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    Rangers have their highs and lows like every other class. They have really good DPS, but they have to work at it a bit more than other classes like warrior or mesmer. It’s possible just not as easy.

    As for ranger balance, we have frequent meetings about balance where we discuss that sort of stuff – I go to those meetings on behalf of dungeon content and to lend my experience with ranger knowledge.

    I personally accept the tradeoff of damage for survivability (Can’t do damage if you’re dead). I tend to run a condition build using shortbow and sword\dagger, and focus on being supportive and holding aggro while keeping a steady output of DPS through conditions. Rangers have an incredible amount of evasion and damage mitigation if you are very focused and know when to use your skills and heals (prot on dodge roll, vigor on heals) means you can keep prot for when you mess up, and always have evasions ready. There are some very successful dungeon builds, but most of them aren’t DPS focused.

    We’re working on ideas for making pets better in dungeons. There’s a list of reasons we can’t just tweak a number and call it good (it wouldn’t actually solve the problem), but it is something we are aware of and working on.

    One of the things you have to think about, is how the game is played. If we buff rangers just for dungeons, than they are too strong for the open world. Considering I can solo most content in the open world by letting my pet tank, I feel ranger is very powerful outside of dungeons. We can’t have rangers that change based on PvP, open world, and dungeons because that gets too confusing for players and puts us on a slippery slope. Whatever we do to the ranger, it has to happen in both the open world and dungeons, so it requires more than just number tweaks. You see a lot of bots as rangers for that very reason – they are really strong open world classes, and buffing them for the sake of dungeons doesn’t work out to being a good fix.

    Wow this is getting long. I should go to the class balance forums some time, lol. Sorry for the text wall!

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As for AR resistance on pets and such, know that I am actively looking into solutions to that. It’s not something we are unaware of, and it is an issue we are trying to develop solutions for. I am at scale 52 in the fractals, and pet insta-death above scale 20 is something I am acutely aware of and trying to resolve.

    I am still here and watching. I’m currently composing a list of ideas and statements from this thread to bring to our balance meetings (held multiple times per week), that I can present to at least talk about with the group.

    I go to the meetings as a representative for rangers and dungeons, since I play both of those things extensively. Here’s how my list is looking so far:

    Core problems: (Note: we are very aware of both of these things)

    -Pet AI.

    -Pet management tools

    Things to investigate:

    -Pets auto attacks only hitting a single target.

    -On “return” command, your pet gains swiftness so it can escape out of red rings more easily.

    -A button that makes your pet momentarily not take damage. A sort of “Dodge” button for you to control. This is mainly due to us making sure players know how to use their dodge-roll or damage mitigation skills, which pets don’t have, and don’t always know how to escape properly when recalled without a direct pet swap. (NOTE: This is a springboard idea for pets being able to avoid damage)

    -Pet/minion AR that is shared with the master’s stats.

    -More defensive pet skills.

    -Vigor applied to pets turns into swiftness or protection.

    -In dungeons, pet’s get more health/armor.

    -Lick wounds not always working. Pet just runs back and stands on your body.

    -Search and Rescue buggy

    -F2 skills activating faster.

    -Health/stamina bars for pets

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We tried giving them reduced damage from AOE/attacks, and it opened up other problems – mainly that a team of 2 rangers could take on almost any boss in a dungeon by smart swapping of pets and letting the pet take aggro. It’s unfortunate, but we can’t just increase and decrease numbers until pets are perfect – we’ve tried really hard, but numbers are not going to fix pets without letting them break everything. We have to look deeper into mechanics, AI, player actions, and skills.

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There have been some calls for perma-stowed pets, and while I have said this in other areas I will say it again here. I don’t think we will let you perma-stow pets – the main reason being we want the player to be interacting with the pet, and the pet to be part of the identity of the player. The role of ranger is to to have a pet in our game, and with that comes a bit of extra micromanagement that comes with the package. Right now the micromanage is difficult and more tools are desired, and I honestly feel that once we make micromanaging pets easier, more responsive, and better in general that players won’t mind that they don’t have perma-stow capabilities.

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