Idea For Ranger Beast Mastery Fix

Comfort is the only GOOD pet heal except Heal as One, which is elite. Personally, I prefer FS by far.

Wouldn't it be better to give it some other penalty, like additional downtime to skills? It's really not worth being elite.

They're remote controlled and unintelligent, they need some sort of edge.

Don't be so nitpicky.

BM's deffinently need a weapon. Having to sink points into Marksmanship whne you don't use any of their skills is borderline crippling.

My idea for a BM weapon is a sling with a "tamer's whistle" as the off hand. The sling would do the same damage as a wand 11-22 and the whistle would give a modest enrgy boost like +5 or so (energy management is a serious problem for BM's before you get ferocious strike). The whistle would have typical mods like "20 BM+1", "lengthens bleeding from pet attacks" and etcetera. The sling would have normal weapon mods, i.e. only the whistle would boost pets and their attacks. It makes sense logically and would prevent pet attack from becoming too powerful.

The biggest misconception people have:

1.) Pet does regular bow damage. They deal great damage as a "weapon"!
- Wrong! In order for pet to do that damage, you need to use at least 2 Skill Slots (Charm and Comfort) (and heavy Beast Mastery investment). Then pet's reaction speed is just so slow, so you throw in Call of Haste to match bow's shoot speed (excluding the fact that pet can easily be kited and stuck behind things/people). For 2-3 skill slots, your pet does about 19-32 damage. THAT'S HARDLY OVERPOWERING.

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A few ideas I have:

1.) BM weapons that reduce the Duration of the condition the pet suffers. If I remember correctly, Warriors have new armor that reduce the hex duration. I feel pet is just a mini-version of Warrior and it will be really nice if the BM weapons can reduce Condition duration.

2.) BM weapons that reduce Hex duration on the pet.

3.) BM weapon that add resistance on the pet.

4.) BM weapon that can reduce the skill disable time by %.

Yes! Investing into Marksmanship and find out that you have almost NO skill slots left. That's the pain. We HAVE the attribute points left but we have no skill slots left.

ok, so maybe the gloves are a bit overpowered, but one thing they DO need to change is the whole 5 sec recharge on all skills when pet dies AND when it is brought back. either lessen them both to 2-3 seconds, or remove the recharge when it is brought back. And the reason im not addressing the AI issue is because i dont need to. Everyone else does.

Mandy's postings of misinformation is making my teeth hurt....but you guys already corrected her/him so it's all good.

So yeah, they really need to do something with the Charm Animal problem. It's one of many reasons why BM builds are so inflexible. There are a lot of suggestions to fix this so I wont go into that.

And if it turns out that making such changes makes BM too good, they can always adjust the skills accordingly. Right now, BM is too much of an all or nothing build.

I also wanted to mention that Heal As One is in no way a replacement for comfort animal. A 120 point heal every 12 seconds will not save your pet if it is being focused on. When it dies and you have no CA, then you're screwed. But bringing HaO and CA is also sort of a redundancy...another problem of the BM line. Too much redundancy and wasted skill slots.

In regard to your comment on Heal as One, YOU ARE RIGHT! I've already stated my impression on the new elites and even though it's nice to have a self heal as a beast master, the healing isn't enough for you to neglect Comfort Animal. I've tried to just bring Heal as One. All is well until an axe warrior went crazy on my pet. Heal as One can only heal 151 in 12s! My pet died and guess what? I was like 99% shut down.

That just plain sucks. With CA you can heal your pet 660 health in the same amount of time, albeit costing a lot of energy. But still.

True.

True (with equal investment in BM as you would in a weapon attribute)

True


Sadly this is all of the information I have posted...and all of it is true.

Symbiotic bond does heal your pet...dont see how you can argue that.

Pets deal 17-41 damage @ lvl 20 with 12 bm and attack every 2.14 seconds (barely slower than the fastest bow)[A dire pet will deal 20-46 damage]
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=89491

Plus you can still use a bow. (Note: using a bow does not mean bringing bow attacks)

Giving up a skill slot to more than double your damage (assuming you are using a bow as well with at least 12 marksmanship and at least 12 BM) is not that bad. Giving up 2 slots to deal that damage forever is a steal.

