A comprehensive pet feedback thread

[Shadowmist]

This post has taken me quite some time to write and is quite long, but I really hope to start a constructive discussion on how to identify and fix the current problems with pets as well as finding solutions that are appreciated from ALL sides, including the people who want to completely remove them from the game.
I have divided each section into a headline stating what is wrong, followed by a breakdown of the issue and the suggested short- and long term solutions.
A lot of these tie into each other, so please don't comment saying my suggestions are shit, unless you've read the whole thing.

Thanks for taking your time.
// Shadowmist


What’s wrong?

• 
  Auto attacks deal too much dmg
• 
  Too squishy / Can’t protect them
• 
  Skills are too weak or don’t work
• 
  “Command and forget”
• 
  Leveling takes WAY too long and is not fun/interesting
• 
  “Most pets are useless”
• 
  Pets have no stamina. Can chase forever

Auto attacks deal too much damage
With the exception of ritualist pets, the main pet damage output should never be coming from its auto attacks, as it promotes much less engaging gameplay for both the pet users and the people fighting them. For ritual pets specifically, it should be possible to make hard hitting pets, but the damage to health ratio needs to be much more extreme. You shouldn’t be able to have both tanky and hard hitting pets for just 200 skill points invested, regardless of if ritual pets are “expensive to create” or not. The meta we have today where you basically “command-and-forget” your pets to their death should be found in ritualism, but it needs major rebalancing so there’s a choice between damage and health, and where getting a bit of both is less efficient than leaning into one or the other.
For non-ritual pets, auto attacks should deal very little damage, and depending on the pet, might not even be able to deal damage through heavier armor at all. The beastmaster abilities are where you would get any sort of meaningful damage, which also means auto-attack damage no longer needs to scale off of focus, it already does since the abilities would be your main source of damage. Actual numbers are obviously up for debate and final balancing, and will depend on creature speed and pet point cost, but non-ritual pet damage against steel armor should very rarely be more than 5 per attack, and more commonly around 0-2.


Too squishy / Can’t protect them
It’s a bit hard to accurately give feedback on this since pet armors are incoming and we don’t quite know how they will affect the overall meta/balance, but one thing is certain and that is that pet survivability is horrible, especially considering how long it takes to train them, which I will comment on further down. In pvp you send in your pets and hope they deal a significant amount of damage before they inevitably die, and even trying to call them back to save them won’t be enough in most cases as they can be focused down quite easily, especially by mounted combat players. Torpedo pets are not very fun to train, command or fight, so the only place they should exist is within ritualism, which I will comment on further down.

Short term solution:
Veterinarian skill should be changed so that bandaging your pet takes 10 seconds with 0 skill and
near instant with it maxed out. It would obviously still be on a cooldown after using it so you
can’t spam it, but it would at least provide you an option to "clutch-save" your pet if you are close enough
to it, which also puts tamers in harm’s way as a trade off.


Long term solution

• Focus should always regenerate to 1000, regardless of if the pet is fighting or not
• Pet auto attack dmg is no longer affected by its current focus
• Pets receive 0.05% flat dmg resistance per focus point (halved if you mount it). 500 Focus = 75 % damage taken 1000 Focus = 50% Damage taken
• Ritual pets either have no focus bar at all, or use their own system described further down.

The current focus system doesn’t quite make sense because you trade damage for damage, as opposed to trading defense/speed for it, for instance. Why would you ever use a special ability that deals extra damage, at the cost of then dealing less damage?
I get that the idea behind it was to stop pets from dealing massive amounts of damage without “earning” the focus for it first, but again that means they have to survive long enough to gain the focus, which in the current system they rarely do.
With my suggestions above, non-ritual pets would have an inherent defense buff as long as they don’t use their abilities, providing a meaningful choice whether you should let it build up in order to have a tankier pet, or if you want to use its abilities at the risk of it being vulnerable while it recovers. Big damage abilities would obviously cost a good chunk of focus, but would also mean opponents who pay attention will target that pet since it is now much more susceptible to damage.




