The Scrying Pool looks at the smaller things in Guild Wars 2: Miniatures.

In other games I have seen similar systems giving very direct benefits to players, something that has also been mentioned to give reasons to summon minis outside of combat. Some of these benefits included auto-looting where the mini would run to dropped loot and pick it up, giving a specialized buff. The first of these wouldn't really apply since loot doesn't drop to the ground and would be worthless since the addition of AoE looting a couple months ago. (There is a hotkey option for AoE loot in the control options. I set mine to 'E' so I can run around looting without picking up warrior banners by mistake.)

Buffs given by mini-pets could work one of two ways: all minis give the same buff or different minis give different buffs. I would think the latter is more likely, as the buffs given by miniatures could mimic food buffs where players can find the right buff for their build. The problem with this is undoubtedly the community will claim a small subset of buffs the best and now those mini-pets are crazy expensive while the others become worthless.

If all minis gave the same buff, then it would be interesting if they improved Magic Find. Players would then have these magical little minis helping to find better loot. With this and, to a lesser extent, any other buff they would give, it quickly becomes a negative. It wasn't being glad that you have the extra buff; it becomes an expected buff resulting in a failure if you forget to summon the mini-pet at the beginning of that dungeon run, invasion or whatever the player is doing.

So with mini-pets giving an additional benefit being a bad idea, what if the annoyance of summoning them were reduced? In May I released an article of the Scrying Pool talking about town clothes. I mentioned two things in that article I want to bring up: Using a hotkey to switch to town clothes and back, which is already in game, and automatic switching to town clothes when either out of combat or in towns.

What I would like to see is a new slot added to town clothes for mini-pets. This would do a couple of nice things freeing up a bag slot the mini previously would have taken up and preventing the need for an invisible bag so the mini-pet isn't deposited to the bank when Deposit All is used.

The idea for this slot would be that whenever a player switches to town clothes the mini-pet in that slot is summoned. With automatic switching this would give zero effort to keeping a mini-pet summoned while the hotkey would give quick access to it in addition to increasing the desire for players to switch to town clothes. The mini could be designed to stay summoned or not when switching back to armor. I like the idea of them staying as players who wouldn't want to run around in town clothes could double-tap their town clothes hotkey (mine is set to 'C') and the final result would be easy mini summons. They would despawn when switching back to armor which would be good for large zerg fights where there are already many people to render without also needing to render all of these little mini-pets. If they were despawned at combat, however, that would increase the desire for automatic town clothes switching.

The only problem that comes to mind (in addition to more things to render when lots of people are around) is a possible miniature map limit. In GW1 there was a limit to how many minis could be summoned on a single map. I don’t know if there is a map limit in GW2 since I have never seen a warning say I can't summon my mini due to a limit but, at the same time, I don't often see other players with summoned minis. If there is a limit, this auto/easier summoning of minis could present a problem. What happens if the limit is reached? It would get annoying to see an error pop-up at the end of combat due to the mini limit being triggered upon auto town clothes switching.

Lastly there is polymock, a mini-game in GW1 where players were transformed into creatures for creature v. creature fights. What creatures you could turn into depended on the polymock pieces (think chess pieces) a player collected and chose to fight with. In GW1 polymock was not related to miniatures but, in an interview at the time, an ArenaNet employee said that the idea behind polymock was originally to be a way to fight with one’s mini-pets. This unfortunately was not working with mini-pets in GW1, but in GW2 it is likely, and somewhat expected, that polymock will return to this original vision of mini-pet battles and give a huge reason for collecting mini-pets. Unfortunately, in a recent interview Colin Johanson commented that polymock is not currently being worked on, so don't count on mini-pet battles anytime soon.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams really wants Scarlet's hairstyle.

I'm curious to see what happens with invasions after the next patch. The map-wide invasion of a single zone will continue after the patch, though with less frequency. The invasions are fun with full maps, but how will players know to flock to these maps without the Living World event UI? Maybe they will use the "A new build is available" text to announce Scarlet's nefarious undertakings?

As always, if you have a question for me or a topic you would like to see talked about here, comment below or tweet it to @MattstaNinja.