Bad Bear Day : GW2

Rangers have a poor reputation in GW2. Wait, let me re-phrase that: Bearbows have a poor reputation. Bearbow is a handy neologism, coined to describe the kind of ranger who stands a hundred and fifty yards to the rear of his pet, plinking away with a longbow. The preferred pet for this is always a bear because, in a game that famously has no dedicated tank class, it so happens bears never got the memo. 

This works eminently well in solo play, as I discovered for myself all the way back in beta. In almost any other situation it ranges from sub-optimal (zergs, any very easy open group content) through lazy and likely to get you kicked from a group (dungeons, fractals) to content-breaking (anything that needs to be kited - Bears Don't Kite).

My charr ranger used to run with a Murellow in one pet slot and an Arctodus in the other. A murellow is a weird creature that looks like a malformed, hairless dog while an arctodus resembles a kind of cross between a badger and an aardvark, but despite their appearances they are both classed as bears. In fact, the arctodus is based on a real, if extinct, bear species otherwise known as the Short-Faced Bear.  The murellow appears to be an entirely imaginary, Tyrian invention, which is presumably how it came to be able to breathe a huge cloud of poisonous gas, the very reason I liked to trail one around with me.

Acceptable Use Of Bear (example) : Soloing Hearts

That was all very well when I was roaming the wilderness alone, just me and my bears, but it wouldn't do at all for World vs World, so at 80 I traded the pair of them in for a Lynx and a Wolf and swapped my shortbow for an Axe and Horn combo for good measure. I still use the longbow, but one bow does not a bearbow make.

Before the megaserver I don't really recall seeing all that many bearbows running around Yaks Bend but suddenly they're everywhere. The preferred bear appears to be the basic Brown. Fat, round, fuzzy and dim-looking, they hardly confer much in the way of dignity or distinction to their owners but they have the benefit of being very easy to find at low level and come with the highly useful "Shake It Off" ability, an AE condition-remover, although how useful this is when your bear is a hundred yards upwind I'm not sure.

Acceptable Pets (WvW) - Dog, Wolf, Asura.

On a rough head-count it often feels as though four out of every five bears is a Brown, with the remainder coming from a roughly even spread of Polar and Arctodus. Occasionally I spot a Murellow. I don't believe I have ever seen anyone using a Black Bear.

Then again, it's hard to concentrate on species identification, when your mind is reeling at the names some people give their bears. Pet-naming in GW2 is annoyingly implemented in just the same, half-finished, badly-thought-out way mini-pets used to be until the recent change. Pet names are only retained as long as you keep that pet in an active slot. As soon as you swap another in the name is lost.

If a ranger's pet has a name, then, it means one of two things: either the player values naming sufficiently highly to take the trouble to do it every time, even though it's fiddly and annoying (guilty as charged), or they rarely swap pets. Consequently a probable majority of pets go unnamed, meaning they show up as "Juvenile Brown Bear" or whatever kind of animal they might be. It's another annoying and badly-construed trope of GW2 that rangers can only tame "juvenile" animals and yet these juveniles never grow up.

The names players choose for pets in general and bears in particular appear to fall into a few distinct categories:

Pop Culture Broken Record

Cute Like Kittenz

Hey, It's Ironic, Yeah?

Minimalist

Occasionally someone will come up with something genuinely amusing, like this one, which alludes to the issue previously mentioned

or something that seems gnomic and surreal but which probably means something to someone, somewhere

and if imagination fails you can always fall back on smut and innuendo

Love them or loathe them bears are here to stay. As long as they tank like Velcro-wrapped battleship plate and bumble through starting areas begging for love no amount of naming and shaming will cull their ever-growing numbers. And anyway, would we really want to do that? You can tell a lot about a ranger by the company she chooses, after all.