Skills are too weak or don’t work
I mean it goes without saying that skills need to work, especially when the beast mastery system has been out for quite a while by now. Fixing this would need to be done on a pet by pet basis, and in conjunction with all the other suggested fixes, as there are some abilities that kind of work, whereas most of them do not.
The main issues are that attack abilities only offer a minor damage increase, and that buff/dot abilities don’t last long enough to make a noticeable difference. In addition, many skills have animations that either stall its attack animations, prevent the pet from moving while “casting”, or both. In the current system there are even movement speed buff abilities that require the pet to be stationary while it activates it, which completely negates the effect. One way to fix this would be to keep the animation but quadruple the buff duration, but in my opinion this would be way more problematic to balance.


Short term solution

• Fix the broken abilities
• All pet abilities should be able to be used WHILE it is moving.
• Buff/debuff duration needs to be greatly increased to make them worthwhile
• Damage abilities need to be tweaked so they are worth using

Long term solution

• Since attack damage has been greatly reduced, attack abilities need their own scaling instead of being based off of attack damage. My suggestion would be to scale off of raw pet point cost.
• Overhaul abilities that have no place in the system. A single type of pet doesn't need 4 different "deal more damage"-abilities since one will always be the theoretical best one. Instead find ways to differentiate the utility and theme of that specific creature.

 

[Shadowmist]

“Command and forget”
The one thing we can all agree that we are trying to get away from is a playstyle that requires little to no skill to use, and telling your pets to attack someone and then forgetting about them is indeed not very skillful. I’ve already gone into detail about how to fix this for tamed/dominated pets, so in this section I’d like to focus more on Ritualist pets
Since ritual pets don’t require any pet points and are a way cheaper skill point investment than normal domestication, they really shouldn’t be better or even comparable to a properly trained pet, even if they are in fact a major time and gold investment, with the one exception being the legendary Tupilak which should obviously be hard to get and feared by all.
I’ll be going more into pet leveling later on but for now just know that ALL pets should be way faster to level, including ritual pets, which leaves their cost and stats to be the main balancing factors.
The theme for ritual pets should be revolving around creating the perfect beast for a certain situation as opposed to training a creature, and as mentioned before creating a hard hitting creature should be at the expense of its health, and thematically if any pet is intentionally sent to its death it should be a necromancer’s creations.

Short term solution

• Speed/Health/Damage - Increasing one should lower the other two, giving you the option to create a fast, hard hitting torpedo pet but it will be very squishy as a result.

Long term solution

• Remake the focus system for ritual pets separately - Since pets should now passively gain max focus without attacking, instead sending it to attack a target will drain its focus until it is empty, rendering it near useless until you recall it to recharge its focus. Essentially this would function as a stamina system.

Leveling takes WAY too long and is not fun/interesting
Regardless of all other changes the one thing we need to fix is the time it takes to train your pets.
It’s simply not fun or engaging gameplay as it is, and considering “the vision” is to have one character per player it’s weird to require someone to stand afk for hours and hours to get a pet that with the current system is most likely a kamikaze pet anyway. Heck even if we slow down loyalty gain slightly, the time it takes to level a max loyalty pet to 125 needs to be no more than 1 hour.

Short term solution

• Pet leveling speed should be the same in- and out of combat.
• The rate needs to be at least double that of which it is today while it is fighting
• Animal Care should be a profession skill
• To make it slightly more interesting, leveling speed bonus could be coming from lore and mastery if not just a flat increase across the board

Long term solution

• Have pets gain 100x the glory of its master, encouraging farming in the wild instead of being afk in a stronghold.
• Add progressive pet level requirements instead of each level being a flat 10k Exp.
  It makes sense to have higher levels take a little bit more time in order for it to feel more rewarding.
• Within a creature’s food group, a few random ones could be its favorite, boosting leveling speed if consumed

“Most pets are useless”
The two main reasons a lot of pets are considered useless is that they have too little health to be worth investing time into training, and that their abilities are lacking, both of which we have already discussed previously in this document.
In a game full of min-maxers there will always be a meta and a best-in-slot kind of mentality so it’s near impossible to make all pets equally good. So instead of trying to make them perfectly balanced in terms of damage and health, they should lean into their own theme. For instance, having a large part of a pet’s dps coming from bleeds and poisons instead of raw attack damage abilities would make it unique but not better, and it would certainly be more satisfying than the ones we have today that deal 4 damage over 6 seconds which is utterly pointless. Buffs, debuffs and unique flavor abilities should be the main reason we pick a specific pet, so whatever it does it needs to do it very well. Maybe bears and wolves will end up being the meta but at least the other options should be viable or fun in their own unique way with at least one skill that really defines them.

