Curse

Raccoon · Apr 12, 2009, 01:44 PM // 13:44

Oh God Chthon I want you inside me.

I have been thinking the same thing for years. However as for beast mastery weapons, I always thought that it would be nice to have a pair of daggers tied to beast mastery that were in the shape of gloves that looked like animal paws, so that both master and pet could claw the enemy to death.

Fay Vert · Apr 12, 2009, 03:27 PM // 15:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ratson Itamar

Adding another weapon, as you mentioned yourself, the pet is a weapon by it's own right

WTB inscribable pet

MithranArkanere · Apr 12, 2009, 04:13 PM // 16:13

My only complain with pets is that they are not button-mash-friendly.

You must wait until they perform a pet attack until you activate the next one.
Pet attack should get QUEUED, so they perform them in the order you activate them. Instead being replaced all the time.

Chthon · Apr 12, 2009, 05:10 PM // 17:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by zwei2stein

1) That kind of Compression is deemed elite-worthy, see [Heal As One]. As such, it is probably bad idea to add it to common skills. PvE only, maybe...

Well, it shouldn't be. As is, no one runs pets on serious teams, in PvE or PvP, despite the availability of Heal As One. Sure, I agree that Heal As One was probably designed with the thought "pet rez bar compression is elite-worthy" in mind, but that thought is totally wrong. There's an obvious problem with the status quo, and lowering the skillslot cost of bringing a pet is needed to fix it.

Quote:

Making res skills be able to target pet is nice idea, but it would again be quite powerfull and require some tuning. For example, allow people to use all res skills on pets, but also add 5 seccond global cooldown to user (purely to make it okay-ish in PvE and hard choice in PvP)

Just to clarify, I was thinking of adding it only to a couple of the touch-range and suckier rezzes, certainly not all rezzes. Probably Renew Life and/or Restore Life and/or Light of Dwayna.

Quote:

2) Damage equation is fine. No point in making un-attributed pets stronger. Someone who wants to use pet related skills will have to invest anyway and there is not really point in allowing people to get good benefits for no investment at all. They already get physical damage generator (abuse!) and warm body with 80al and 600 hp.

Hybridization should be compromise, and it can work - see thumpers/pack hunters.

1. Thumpers/Pack Hunters are crap in PvE. One might even argue that they aren't so hot in serious PvP either.

2. I don't consider a creature that does the same damage as a 12-mastery spear or sword with only half the attack speed overpowered. Even at zero spec, the pet should do **some** damage. Right now it doesn't. Unless you're willing to dedicate a whole crapload of points to beastmastery, you're better off bringing an asura summon, vanguard assassin, vampirism, or even bone minions.

Quote:

3) That looks ... imba.

The fundamental idea is to create a paragon out of a beastmaster. That's no more or less overpowered than paragons with their unstrippable shouts. The numbers would need to be tweaked so that the quality of the party buff roughly matches the quality of party buff you can get from a paragon, adjusted for uptime ratio.

Quote:

If you want something, make effect scale with pet amount: "Calls" affect all friendly pets within earshot.

Except that encourages barrage/pet and nothing else.

Quote:

I will give you alternative content for "Party Buffs" secontion:

"Allow current party buffs also affect pets".

That means orders/aegises/chants/whatever. Why be bitch if you can make bitch work for you

That might work.

Quote:

5) Umm, no. for BM, pet is the weapon. If you want seccond, compromise and invest to seccond att line. Again pack hunters or whatever.

Indeed, there seems to be widespread agreement on this.

Quote:

If you wan't pets shine again, just make their corpses exploitable again.

And this too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MithranArkanere

My only complain with pets is that they are not button-mash-friendly.

You must wait until they perform a pet attack until you activate the next one.
Pet attack should get QUEUED, so they perform them in the order you activate them. Instead being replaced all the time.

I agree.

spirit of defeat · Apr 12, 2009, 05:17 PM // 17:17

Idea that will help a LOT but doesn't fix all:
[Charm Animal]EN 10 Cast 10:Charm target animal. Once charmed, your animal companion will travel with you whenever you have Charm Animal equipped. If you already have an animal companion, and it dies this skill will resurrect it with 10% health.
I know this is a BAD RES, but having a bad res is better then not having a res at all.
Having a pet res is half the problem. You can res it, so monk's can heal it.

FoxBat · Apr 12, 2009, 05:47 PM // 17:47

If you want something to actually be done, let's focus on simple, lazy band-aid solutions. That basically means adjusting a few skills. Anet isn't going to overhaul pets at this point.

