Nexus Clash

Combat / Combat support are the liveliest bits of Nexus Clash. So it would be nice if Petmasters felt like they had better options for contributing. (Something that has good leveling, contributes to combat, and feels useful in T3).

- Any combat tree. With the exception of spell casting as a Elementalist combat trees feel... extra for a petmaster. They don't contribute to, and aren't central to your main source of damage - pets.
- Alchemy, levelling via Alchemy is slow. And it'll be even worse with SHs turned off.
- Infusion, levelling via Infusion looks hella slow (2AP per XP).
- Repairs, not enough "useful" repairs to really grind exp. Plus PMs are kinda CP hungry and tend not to go repairs when the crafter classes have it much better in hand.
- Other non-combat, yes it exists, but they are generally not combat applicable (books) or don't give xp (barricades).

Here are some ideas many of which are dumber than others

More synergy with pets/combat trees:
- You can control who your pets attack by having your attacks apply e.g. "targeted by".
- You attacking gives your pets a small boost for a short duration (1m?)
- Your martial prowess makes pets better somehow (you are better at directing them?). Maybe replacing grafting/prayer. Or maybe keep them but make prayer less chancy and have your martial prowess matter. Or maybe have it always apply but only to the dinkiest pets (Imp, Aethersprite...???, Will-o-wisp)
- Pets as thrown weapons. You can throw pets at enemies (maybe only ones you can summon 3+ of, or maybe just the dinky ones again). This causes that pet to lock onto that enemy (as if they had attacked you) and does some amount of damage and maybe damages the pet.

Pets as findables:
You can find pets as consumable items somewhere. (There are no petstores so let's say police stations or something). You can use the item to summon an animal (like a dog). You can only have one dog at a time.

Move T3 pet buff skills into T2. So e.g. ap/mp/hp/damage increase due to stuff like Soldiers of Might, Favor of GNak, Summon Ghoul are consolidated into some T2 skill/skills that buffs pets.

Pokemon:
Make a smol pet that can be taken at T1 or T2. Subsequent skills in T2 and/or T3 upgrade the pet.
E.g. at T1 you can take a "small mote of light". This has some very subpar pet stats.
At T2 you can upgrade this to a "white/grey/black orb". This has somewhat subpar pet stats
At T3 this becomes whatever there is today in T3 (since the mote/orb is sorta like an egg which is hatching based on what path you take). And can be like pre-reqs to T3 pets (like maybe on entering T3 you get a choice of one 30CP pet skill to get for free if your class has a pet skill). Assuming pets are T1(10CP) and T2(20CP) this balances the CP costs (though it does shift 30CP from T3->T1/T2). Alternatively one pet skill per petmaster class is just 30cp cheaper (and requires the T2 skill).

Pokemon option 2:
Move first pet of a pet trees to T2. Ex. Judgemaster, Aethersprite, Hellhound, Tentacle, Skeleton, Will-o-wisp (maybe each of the 30CP Elementalist summons, but maybe not as Elementalist has spells as a very viable T2 option). The first skill restricts the number of summons to e.g. 1 or 2. This restriction is released upon purchasing upgrades to these pets in T3.

I was musing on this when A Cat was talking about petmasters being topheavy, and I think having some form of pet summonable in T2 could be interesting, probably the Imps/Wisps/Sprites since those pets are fairly weak without all the upgrades that exist for them.

Another thing is that petmasters have slower levelling in T2, but they are one of the fastest T3 summoners, especially in a faction. But yeah making sure there's at least 70 + 180 cp of stuff to take in T1/T2 is something that should happen. I don't remember WM having that problem so probably need to look at the others more

I am all for that

I guess WMs have a bigger incentive to go a combat tree (because they can get ices out of them) and their thrown innate looks like it can actually do damage. Still doesn’t look amazing imo but definitely has more going for it than lich/ls.

Lich boneswords seems a little why when you can accomplish ~the same effect with Zombies.

LS verdant sling - my interpretation is this does 7-9 damage period which… sucks? (Can’t even break a door in one hit with that )
LS keepers crook also seems a little why. Like sure, you can assassinate wild PMs. But once you get into factional warfare your damage through forts is… questionable at best. And if you need someone else to be inside to take down forts that person can probably either tank down the pets or assassinate the PM themselves anyways.

Also it’s not like petmasters don’t have skills they can buy to fill out 250cp without a combat tree (dodge tree, stamina, tap ley line) but it’s all utility stuff that eventually helps when you reach T3. But the curve would feel a lot nicer if you got more pet stuff in T2 and then had the dodge tree compete against T3 pet upgrades instead of having like half of all petmasters picking up the dodge tree for lack of anything else to pick.

oh my god it's come full circle again

i swear there's got to be some grave rolling going on right now

ignore my reminiscing 'kay thanks

advanced raid roles only develop in t3 and aren't really workable outside of that

it'd be a complete nightmare to work out t2 pets or god forbid t1 ones and the end result is just that a pure-pet focus summoner takes the longest to get to t3 (snrk)^

the flipside is that summoners can have some very explosive t3 progression so when they do get there it's a ball

The HoZ discussion elsewhere reminded me of why LS feels even more top-heavy than before.

You used to be able to take HoZ/HTT as a LS in T2. But that has been moved to T3. So for LS once you're done picking the "mandatory skills": Judgies (w/o Divine Interdiction), HoZ, Wings and Caretaker's tree, you've chewed up all but 100 of your level 30 CP. With that you pretty much can only pick up one more pet (Aether's w/out Brother's Bond doesn't count) or Cultivate Grounds/Ley Sculpting. Which means at level 30 you get to pick between "titan pet" or cultivate grounds/ley sculpting (or any other pet)

By comparison every other PM can get at least their "main" pet, plus their "titan" pet, along with their "mandatory skills" and have enough CP to buy Cultivate Grounds/Ley Sculpting at level 30.

The main problem here imo with LS compared to the other classes is HoZ (getting rid of it puts LS more on par with WM although it looks like Lich and Elementalist come out ahead on bang-for-CP at least to level 30). I think it would be a lot less bad if HoZ was offensive-only. But the whole "your pets look away as any good/neutral proceeds to shoot your face off"-thing made HoZ (and HTT although LS can no longer get it) kinda mandatory for LS.

Yea I can definitely see how T2 pets might difficult to add.

But like you don't need T2 pets to make PM T2-life nicer. For example I really like Elementalist spell familiarity contributing to pet damage. So like more of that for the other PMs would be cool and potentially less game breaking.