Short and long term solution

• See: ‘Skills are too weak or don’t work’
• See: ‘Too squishy/Can’t Protect them’

Pets have no stamina. Can chase forever
This has already been discussed earlier and with the suggested changes it would really only be ritual pets that are a problem, since domesticated pets would deal very little damage unless frequently commanded by their masters. With some rebalancing of ritual pet stats and potentially implementing the suggested ritual pet focus drain system, this would be more or less a resolved issue.

Short and long term solution

• See: ‘Command and forget’

Thanks for taking your time to read, I look forward to your comments and input.

 

[bbihah]

A better mechanic on pets having no stamina is to make sure ALL AI have the same limitations that players do and manage these resources.
AI should have stamina and mana just like players. Managing your pets resources is as important as managing your own.

 

[Doom and Gloom]

I commend your effort for writing this, sadly SV will not be reading it.
The pet system is a mess, it wasn't great before focus, kinda even worse now.

It’s simply not fun or engaging gameplay as it is, was, has been, and likely ever will be sums it up pretty well.

Hard agree on all the issues you bring out, solutions are less simple though, it is not just due to the pets themselves, but the rest of the broken af combat in the game.

 

[Shadowmist]

A better mechanic on pets having no stamina is to make sure ALL AI have the same limitations that players do and manage these resources.
AI should have stamina and mana just like players. Managing your pets resources is as important as managing your own.

I think that would only lead to a specific pet being the best stamina pet to use and everything else considered useless. Also, managing both focus and stamina for 3-4 pets does not sound fun at all.

Pets chasing you down should mainly come from either what I call "torpedo" pets if you're a ritualist, or from using chase/speed bonus abilities on domesticated pets, which would have both a limited duration and with my focus overhaul suggestion also leave it vulnerable to attacks.

 

[Shadowmist]

I commend your effort for writing this, sadly SV will not be reading it.
The pet system is a mess, it wasn't great before focus, kinda even worse now.

It’s simply not fun or engaging gameplay as it is, was, has been, and likely ever will be sums it up pretty well.

Hard agree on all the issues you bring out, solutions are less simple though, it is not just due to the pets themselves, but the rest of the broken af combat in the game.

Thank you.


I personally find them fun to use, but I find the idea of using their unique abilities efficiently A LOT of fun.

As I'm mostly a pve kind of player, I really enjoy the the concept of pets and having to train and nurture them while having them do all your heavy lifting, and seeing as I've put 600-700 points into it, I'd like to see a system where I'm not considered op, nor where my hard invested time and skill points rewards me with pets that just die in 4 seconds.

 

[Tzone]

This post has taken me quite some time to write and is quite long, but I really hope to start a constructive discussion on how to identify and fix the current problems with pets as well as finding solutions that are appreciated from ALL sides, including the people who want to completely remove them from the game.
I have divided each section into a headline stating what is wrong, followed by a breakdown of the issue and the suggested short- and long term solutions.
A lot of these tie into each other, so please don't comment saying my suggestions are shit, unless you've read the whole thing.

Thanks for taking your time.
// Shadowmist


What’s wrong?

