That's what happened with engineer turret builds, and it's what happened with druids. MM necromancer probably survives - as much as it does - in part because making the minions really effective requires spending multiple major traits, often directly competing with durability traits.

>

> Nerfing the pets so that they're in line with durability builds often means nerfing them so they're no longer a significant boost for DPS builds.

>

> As a result, pets and summons having independent stats may well be a sacred cow that needs to be made into hamburgers. Possibly not universally, at least not right away, but with turrets already being something that is generally only taken for the toolbelt skill and _maybe_ the player will actually think to drop the turret itself occasionally, I think ArenaNet can afford to use them as a testing ground. Linking their stats to the engineer's would mean that it becomes possible to get good damage out of them, but only if the engineer commits - you can't have high-DPS turrets and an engineer that is nearly impossible to kill.

Having minion attributes scale to be a reflection of their owners would make sense, then. Glass cannon owner begets glass cannon minion. Tanky, low damage owner begets tanky, low damage minion.

Healing/buff focused owner theoretically limits the "best" minion/pet choice to anything that can take advantage of that. For more "regular" pets, they would stay at their base attribute values and be proportionately weaker than a glass cannon or tank owner + pet.

When I tried out Necromancer, I was admittedly off-put by the 1 minion per spell thing and poofing em' out of thin air, no real relationship to the whole "Reanimate a corpse to do your bidding" theme.

The overall effect was like I had a menagerie of weird birds following me around or something. I didn't even have to kill something to get my Flesh Golem!

Turrets were weirdly short lived, too hard to perceive the effect of, and uninspiring looking as they're a warm grey which blends into the surroundings and their shape is barely anything more than a cylinder with legs.

Minions/turrets/pets as basically mini-characters I don't think would be such a big deal if other classes had equally obvious and potent sounding features, like Elementalists casting biblical sized storms or warriors being able to Kool-Aid man it through walls and throwing boulders bigger than the enemy's future.

But in Gw2 AOE fields from players are the size of most people's personal space bubbles, Kool Aid Man aint happening unless you're on a roller beetle with a specially labeled wall for it, and pets/minions are rage inducing nuisances the second enemies have to start paying attention to them on top of their owner.

Stat wise, I think in PVE it'd be fine to beef up minions. Gear stat scaling seems like it would require the development of new tech and raise more design questions than answers - does glass cannon player = tank minion? Or glass cannon owner beget glass cannon minion? I could see traits touching on this, the Beastmastery traitline for Rangers has the foundation for this.

From Core to PoF monsters that aren't trash mobs have been power creeped like players have. They have more tricks up their sleeve than bosses of yore and have shorter windup times to do anything noteworthy. HoT and PoF ranger pets are similarly potent compared to their Core predecessors. Minions & Turrets seem like they could stand to be scaled similarly.

In PVP, nobody likes having to split their attention between owner/pet, PVP already has enough info to process as is and a pet that has to be watched essentially represents an additional enemy player to keep track of. I think there was a missed opportunity to make pets/minions in PVP more about team support rather than just being an extension of the player's damage dealing capacity (which inevitably dies in any real fight.)

Then again, Nature Spirits were also much maligned way back when they were meta, I believe this was during the e-sports heyday.

Hammer.

_Bunny Thumper! Bunny Thumper! Bunny Thumper!_

Ultimately I'll play whatever is most effective, but thematically I'd be most interested in more plausible looking creatures. The bristlebacks, smokescales, fanged ibogas, wyverns, etc, of HoT & PoF are all nifty creatures on their own but they're very much fantasy monsters. In Cora Tyria, even Drakes still look like something that could happen under the right circumstances, sans breath weapon.

EDIT: I pray for 2 things for Ranger:

1. A hammer mainhand weapon.

2. A rabbit pet.

_BUNNY THUMPER!_

> @"Druitt.7629" said:

> Why duplicate a Ranger as another profession's Elite? As Kodama notes, most classes already have minion mechanics. (Actually, they underestimate things: Engineers have two different minion mechanisms: Turrets in base, and Gyros (mobile Turrets) in an Elite spec.)