You don't need comfort animal to keep pets alive. First off, you can cure them with many Monk spells, as well there are life stealing BM skills, but most of all, revive animal allows one player to resurrect an innumerable amount of pets for your entire party, The skill ressurrects Pets in an AoE your own and allies for only 5 energy, with a good chunk of health I might add.

Aside from the fact that Pets are hard to kill even if nobody is maintaining them, and they are never a focal target, there are plenty of skills to maximize the power and effectiveness of your pet, making pets Free of skill slot is totaly broken, And if you don't agree, then 13 points in Fire Magic should make Fire Attunment free as well, that is exactly the kind of suggestion your making.

1 skill gains you an entirely extra body on the field, good health and higher armor then yourself, and an added attack. As well, because of the pet requirement to use beast mastery skills, "All" beast mastery skills are cheaper then any counterpart, doing just as much damage and having more energy efficiency and versatility then any simular skill done by a normal character.

Light of Dwayna cost 25 energy to raise a group of players, it only cost 5 energy to raise a group of pets and they get back more health. Almost every pet attack cost 5 to 10 energy max, with damage and effects just as powerful as warrior attacks. Call of protection reduces damage on an entire team of pets for 5 energy, and last for "Two Minutes" wile being recastable at 5 seconds shorter then its lasting time, compare that to Shielding hands, which only covers 1 teammate, for a very short time, and cannot be recast anywhere soon enough to continously maintain the effect, this doesn't include the fact that people don't waste enchantment removal on pets.

Pets are powerful, expendable, cheaper, easier to maintain, and now you want it to be free? BS. This isn't even a debate, you haven't come up with a balanced concept to allow pets to be usable without a skill, so it Can Not be accepted. In a party of 8, and soon upcoming, 12 members each with pets, only 1 or 2 people need bring Revive animal for a maximum of 77% restoration from death to allied pets in an AoE, and only 1 person needs bring Call of protection to cover all of your pets with 11 damage reduction, permenantly. Your out of your mind or completly lacking one if you think that allowing pets to be usable without a skill is acceptable.

You still need Comfort Animal. Not so much for the heal but for reviving the pet. Saying that you dont need CA because there's other heals is missing the point.

Pets do NOT do the most damage without skills. You're saying that they do more damage than Hammers and Axes? This is taken from the same pet guide that you referred to:

A basic pet thus attacks every ~2.14 seconds for ~24.4 average damage vs. 60 AL at level 12 beastmastery, for 11.4 DPS with no other skills used.

So NO pet attacks are NOT the highest damage with no skills.

20-46 @2.14 mean 33 (/2.14 = 15.42) [dire]
17-41 @2.14 mean 29 (/2.14 = 13.55) [elder]
[email protected] mean 17 (/1.33 = 12.78)
[email protected] mean 18.5 (/1.33 = 13.909)
[email protected] mean 26 (/1.75 = 14.857)

All assuming no customization or bonuses.

Dire pets do the most damage.

The mean damage is 22.4, the reason you see a high max damage is because that includes critical hits. So there goes that argument. The Dire Pet gains a 15% damage bonus, like a mod on a weapon, but you must sacrifice pet health and can't chose it on a PvP character.

The best solution is to combine charm and comfort animal at BM higher then 13.

Skills still not worth it. Large recharge and a AoE smaller then that of light of Dwanya means that you cannot reliably keep your pets up. And not only that your primary attribute is useless while the pet is dead.

More Versatile is a total fallacy due to the AI and reaction times of the pet. The skills are much less versatile.

Additionally Call of Protection and Call of Haste only work on the owners pet. the plural in the description is a typo.

Pets are not reliable and with the large proportion of your skill bar used just to bring one that you can res they aren't worth bringing except in very specific builds. And you can't even afford to put BM past 14 in any of them, because witbh the pets current state you either need a bow or melee weapon to use them effectively and have no slots left for a self heal.