- Never Rampage Alone - rezzes dead pet.
- Strike as One - 5s recharge for starters. Maybe a small damage bonus.
- Ferocious Lunge - useless elite that could be reworked.

The thing about pets is that they are always best supplementing a damage build, whether it's RaOing with hammers, or churning out conditions on spears. This makes for very little space for pet skills and annoys PvErs who want the "flavor" of pure pet focus and wonder why their damage is garbage. So I suggest reworking Enraged Lunge to something like:

Pet Attack. Deals X damage. If this attack hits, your pet attacks recharge 50% faster and cost 50% less for Y seconds, and your non-pet attacks are disabled for 10 seconds.

The above are the simplest. Beyond that more can be done to rework pet attacks slightly. From a PvP standpoint though pets are already fairly powerful in degenerate melee RaO builds, as well as enraged lunge condition spam in hexway, so simply buffing their interrupt abilities or attack skill damage is dangerous. A "cyclone axe" equivalent would be very welcome for PvE though.

There's nothing in the game like "mobile wards" so that takes too much effort. But maybe we could look at the pet shouts, make them spammable and apply to allies near the pet. example:

Call of protection 5e 8s recharge
For the next 10 seconds, your pet and allies near it gain X damage reduction.

Or if that's too hard, they could be adjusted to affect you AND your pet. E.G.

You and your pet get X damage reduction.

snaek · Apr 12, 2009, 06:01 PM // 18:01

[heal as one] isn't really compression, its just a greater [comfort animal].

[[heal as one] bm builds require you to bring [charm animal]+[heal as one] just like standard bm builds require you to bring [charm animal]+[comfort animal].

imo its only used a lot because, quite frankly, its one of the better bm elites.

Karate Jesus · Apr 12, 2009, 06:01 PM // 18:01

I love the ideas. If they actually do this, I might have a reason to use a pet.

And tbh, I don't get why they can't combine Charm Animal and Comfort Animal. Why would it be so hard?

Empress Amarox · Apr 12, 2009, 06:04 PM // 18:04

For some reason I thought this was going to be about mini pets. I feel let down...

P.S. Give my Miniature Mursaat Spectral Agony and call it a day.

Edit: Oh and..

Quote:

2. Change the Pet Damage Equation

The problem: Unless you sink a ton of points into beastmastery, pet damage is very, very weak. This tends to strongly discourage people from using pets in "hybrid" builds since the pet does basically no damage. So, it's "full beastmaster or nothing," and folks tend to go with "nothing" since full beastmasters aren't very good in PVE. I'm going to dedicate the remainder of my points to improving full beastmasters enough that someone would want to use them for serious PvE, but first I want to talk about making pet damage worthwhile for hybrids.

Right now, an elder pet is treated as a 17-29 weapon and beastmastery is treated as a weapon mastery. I propose the following change: A pet should function as a slightly weaker weapon (maybe 15-22 or 14-27) with pet-level * 3 mastery, plus a damage bonus of +1 armor-sensitive damage per level of beastmastery. The practical effect of this change is that a pet with no investment in beastmastery becomes roughly equivalent to a 12-mastery sword or spear guy under a decreased-attack-speed hex; and a pet with a high investment in beasmastery becomes roughly equivalent to a hammer guy with the same investment in hammer mastery.

[Edit, just to be a bit more clear. The goal of this proposal is to bring a low-spec pet's damage into line with things like asura summons, vanguard assassins, spirit of vampirism, and even low-spec minions -- all of which do more damage than a low-spec pet right now. The basic idea is that a pet should have its own mastery based on its level, and beastmastery rank should only supply a small bonus on top of that. The exact numbers can be adjusted from there.]

New GvG Meta: 8 x/R. Wanna talk about pressure?

Axel Zinfandel · Apr 12, 2009, 06:06 PM // 18:06

Rangers are not Paragons. That fact ALONE is more then enough proof as to why they DO NOT need to have buffs to party members. Stop talking about party buffs for BM because it makes no sense.

And I think pets definitly need to stay as they are in PvP, period. Buffing them in PvP would cause problems that I'm sure those people do not need.

I do agree that at this point, it's best to think in terms of Anet's resources, and what would be reasonably easy for them to do compared to a complete overhaul of the pet system.

And also, the next person to say Enraged Lunge is a useless elite gets punched. I'm happy with +80 armor ignoring damage.