>

> Not to mention that minions and pets have been problematic in terms of behavior and reliability for a long time and building an Elite around them would probably not be a good idea mechanics-wise. And balancing pets is very hard: they can't do so much damage that you can stand back and have them defeat anything, but neither can the toon have so much damage that the pet simply puts you over the top. Pets are also not very compelling in general. They tend to distance you from active participation -- which sometimes you want, but in general it's a cancer that gives the whole profession a bad name. Specs that have pets or tough minions (Ranger, Necromancer) are generally regarded as lower skill and become boring after a while. (A pet/minion is never going to provide the interactivity that the player can provide via direct-control skills.)

>

> That said, with sufficient imagination, it just _might_ work. For example, a Warrior might spec into "Commander" and basically give them some "soldiers" that they command. To avoid being overpowered, the Commander would have to lose stats, skills, etc, during any encounter that they used soldiers. Maybe a Commander's Mindset debuff, or something? That doesn't really appeal to me -- and I think most Warrior players would hate it, too -- but if there's no tradeoff you'd end up with weak minions that are just fodder.

On ranger pets, there was a missed opportunity for letting players manually activate their skills. (Putting aside the F2 skill.) To add insult to injury, most F2 skills are just damage bonuses that don't open up any interesting strategies.

Something like the Smokescale has a knockdown ability (Good functionality being left to AI stupidity), Smoke Assault that lets it simultaneously evade and teleport to target (another great candidate for player control), and the 1 ability players actually can control; Smoke Field. It's an actual smoke field generated at the Smokescale's position, so I or player allies can use finishers with it.

It might have been kinder on the balance team for pets/minions to be treated as living banners that do damage on top of delivering team buffs at the risk of being killed in combat. Tigers pounce & give Fury on F2, all Moas have an AOE healing ability(!) in their AI ability list and Fern Wolves have a healing howl as their F2 thing. The precedent is there but none of them have the potency and/or AOE range needed for allied players to reliably benefit from this stuff and nobody wants to stack around a stupid pet.

I'm not getting my hopes up but I'm joining the chorus anyway:

Bunny Thumper! Bunny Thumper! Bunny Thumper!

Edit: Rabbit sound effects.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=aBF52C0NDX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBF52C0NDX4)

If there's a lot of code baggage that can't be touched, perhaps core pets could be replaced with what are technically new creatures with spiffier and easier maintained code bases, designed in mind with "new" features like Quickness and such.

Pair it with replacing the original models for the old creature roster with something new to meet the current visual standards. They're visually dated, especially so in the wake of PoF. This might get me burned at the stake for writing this, but for ArenaNet there could be gem store opportunities for refactoring ranger pets like this. Ranger pets are conceptually very similar to mounts and I would think there is significant overlap between people who buy mount variants and people who play ranger.

On designs and balance, my thoughts would be to figure out how to condense the core creature roster into a more manageable list. If I were to put together an exclusion list of core creatures to just drop or roll into a base type, it would be something like this: [https://i.imgur.com/ubJSIMx.png](https://i.imgur.com/ubJSIMx.png)

The idea here being to only keep creatures that have significant difference between their special abilities. In this example, Rock Drake doesn't make the cut because its special ability is nearly identical to the Poison Drake's. The Salamander Drake survives as its breath attack is a cone, rather than a series of homing projectiles. Polar Bear loses out to Arctodus as the two just simply "Maul" a target with a different condition output (Chill vs Bleed.) Drakehound and Arctic Wolf lose out to Wolf as the former 2 are just crowd control variants. Hyena and Fernhound bring different functionality to the table compared to other canines, so they make the cut.

Let the models/skins of creatures that end up on the exclusion list survive as visual variants. Such as Reef Drakes being a visual variant of Salamander Drakes. Or Polar Bears becoming a visual variant of Arctodus.