• 
  Auto attacks deal too much dmg
• 
  Too squishy / Can’t protect them
• 
  Skills are too weak or don’t work
• 
  “Command and forget”
• 
  Leveling takes WAY too long and is not fun/interesting
• 
  “Most pets are useless”
• 
  Pets have no stamina. Can chase forever

Auto attacks deal too much damage
With the exception of ritualist pets, the main pet damage output should never be coming from its auto attacks, as it promotes much less engaging gameplay for both the pet users and the people fighting them. For ritual pets specifically, it should be possible to make hard hitting pets, but the damage to health ratio needs to be much more extreme. You shouldn’t be able to have both tanky and hard hitting pets for just 200 skill points invested, regardless of if ritual pets are “expensive to create” or not. The meta we have today where you basically “command-and-forget” your pets to their death should be found in ritualism, but it needs major rebalancing so there’s a choice between damage and health, and where getting a bit of both is less efficient than leaning into one or the other.
For non-ritual pets, auto attacks should deal very little damage, and depending on the pet, might not even be able to deal damage through heavier armor at all. The beastmaster abilities are where you would get any sort of meaningful damage, which also means auto-attack damage no longer needs to scale off of focus, it already does since the abilities would be your main source of damage. Actual numbers are obviously up for debate and final balancing, and will depend on creature speed and pet point cost, but non-ritual pet damage against steel armor should very rarely be more than 5 per attack, and more commonly around 0-2.


Too squishy / Can’t protect them
It’s a bit hard to accurately give feedback on this since pet armors are incoming and we don’t quite know how they will affect the overall meta/balance, but one thing is certain and that is that pet survivability is horrible, especially considering how long it takes to train them, which I will comment on further down. In pvp you send in your pets and hope they deal a significant amount of damage before they inevitably die, and even trying to call them back to save them won’t be enough in most cases as they can be focused down quite easily, especially by mounted combat players. Torpedo pets are not very fun to train, command or fight, so the only place they should exist is within ritualism, which I will comment on further down.

Short term solution:
Veterinarian skill should be changed so that bandaging your pet takes 10 seconds with 0 skill and
near instant with it maxed out. It would obviously still be on a cooldown after using it so you
can’t spam it, but it would at least provide you an option to "clutch-save" your pet if you are close enough
to it, which also puts tamers in harm’s way as a trade off.


Long term solution

• Focus should always regenerate to 1000, regardless of if the pet is fighting or not
• Pet auto attack dmg is no longer affected by its current focus
• Pets receive 0.05% flat dmg resistance per focus point (halved if you mount it). 500 Focus = 75 % damage taken 1000 Focus = 50% Damage taken
• Ritual pets either have no focus bar at all, or use their own system described further down.

The current focus system doesn’t quite make sense because you trade damage for damage, as opposed to trading defense/speed for it, for instance. Why would you ever use a special ability that deals extra damage, at the cost of then dealing less damage?
I get that the idea behind it was to stop pets from dealing massive amounts of damage without “earning” the focus for it first, but again that means they have to survive long enough to gain the focus, which in the current system they rarely do.
With my suggestions above, non-ritual pets would have an inherent defense buff as long as they don’t use their abilities, providing a meaningful choice whether you should let it build up in order to have a tankier pet, or if you want to use its abilities at the risk of it being vulnerable while it recovers. Big damage abilities would obviously cost a good chunk of focus, but would also mean opponents who pay attention will target that pet since it is now much more susceptible to damage.




Skills are too weak or don’t work
I mean it goes without saying that skills need to work, especially when the beast mastery system has been out for quite a while by now. Fixing this would need to be done on a pet by pet basis, and in conjunction with all the other suggested fixes, as there are some abilities that kind of work, whereas most of them do not.
The main issues are that attack abilities only offer a minor damage increase, and that buff/dot abilities don’t last long enough to make a noticeable difference. In addition, many skills have animations that either stall its attack animations, prevent the pet from moving while “casting”, or both. In the current system there are even movement speed buff abilities that require the pet to be stationary while it activates it, which completely negates the effect. One way to fix this would be to keep the animation but quadruple the buff duration, but in my opinion this would be way more problematic to balance.


Short term solution

• Fix the broken abilities
• All pet abilities should be able to be used WHILE it is moving.
• Buff/debuff duration needs to be greatly increased to make them worthwhile
• Damage abilities need to be tweaked so they are worth using

Long term solution

• Since attack damage has been greatly reduced, attack abilities need their own scaling instead of being based off of attack damage. My suggestion would be to scale off of raw pet point cost.
• Overhaul abilities that have no place in the system. A single type of pet doesn't need 4 different "deal more damage"-abilities since one will always be the theoretical best one. Instead find ways to differentiate the utility and theme of that specific creature.

