A bit of a lull in the ongoing Guild Wars storyline for me at the moment. Last session saw me and my Elementalist friend finish Missions 23 (Ring of Fire) and 24 (Abaddon's Mouth) without too much fuss, although both were quite hard work. We've fought our way up a very Tolkienesque volcano, to the top, and then we did something very silly indeed, and now the world stands on the edge of firey destruction, proving once again that the biggest threat to any half-way stable magical medieval society, is Heroes. Ooops! Our bad! Naturally, since it was our fault, it's down to us to stop it, so naturally, we've taken a bit of time off to go sightseeing somewhere else entirely, instead...as you do!

One mission to go, 25 (Hell's Precipice), but we're making those a weekly event now, and in the interim, I've been working at capturing my various missing Elite Skills from the many Boss mobs found in the bits of the world I've missed, and looking at my much neglected Beastmastery skills, and my pet. As in pretty much any other fantasy game, the Ranger gets the usual tamed, trainable animal companion, and I dabbled with it very briefly at the start, rushing out of Ascalon City and taming the first thing I saw, a Moa Bird, which basically looks a lot like Big Bird from sesame street. We played a bit, by the squarking wasn't particularly dignified, and anyway, for some reason the majority of the skills you get given for free, via quests, tended to be Marksmanship based, so I ended up giving up on the pet quite early on and just turning into an extreme archer instead.

I've now retired the bird and got myself a Black Bear pet instead - statistically, it's pretty much identical to the bird, but definitely looks the part and makes a hell of a roaring racket when it attacks, which always makes me giggle, so I've respecced back into Beastmastery and am training the bear up, from it's wandering, tameable 'critter' level of 5, up to my level - 20. Here's the build:

Marksmanship: 12
Beastmastery: 12
Expertise: 13

The Marksmanship and Expertise are mostly pumped by runes, mask and bow. Having completed the second attribute quest helps a lot too, giving me all the attribute points I can expect with this character now.

Charm Animal: Required in the skill bar to have the pet with you at all. Also used to initially tame a pet if you don't have one.
Comfort Animal: My pet 'heal', this also brings it back from the dead if killed. Pet death forces ALL your skills to recharge, but doesn't penalise you too much - just wait a few seconds, and bring it back!

Many ?/R secondaires use just these two with six from their main profession, giving them a disposable extra henchman for free. I'm trying to be a proper BM though, so...

Call of Haste: Pet Buff - increases pet movement and attack speeds.
Call of Protection: Pet Buff - gives the pet significant damage reduction.
Bestial Pounce: Pet Attack - direct damage, and interrupts and knocks down, if the target was trying to cast a spell.
Predator's Pounce: Pet Attack - direct damage, which actually heals the pet too.

I've also got:

Incendiary Arrows (Elite): Self Buff - my arrows interrupt spellcasting, and set the target on fire.
Signet of Capture: Used on a dead boss, of one of your two classes, lets you swap it for a skill they have. This is the only way to collect the Elite skills.

The Incendiary Arrows are Wilderness Survival, a skill I don't have many points in, but help tremendously on those nightmarish occasions you get one or more Monk-Class Bosses chain-healing everything around them. Between that, and the Bestial Pounce, you have a good chance of interrupting it long enough to bring it down. Without interrupts, the rate of healing is likely to be far in excess of your party's normal DPS.

Pet work is quite tricky, as there's a bit of a delay between you picking the target, and the Bear getting to it, and starting to maul, and the pet attack specials need to be timed to fit in with it's normal melee swings. Interrupting becomes a bit hit and miss, not helped by the flight-time delay between me firing an arrow, and it hitting the target. I'd imagine Mesmers are better at it, with a range of insta-cast interrupt spells available. It's a good all purpose PvE Exploration build though, in which the pet becomes the star, and you just need to stand there firing arrows on auto-attack, and with high Beastmastery, and the two 'Call' buffs, the pet becomes a force to be reckoned with, even at much lower levels than the rest of the party and henchmen. I've got the bear up to L18 now, over perhaps eight hours of having him tag along, and it's easily holding it's own now, and should be more than up to the challenges of Mission 25.

What would help even more, is going out and buying my missing Beastmastery non-elite skills, and rejigging my wearable runes and mask to improve the attribute even further, as this point score directly affects the pet's performance, as well as the potency of related skills. A costly specialisation, but one I'm increasingly thinking, is worth the grind and money.

Mission 25, and the salvation of the world (or Tyria at least) awaits, but I'm thinking our Nemesis is going to have  much harder time concentrating on his diabolical arcane machinations, while staring down the business end of an enraged 500lb Black Bear...I know I would!

Awww....he's just playing!