Also, queuing pet attacks is a very good idea, same with making them more responsive to what target you are attacking

aapo · Apr 12, 2009, 06:19 PM // 18:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by FoxBat

If you want something to actually be done, let's focus on simple, lazy band-aid solutions. That basically means adjusting a few skills. Anet isn't going to overhaul pets at this point.

- Indeed?

Someone didn't get the memo that Guild Wars is a thing in the past. They're making a new game called Guild Wars 2. Investing hundreds of work hours to reconstruct a single attribute line of single profession with complex UI, balance, localization mechanisms just won't do. While it's understandable that you're enthusiastic about the game, you're wasting your time typing suggestions that will never be implemented.

Have you guys any idea what it's like to work on this field of industry? If you do as little as change one piece of text, you'll need to get a guy to translate it to German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and what other languages this game supported. If there's any monster using the skill, they have to check that the monster still performs correctly. If there's any dual-profession mechanisms that can potentially abuse new powerful combination, these forums will be utter ****storm of whining because PvP is broken. Simply put, it's not worth the effort to change things what OP suggested, even if ANET had budget to do so.

FoxBat · Apr 13, 2009, 12:06 AM // 00:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axel Zinfandel

And also, the next person to say Enraged Lunge is a useless elite gets punched. I'm happy with +80 armor ignoring damage.

Sorry, I meant ferocious lunge, editing. And that skill is especially useless now compared to scav strike.

Shayne Hawke · Apr 13, 2009, 12:40 AM // 00:40

Concerning the two additional points made:

I can't remember whether the "pets don't leave a corpse" change was PvP-only, or global. Either way, I can't see this directly improving pets, so I don't see a need for it to be switched back. The people who would benefit the most are the characters bringing corpse exploitation, and the only ones I can think of that do that should already have enough bodies around to use.

The attack queue is also very important, even if it's a queue of two sorta like skills are with players now: an activating skill, and a to-be-activated skill. Managing that with the player's bar might be a bit of a coding challenge, but it would certainly make using pets easier. Overall though, this change still wouldn't make pets much more powerful, so using them doesn't get much better.

Axel Zinfandel · Apr 13, 2009, 12:54 AM // 00:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shayne Hawke

Concerning the two additional points made:

I can't remember whether the "pets don't leave a corpse" change was PvP-only, or global. Either way, I can't see this directly improving pets, so I don't see a need for it to be switched back. The people who would benefit the most are the characters bringing corpse exploitation, and the only ones I can think of that do that should already have enough bodies around to use.

The attack queue is also very important, even if it's a queue of two sorta like skills are with players now: an activating skill, and a to-be-activated skill. Managing that with the player's bar might be a bit of a coding challenge, but it would certainly make using pets easier. Overall though, this change still wouldn't make pets much more powerful, so using them doesn't get much better.

It was originally changed, I believe, because pet deaths were allowing MMs to become overpowered.

I forget exactly how though.

Roupe · Apr 13, 2009, 02:53 AM // 02:53

Quote:

It was originally changed, I believe, because pet deaths were allowing MMs to become overpowered.

I forget exactly how though.

Barrage pet team.. that steamrolled hard areas/challenges in PVE and Heroes Ascent

FoxBat · Apr 13, 2009, 07:22 AM // 07:22

Barrage Pet didn't do anything in HA, but a similar thumpers + necro build (spiritway) did.

Shayne Hawke · Apr 13, 2009, 12:10 PM // 12:10

And that's exactly why I don't really want to change that back. I have a feeling that it'll just bring back an old meta rather than actually make pets a more useful option in general.

Shemsu Anpw · Apr 13, 2009, 03:27 PM // 15:27

I like a number of these suggestions it would really be nice to actually use my pet every now and again. My biggest issue is the need 2 skills just to have the pet out. Maybe a new Pet rework when menagerie comes out?

xron · Apr 13, 2009, 03:34 PM // 15:34

some really good ideas there would be interesting to see a few implemented... although I dunno whether a-net would spend the time doing so at this stage :S

Wish Swiftdeath · Apr 13, 2009, 03:39 PM // 15:39

Really pets should stay as they are.

They take little to no skill (just spam) and therefore shouldn't be as rewarding as playing more skillful templates.

Also with skills like Otyugh's cry they are either under or overpowered, that skill needs to see a nerf before we consider buffing pet damage.

I would rather anet fix the broken stuff before they break something else (Water Eles, Fire Eles, Foul Feast, various Curses, healing, party healing, deep removals, mass removals etc).

Edit: Spelling