Every mob you pet kills it should gain a level or git a bunch of Exp. Besides just sitting in a stronghold and attacking a NPC to level.

 

[Shadowmist]

Every mob you pet kills it should gain a level or git a bunch of Exp. Besides just sitting in a stronghold and attacking a NPC to level.

Yeah that's in there already as a suggestion. Pets would get 100x the glory of its master, meaning 20 glory = 2000 pet exp (each level up requires 10k exp).

 

[xeric]

It has been quite some time since I came across a compelling post on this forum. Please, keep up the insightful contributions. I sincerely hope this post garners more attention and constructive criticism, as I believe many share concerns about the current pet system. While I acknowledge that even small changes can make a significant difference, there is a unanimous agreement that changes are necessary.

To initiate this process, I propose a substantial reduction in auto-attack effectiveness, with skills taking precedence in dealing damage. However, for balance, these skills should either have short/instant cast times or be usable while in motion. By emphasizing the use of skills, stamina becomes less of an issue, as tamers would need to be in close proximity to their pets to deal damage, resulting in a more dynamic engagement where tamers must actively pursue their targets.

To maintain equilibrium, such skills might be limited to unmounted attacks. I resonate strongly with Shadowmist's post and believe that these adjustments could greatly enhance the overall experience of the pet system.

 

[Rhias]

It has been quite some time since I came across a compelling post on this forum. Please, keep up the insightful contributions. I sincerely hope this post garners more attention and constructive criticism, as I believe many share concerns about the current pet system. While I acknowledge that even small changes can make a significant difference, there is a unanimous agreement that changes are necessary.

To initiate this process, I propose a substantial reduction in auto-attack effectiveness, with skills taking precedence in dealing damage. However, for balance, these skills should either have short/instant cast times or be usable while in motion. By emphasizing the use of skills, stamina becomes less of an issue, as tamers would need to be in close proximity to their pets to deal damage, resulting in a more dynamic engagement where tamers must actively pursue their targets.

To maintain equilibrium, such skills might be limited to unmounted attacks. I resonate strongly with Shadowmist's post and believe that these adjustments could greatly enhance the overall experience of the pet system.

Most larger pets such as camadons or elder terror birds basically walk into their target and block your total sight of it. It is really hard to focus the target to trigger a skill.

 

[xeric]

Interesting point. Indeed, a straightforward adjustment of values might not be a universal solution. I was contemplating a simple fix. What are your thoughts on implementing small a AOE attacks for larger pets? The AOE, akin to a cleave attack, would need to be strategically placed and unaffected by line of sight for its execution

 

[Weis]

What’s wrong?

I run a beastmaster on my main character and I would categorize pets as basically an unfinished beta feature that should not be changed until beastmastery is reworked, all pet armors are implemented, and pathing fixed among many other fixes/changes. Any changes in the current state will likely over or underpower the pets making the entire build pointless for the amount of time that has to be put into it.

Pet armors: Most squishy pets can benefit from armor being added, granted, we would have to adjust base autoattack damage on some of them so they don’t become too overpowered.

Pet pathing: In the beta and initial months of game release, pets used to stop pathing near houses or strongholds, making it super easy to grief a pet with little to no effort. This was later fixed and then broken again with TC structures were added without pet pathing. And now with the last update, pets push players out of buildings making it impossible to use in player houses as well, to add insult to injury.

Pet swimming: Pets are extremely vulnerable near water and aquatic pets like crabs cant even swim. This adds another layer of potential loss and griefing for beast masters that eventually needs to be balanced and fixed. I’ve lost at least 50 125 lvl pets due to naked guys swimming in the water with short bows. Or full footies just standing in shallow water. That’s my favorite.

Focus: The focus system is a poorly designed mechanic that should be scrapped instead of improved on. You don’t build a house on a crumbling foundation. Beast mastery skills should function the same way as popping a clade with a 1-2 minute timer before the skills can be used again. The beast master skills need to be tested thoroughly in a PTR so that they can be properly balanced.