Pets are Unreliable due to their horrific AI, the need to combine charm and comfort would totally dissapear with a beastmastery weapon with the same stats as a wand.

First of all, your weapons numbers are off. Hammers are 19-35 damage. So even if your pet damage numbers werent wrong, hammers still beat them in damage.

And second, as I said, your pet damage numbers are wrong.



Dire pets do 13.1 DPS at 12 BM. You were using BM 16 numbers and comparing them to level 12 weapon masteries of the other weapons. At least make it fair okay?

And this isnt even adding extra mods to weapons that can push the edge even more (ie Vampiric)

I think a good idea is that a lizzard does poison dmg,wolf causes bleeding,panther stuns or knocks down,warthog cripples etc..or something in that line.They may even have different attack speeds and dmg.Just a sugestion.

Some of us don't want the pet to die in the first place.

I don't see pets as expendable or cheap. I know some people use their pets as meat shields, but many of us actually try to keep them alive because if you're willing to sacrifice half your skill bar to them, they have some good skills and can really help out in a fight. But it's *not* cheap, and because you can't issue simple commands to the pet, pets can sometimes do more harm than good. If you meant expendable in the sense that you don't have to have one, well true, and it's easy to pass up on having one when they're so expensive to use. That's the point.

I agree that keeping a pet should require a skill slot. The complaint at the moment is that it takes two skill slots to take out a pet, and if those are the only two skill slots you dedicate to your pet, your pet isn't going to be all that useful. So you have to dedicate at least another skill slot to your pet, ideally more, plus dump a lot of points into beast mastery. That's too expensive for the current gain. The only reason I do use a pet is because I like having a pet--I think it's cool, but at the same time, I know I don't have the best build because of it. And there are times, unfortunately, when the pet is left at home because I know I'm going through a tough area and I need those skill slots and beastmaster points for something that's actually going to make a difference.

Bottom line is that being a beast master can be made more viable with a few tweaks to the current system.

"Fixing" the BM issue is quite simple: just fix the pets AI. No need to add gloves or whips or collars or whatever. And the good news are that apparently ANET is working on it. Now I hope that wont be a crappy fix. I think the only solution would be to assign 2 keys to 2 new functions: pet attack command (the mob targeted), and pet heel command.

If only we could get that command for the henchies.

Actually, a pet heel command would be fabbo. But I still think it would be nice for them to reduce the skill requirement for just taking a pet with you from two to one.

A few points I want to make after reading the new posts:

1.) Not every Ranger is R/Mo and even though you can bring cure/heal for your pet, can you imagine how many skill slots you have left for offense or your defense?

Comfort, Charm, Res Sig, Monk Cure. 4 skill slots for anything else you want to bring.

2.) Have you tried Revive Animal?? Sure, it only costs 5E but the casting time is freaking 6s long and the rezing CIRCLE is so small. If your pet dies at the frontline, good luck going in and trying to rez it. I think I'll be better off with Comfort and run away a bit and then get back to action.

3.) I think most people want Comfort + Rez together. Getting rid of Charm can be overpowering, which I agree. Pet's AI is the most important thing though.

I am glad A.net is going to fix pet's AI.

When it comes to the specific armor for the ranger (like bloodstained boots and stonefist gloves) to help that class, I thing every class should have something like that.

The rez in comfort animal should be transfered to charm animal this way it makes bringing comfort animal not so much a neccesity. Also, it prevents the BM from becoming to overpowered. If you want to bring a pet then you use one skill slot (charm animal), if you want to keep that pet from dying while in a fight then you use up a second skill slot for healing your pet (comfort animal). Right now it's if you want to bring a pet you must use up two skill slots because if you just bring charm animal and that pet dies then now your using up a skill slot and no longer have a pet to make up for it. It's the same as taking only 7 skills and leaving the last one empty. The other thing would be the reverse. Charm animal is still used to charm an animal but its comfort animal that is required in your skill bar to have your pet in your party. This way it still costs a skill slot to have a pet but you wont require spending a second slot to keep the first one from becoming a waste if your pet dies at the beginning of a long mission.