In theory all of this would reduce balance/design clutter in the long run. The Gem Store would have another market to tap into. Though admittedly it would be a lot of development effort for something that already "works" and would all too likely cause an avalanche of bugs, exploits, complaints, and fine tuning. As we see with HoT and PoF pets the issues with core pets can be "solved" simply by having the expansion pack pets overtake old creatures.

That said, each creature does convey a specific personality. It's the 1 thing that cannot really be replaced by a shiny expansion pack pet, especially as HoT and PoF pets are obviously fantasy monsters. They're not plausible animal creatures like the core pet roster is.

Can't speak for PVP

In PVE, for folks struggling with the Soulbeast change I figure we're more accustomed to using the pet swap to save a dying pet.

At the risk of sounding obvious or inept, treat merging as that survival mechanic instead if the fight goes that way. Build your battle plan around utilizing the merge for whatever fat bursts you have planned to avoid forgetting you even have it (assuming you're rocking beast mastery and/or commands.) Don't be afraid to take on tankier traits to offset the more regular absence of the pet - getting greedy with glass canon traits easily leads to the glass being emphasized over the cannon.

Warrior, ranger, and thief occupy my 3 slots.

Ranger is very much my main character. Played one as my first pick in Guild wars 1 back in 2005 and never changed.

Warrior is a close second, and thief a distant third. I've always been partial to the classes that are about sticking em' with the pointy end.

While I actually do have 1 character of each class, only the aforementioned 3 are meaningfully developed. I have neither the time nor inclination to seriously develop more than that.

Even if Gw2 moves relatively quick for an MMO, that's still a non-trivial time sink.

If I'm gonna indulge in pipe dreaming I might as well have fun with it!

Or alternatively, make my own game. I un-ironically aspire to this one. Granted, what I want to make has nothing to do with what's in this thread. I want to basically make the promised land for alt-o-holics like myself.

More seriously, if I were to develop this idea further the emphasis wouldn't be on EHP. The emphasis would be on who's being targeted. Say, Ability X delivers confusion to the target and vigor to the player if the player is aggro'd by the shared (Marked? Hunted?) target. If pet is targeted, the attack delivers poison and gives might to teammates. If the shared target is focusing on neither player nor pet, do nothing. If aggro is exchanged before the effect ends, give a shot of stability to the character who took aggro and quickness to the character who lost aggro.

Don't think too hard about an actual use-case for what I just made up, it's just for example's sake.

Tank ranger.

We got DPS (Soul Beast), we got healing (Druid), all we need is tank spec (???) to become the entire holy trinity in 1 class. Also cuz I like animalistic pets/minions and I like tanking.

Hammer weapon as an ode to the bunny thumper builds of Gw1. Or maybe become land-spear d00ds to egg on a hunter image and set a precedent.

Make the play-style an act of constantly juggling aggro between you and the pet. Have the special abilities behave differently depending on whether the pet or you have a shared target's attention so that aggro-swapping isn't just about boosting EHP.

Guild Wars 2 has always felt lacking the R in MMORPG.

Every class feels less like a tapestry and more like a patchwork of design decisions. They seem to be designed in a vacuum, and then balanced based on what happens when they're taken out of the vacuum and their relationship to other classes is realized. "The meta" is basically an accident of ability-interaction.

Banner-slave warriors? Heal-bot rangers? Tank mesmers? Fine builds unto themselves, but I don't fancy playing any of those 3 classes for those roles. Ranger at least has a clear-cut DPS alternative with Soulbeast.

Traitlines, especially Elite Traitlines, often feel to have just been materialized out of thin air with barely any internal consistency just to hit a quota.

Guild Wars 1 is similarly shallow as an RPG and with an even bigger, blobbier, and more incoherent ability list. I'm more partial to its style of character development anyway; even if the class's ability list on their own weren't that coherent you could organize them into something specific. Ability-types like Stance, Signet, Shout, etc, were more meaningful and ironically your base class was a more unique property as they always had 1 undeniable and intentionally somewhat overpowered attribute. Your class also sort of doubled up as your "race" since each class had mostly unique cosmetic choices during character creation.