Doubts about the ranger

[Duneror]

Hello everyone,

I come from playing in Pillars of Eternity with a Ranger, it is a class that i like very much, having a pet is something that i love, however, in the middle of the game, my "wolf" began to be more obstacle than a help. ... dies too fast, his accuracy was not too good and, most worrisome, he used to get caught on the road to the enemies.
My question is this: has the pet improved in Pillars of Eternity 2 compared to the previous game?

If the pet has not improved, what type do you recommend for a character 100% focused on distance damage?

[Wotcha]

The easiest way to simplify pet management for a ranger is to go Ghost Heart. That makes your pet into a summon, with a very fast cast time, a very long duration, and a moderate summon targeting range, for 1 bond. This is so, so much better than it sounds. You get, starting from level 1 and requiring no ability point investment, the ability to effectively short-range teleport your pet, while simultaneously healing and dispel all CC from it, even bringing it back from death if it had died, just for 1 bond. At lower levels, the bond cost is a little painful, but eventually it gets trivial in comparison to what you get for it.

There are a couple of very minor downsides to Ghost Heart. It combines poorly with summoning classes because a given character can only have one summon out at a time (so a regular ranger could have their animal companion and another summon, but the Ghost Heart pet counts as the summon itself). There are a couple of metagame things where a meat pet is handy but those are hard to describe to a new player. And the summon duration is very long but not infinite. In a very long fight, an animal companion might keep going after the point you ran out of Bond to keep the summon up. But that’s almost more theoretical than practical, because that’s a VERY long fight indeed, and it would be exactly the kind of fight that a regular animal companion might easily die early in.  

[Boeroer]

Due to the new Penetration/Armor system I think that at least bear and boar are more sturdy than in PoE. If you pick "Resilient Companion" that is. The bear has +2 AR on top which is a lot - and the boar regenerates a bit health every 3 secs with no time limit.

Both are more likely to get in the way or get stuck though because they have bigger models and ground circles. But in Deadfire there's also a push mechanism which helps with with pushing party members aside if you want to get through.

Also the animal companions do less base damage than in PoE. Unlike PoE the base damage doesn't scale with level but instead they get a scaling additive damage bonus (like a weapon gets when you upgraded its quality from normal to fine etc.)

But they have some more interesting abilities. For example their Takedown attack can get upgraded so that the next attack on that enemy get +100% damage. Like a Backstab for Rangers basically. And so on.

Rangers have their own healing and resurrection abilities for their Animal Companions.

[Elric Galad]

It also depends on which PoE version you've played.

In PoE1, pets were greatly improved since version 2.0. So maybe your experience date back from this time and this is the reason you found it weak.
I don't remember having troubles to keep pet alive since this time, given you shouldn't play it as a tank (more offtank or flanker).