Command and Forget part 1: This concept is fine as it is because the amount of time put into it and because if you truly use pets every day in PVP you know that any decently geared footie can just murder your pet at max level with little to no effort. The solution to this is lowering the base damage of pets which cant be done until the focus system is fixed and beast mastery skills are reworked completely.

Command and Forget part 2: Right now to use a beast mastery skill your character has to have the crosshair fixated on the target it is actively attacking. This doesn’t really make sense considering that the pet will block your crosshair when its attacking a player. This needs to be removed so you can use beast mastery skills regardless of where you are looking.

Leveling: you said it really well. Make it so the cap for each level grows and isn’t locked at 10k exp. Then make it so your pets share exp gained from glory. That would be an awesome system. Animal care should also be a profession as it has nothing to do with action skills.

Pet stamina: this suggestion is stupid as hell to make in the current state because pathing hasn’t been fixed and because most pets base speed is too slow to catch up most builds. If a pet stamina was implemented, there would be no reason to use shore prowlers, campodons, crabs, turtles, water lizards, celeanos, tagmatons, or Spiders. The other fast pets are designed to catch up to players so adding stamina wouldn’t really stop them from doing so, it would only prevent the aforementioned pets from ever being able to catch up to a target.

 

[ElPerro]

Pet stamina: this suggestion is stupid as hell to make in the current state because pathing hasn’t been fixed and because most pets base speed is too slow to catch up most builds. If a pet stamina was implemented, there would be no reason to use shore prowlers, campodons, crabs, turtles, water lizards, celeanos, tagmatons, or Spiders. The other fast pets are designed to catch up to players so adding stamina wouldn’t really stop them from doing so, it would only prevent the aforementioned pets from ever being able to catch up to a target.

Pets able to catch players is whats stupid, it just kills any sort of small scale pvp when you cant even escape some pets with a veela. If anything it should be a skill for certain pets that they can use sparingly, but a heat seeking missile with no stam that you cant run away from is just broken. Make them harder to kill if anything but they need to follow the same rules as players.

 

[Weis]

Pets able to catch players is whats stupid, it just kills any sort of small scale pvp when you cant even escape some pets with a veela. If anything it should be a skill for certain pets that they can use sparingly, but a heat seeking missile with no stam that you cant run away from is just broken. Make them harder to kill if anything but they need to follow the same rules as players.

All pets are currently designed so that footies with reptile armor and a cuprum weapon can solo the max level pet with the exception of a campodon. Pets are supposed to catch up to players so I dont know how people continue to defend this. People suggesting this simply dont know how to parry the pet and want to have the power to grief the pet with a shortbow butt ass naked.

What youre suggesting is that a player should be able to run away, the pet would stam out in a field and then they would be able to kill it from a distance while the tamer spams "pet follow me" while nothing happens because its stammed out. Am I wrong about what you are suggesting?

 

[ElPerro]

All pets are currently designed so that footies with reptile armor and a cuprum weapon can solo the max level pet with the exception of a campodon. Pets are supposed to catch up to players so I dont know how people continue to defend this. People suggesting this simply dont know how to parry the pet and want to have the power to grief the pet with a shortbow butt ass naked.

What youre suggesting is that a player should be able to run away, the pet would stam out in a field and then they would be able to kill it from a distance while the tamer spams "pet follow me" while nothing happens because its stammed out. Am I wrong about what you are suggesting?

Yeah you should be able to kite a pet like you would a player ffs, why should you press a button and force a player to fight your zerg. Yeah any footie can 1v1 the pet but they arent teleported to an instanced 1v1.

I literally suggested they give them more hp and they should balance them more for big fights like sieges where you have to hold positions, instead of just being a grief mechanic to zerg smaller groups more effectively.

 

[Tzone]

People hate fighting pets regardless is a reptile set player can kill them 1v1 because its not 1v1 its 1v2. If you are a mage v pet you kinda screwed especially in small scale.
Pet stam would be nice along with a buff to pet health and a nerf to auto attack. Also buff special attacks.

Leveling pets is unfun. Make PvE with pets level faster so its less time consuming and more fun/active.

