Feedback:User/Jimmer123/My Idea of How Pets Should Be

Intro and What I Didnt Like
Well, where to start? Assuming pets will make a return in GW2, i think it would freakin sweet if they were re-wroked, nearly completely overhauled.

When i started playing GW1 the first class i picked was ranger, becuase of one thing and one thing only, pets. I was thinking "Oh sweet, i can have a feckin bear tear those guys up and sit back and watch!" However i was dissapointed when i realised you had to devote the majority of your skill bar to your pet. Essentailly making it another version of you, only hairier, but in the enemy's face instead of you. Its like playing a warrior but standing still and watching your sword hack up the guy 20 feet away. The other thing i didnt like is that there was virtually no differnce between pets; a Moa would do the same as a crab.

My Idea(s)
I think that your pet should function kind of like hero's function in GW1. They have their own energy, health, aggression stance, and skill bar. You shouldnt have any pet attacks to put on your own skill bar. The skills you should have on your skill bar should be ones like comfort animal, run as one etc. Skills that affect the pet but are not actions the pet takes directly (i.e. attacks).

Every pet should be unique. They should;
 * 1) have their own stats, which automatically increase upon the pet levelling. In this case when i say stats i mean the usual, health, energy, base damage, natural armour sort of things.
 * 2) have different arbritrary attributes such as movement speed, attack speed, maybe some have resistance to particular damage types, or resistance to knockdowns.
 * 3) have a different growth rate (both stat increases and exp needed to lvl).
 * 4) have a small number of skills unique to the pet. I mean, yeah fine, a bear can do a Poisonous Bite, but can a crab? I severely doubt it. To that note, if you have two different types of the same species (eg moa and black moa) they could well have the same or very similar skills. I say a small number of skills because, in freeing up more of your own skill bar, having a pet which is essentialy a gw1 hero, would be overpowered. I think a max of 4 or 5 skills would be good.
 * 5) High end/rare pets would be stronger in a lot of ways than pets found commonly or early in the game.

I believe this system would make capturing pets more rewarding. It would make fulfilling the requirements, and successfully capturing a Rainbow Phoenix (putting it in gw1 terms) more than a status symbol. Also putting the effort into maxing your pets level would be worth the trouble it takes to do it.

Potential Problems
With a system like this, if it is implemented wrong it could theroetically create massive imbalance in the game. If pets are made too powerful, it would make the ranger class overpowered in that you have a 2 man army, you with your bow/gun/whatever doing what a similar class can do normally, but you have your pet with you to boot. I dont know the technical details of the game to quantify the limits put on pets, so i wont try. All i can say on this point is they should be equivelent to maybe a player character 3/4 max level? roughly something like that.

Another problem that might arise would be, since every pet is unique, you might end up putting a lot of time and effort into levelling your pet, only to find a new one that might just generally better at max level than your current one, but you dont want to get rid of your current pet completely. This could be rectified with an NPC like the guys who you give your pets to in gw1, but you can go back to one of these NPCs and get your pet back when you want to. This way completionists can get every pet max level. This might even give the possibility for a new title track, one for taming all the pets, maybe one for getting pets to max level.

Thanks For Reading
Thanks for reading this, if you have anything to say at all, be it criticism, praise, a suggestion for improvement, anything at all then please dont hesitate to put it on the talk page =]

thanks again --Jimmer123 23:20, 2 July 2010 (UTC)