 

[Shadowmist]

I run a beastmaster on my main character and I would categorize pets as basically an unfinished beta feature that should not be changed until beastmastery is reworked, all pet armors are implemented, and pathing fixed among many other fixes/changes. Any changes in the current state will likely over or underpower the pets making the entire build pointless for the amount of time that has to be put into it.

Pet armors: Most squishy pets can benefit from armor being added, granted, we would have to adjust base autoattack damage on some of them so they don’t become too overpowered.

Pet pathing: In the beta and initial months of game release, pets used to stop pathing near houses or strongholds, making it super easy to grief a pet with little to no effort. This was later fixed and then broken again with TC structures were added without pet pathing. And now with the last update, pets push players out of buildings making it impossible to use in player houses as well, to add insult to injury.

Pet swimming: Pets are extremely vulnerable near water and aquatic pets like crabs cant even swim. This adds another layer of potential loss and griefing for beast masters that eventually needs to be balanced and fixed. I’ve lost at least 50 125 lvl pets due to naked guys swimming in the water with short bows. Or full footies just standing in shallow water. That’s my favorite.

Focus: The focus system is a poorly designed mechanic that should be scrapped instead of improved on. You don’t build a house on a crumbling foundation. Beast mastery skills should function the same way as popping a clade with a 1-2 minute timer before the skills can be used again. The beast master skills need to be tested thoroughly in a PTR so that they can be properly balanced.

Command and Forget part 1: This concept is fine as it is because the amount of time put into it and because if you truly use pets every day in PVP you know that any decently geared footie can just murder your pet at max level with little to no effort. The solution to this is lowering the base damage of pets which cant be done until the focus system is fixed and beast mastery skills are reworked completely.

Command and Forget part 2: Right now to use a beast mastery skill your character has to have the crosshair fixated on the target it is actively attacking. This doesn’t really make sense considering that the pet will block your crosshair when its attacking a player. This needs to be removed so you can use beast mastery skills regardless of where you are looking.

Leveling: you said it really well. Make it so the cap for each level grows and isn’t locked at 10k exp. Then make it so your pets share exp gained from glory. That would be an awesome system. Animal care should also be a profession as it has nothing to do with action skills.

Pet stamina: this suggestion is stupid as hell to make in the current state because pathing hasn’t been fixed and because most pets base speed is too slow to catch up most builds. If a pet stamina was implemented, there would be no reason to use shore prowlers, campodons, crabs, turtles, water lizards, celeanos, tagmatons, or Spiders. The other fast pets are designed to catch up to players so adding stamina wouldn’t really stop them from doing so, it would only prevent the aforementioned pets from ever being able to catch up to a target.

Some good insights here, thank you for contributing.

I disagree that aiming at your target for skills is bad. Some abilities require this, others don't. Pet buffs should not require you to aim at them since you're thematically just telling them what to do, but targeted damage abilites should be aimed.
I also disagree that command and forget as a concept is "fine". The only time that should be fine is with ritualist pets that have specifically been designed to kamikaze. Normal domesticated pets should never be effective if you just no-brain launch them on someone.

We all agree the idea of pet abilities is great, but in order for a system like that to ever work they need to be a lot tankier.
In a nutshell, I would much rather have pets unable to deal auto attack damage at all, if it meant they were generally really tanky, and with my suggested focus overhaul you would constantly make desicions around your pet survivability VS its damage output, creating meaningful gameplay opportunities for both the tamer and his opponents.

 

[Slarti Bartfast]

but non-ritual pet damage against steel armor should very rarely be more than 5 per attack, and more commonly around 0-2.

disagree... you did say it's up for debate that amount of damage is so tiny it's utterly pointless, you said so yourself about current pet skills:

we have today that deal 4 damage over 6 seconds which is utterly pointless

auto attack pet dmg shouldn't be a primary source, i agree there, but it should be enough to apply pressure over time... i'm thinking 7-10 at least.. functioning almost like a dot... you can ignore it for a bit but eventually it's gonna catch up to you

It’s a bit hard to accurately give feedback on this since pet armors are incoming and we don’t quite know how they will affect the overall meta/balance, but one thing is certain and that is that pet survivability is horrible

preach! this will also greatly affect the damage discussion above (how long should that be able to tick before you extinguish it by killing my pet?)

will also affect slightly:

Regardless of all other changes the one thing we need to fix is the time it takes to train your pets.

It takes forever... even if you're doing it in unscrupulous ways, which I finally gave in to b/c nothing is being done about it and i'm not gonna be the only damn person that levels their pet in the original "intended" manner... poor argument i know, but screw that. I've got over 1k hours and honestly at least 1/3 of them are me standing semiafk while my pets attack each other and i'm doing something on the other screen and only hopping back over to feed them and not afk out. Imagine if I hadn't been using the trick (which I didn't do for first half of that third) and I'd be around half my playtime just standing there while my pet levels enough to be semi-viable but still kamikaze fodder in the end. Ridiculous.

Heck even if we slow down loyalty gain slightly, the time it takes to level a max loyalty pet to 125 needs to be no more than 1 hour.

At first I felt like this was a little too far in the direction of speed, but considering how fast they die right now and that most are only viable at at least lvl 90+ 1 hr seems about right. IF pet armor greatly improves survivability and/or readjust the dmg to be higher before they hit 90+, I could see with going 2 hrs maybe.

Veterinarian skill should be changed so that bandaging your pet takes 10 seconds with 0 skill and
near instant with it maxed out

Cool idea, especially since it is relatively worthless right now with most folks pet leveling with a bug.

Overhaul abilities that have no place in the system. A single type of pet doesn't need 4 different "deal more damage"-abilities since one will always be the theoretical best one. Instead find ways to differentiate the utility and theme of that specific creature.

Yes... give me utility instead for some of these (knockdowns, stuns, pet self-heals, buffs, debuffs, etc.). Your other ideas about rehauling the BM skills are sounding good, too. The skills currently are mostly worthless with a few that give you a slight advantage but only if you're at 100 focus.

Pets have no stamina. Can chase forever

While this does need to be thought about, it needs to be thought about carefully. Some speed pets (razorback, cougar) are really useful for applying pressure to horses if you're mounted and trying to just make a getaway (useful for merchants such as myself, keep chasing me and my pet with eventually pressure you to kill it by threatening your horse giving me an opportunity to keep running or swing back around and blast you or your horse while you're trying to kill my pet when initially you thought i was the mouse and you were the cat). I think that's a pretty neat mechanic and don't want it to go poof by sloppily and thoughtlessly just nerfing the no stamina thing into the ground... but again don't agree with nerfing auto attack dmg too far either as discussed above, so there'd need to be a different solution.... maybe give them a leash but be sure to make that sucker huge if the owner is mounted.

telling your pets to attack someone and then forgetting about them is indeed not very skillful

I think some of this will be fixed with survivability increase from the armor b/c then they're not necessarily kamikaze and you have a choice to call them back when they're getting low health for heals/bandage or let them continue to dmg at risk of them dying. right now it's just.. yup the pet is most likely gonna die vs a player so set and forget. Also, when they add armor... hopefully they make it for all pets... or the ones without it just aren't gonna get used probably if the armor is effective.

I always really wanna ride fast pets like cougars and razobacks. I know that'd be hard to balance though.

 

[Slarti Bartfast]

Beast mastery skills should function the same way as popping a clade with a 1-2 minute timer before the skills can be used again.

Right now to use a beast mastery skill your character has to have the crosshair fixated on the target it is actively attacking. This doesn’t really make sense considering that the pet will block your crosshair when its attacking a player. This needs to be removed so you can use beast mastery skills regardless of where you are looking.

This + This please

 

[Rhias]

This + This please

Reminds me of my first experience with the spider pull skill. At the beginning I was really hyped to try it out.

Then the first shock: your pet needs max focus to trigger the skill. So basically your pet needs to be in meele distance to pull the enemy.
So basically only useful for fleeing enemys.
Second shock:
Evey tried focusing a player through the huge hitbox of a spider following the player?

Edit: GW2 pet system for rangers was great.