Pets are cool but awful ??? [SPICY]

[Lychwood]

Pets.

Super hard to balance. (get) Super OP. (rid) Makes certain classes capable of ridiculous (of) feats and XP gain not comparable to any other. (pets)

What do? If you could change anything and everything about the pet system, how would you do it?

[Leila]

I would start by having more pets that do fundamentally different things from other pets. Wraiths, as you know, were a great example of this. Their nerf made the game a poorer place, imo.

I reset Clippy, my former Lich, because I was forced to choose between being a traditional PM who sits in stronghold and waits for a tank to kill my petwall and then me, or a feral PM who sat elsewhere and... same. But I think the outcome would have basically been the same whether I was a Lightspeaker, Elementalist, or Wyrm Master. Those options are pretty lame, honestly.

I feel that pets are a tedious chore that don't provide a whole lot of payoff. I mean, Foundation summoned 200 pets for the Halloween party, and one Advocate dealt with *all of them* with minimal healing. Pets, and everything else in the game, should be fun and worth one's time. As-is, I don't really feel like they're there. For starters, I really think they need more variety and be capable of incorporating more play styles.

[Skouth]

aw shit lets go

FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES TO MOST PETS
Most pets have summon limits a la old NW petmasters and Elementalists nowadays.
Pets have gimmicks to them. Not just stat blocks, but things that fundamentally change the way the petmaster plays and people play against petmasters, depending on the pet.
SPECIALIZATIONS. Let's say you're a Lightspeaker who wants to summon a shitload of aethersprites and have them deal damage. You can do that if you purchase the relevant skills to amp your sprites into little flying holy lasguns.
More pets being immune to auras, or at least taking less damage from aura retaliation.
Give petmasters a way to direct pets that isn't just stance shifting. This is very likely too much to code, but think command groups from RTS games. Get X pets in command group 1, tell them to attack Y target. A pets in command group 2, attacking B target. Or just a mark skill that makes your pets automatically attack whoever you've marked.

LETS GET SOME DESIGNATIONS GOING BEFORE MOVING FORWARD
Titans: Big honken bois. Wheels, wyrms, necros. One per petmaster. Will have stuff that makes your whole pet party stronger or some other mechanic that interacts with it. IMMUNE TO AURAS?
Frontline: Your regular dudes. Judges, hellhounds, ghouls, wights and boneseekers. Have summon limits that depend on the pet. Usually will be the mainstay of any non-meme pet force. resistant to auras??? :O
Swarm: small bois. easy to summon, easy to mass. sprites, imps, wisps, the small elementalist pets, zombies and skeletons. Can be specialized into either support or damage. gets mowed down by auras (unless you spend cp to make them not get mowed down by auras :O)
Gimmick: what it says on the tin. tentacles, foo lions (actually no foo lions get deleted in this timeline), wraiths. just meme pets that have very special gimmicks

THEMATIC CHANGES TO PETMASTERS?!
Lightspeaker: QUALITY QUALITY QUALITY. Those few pets hit like a fucking truck and are built like brick shithouses. See a lightspeaker with three judgemasters and a wheel behind them blaring holy hymns that make you feel unworthy of being in its presence? You probably are, and you probably should get the fuck out before you get cleaved in half by those judges.
WM: Not necessarily quantity, but... ease of replenishment. WM pets won't hit as hard, individually, as LS pets, but they will be easier to get started and get going. A hellhound pack is more than a match for those three judgemasters, especially if it has a Wrackwyrm with enough Imps to feed it...
Lich: QUANTITY QUANTITY QUANTITY. Start with regular weak zombies and skeletons that grow into ghouls and boneseekers as they get kills/feed on corpses on the ground. You can only control a limited amount of ghouls and boneseekers but zombies and skeletons are fair game. Basically this will be the closest to the petmasters we currently love(?) and hate.
Elementalist: I kinda wanna make it so their pets of different elements support each other if you have a balanced composition, based on arcane concepts like feng shui but with only 4 elements. So if you have pets of all four elements in a balanced proportion they work together as an absolute unit, feng shui is auspicious, your family prospers and chi flows properly. Some dunkass killed all your fire pets? feng shui ominous, chi blockage, family fights, divorce imminent. Don't let it happen. A problem with that is how the fuck do you do mono or dual element builds like that? not fully ironed out yet.

actually this seems good enough? idk if there's much point to writing out minutiae about numbers and changes at this stage? maybe write some of the gimmicks for the pets? kinda late right now though but I'll give it some thinking about at work tomorrow and come back with the noggin full of steamy ideas

[GreatCatatonic]

+1 to summon limits. My Elementalist is nice because I can just pick up and run errands, raid, or hunt on a moment's notice because my horde is there, and I know I can't do anything more for it. Their pets' not decaying certainly helps that, and I wouldn't argue for non-decaying pets for other PMs, but even for my LS, once my horde was up, it was up, and I knew I could focus my AP on other things, outside of minimal upkeep. I could, of course, limit myself right now, but there's a psychological aspect of knowing you could have done more, on defense or offense; being limited is actually freeing in this regard.

+1 to reduced aura damage for pets. Can auras have separate player-damage and pet-damage values? 10 unholy damage auras on the most common class in the game renders pets almost entirely useless against evil factions.

--Great

[Meric]

+1 for Skouth post

Overall Id like to see both pet caps come back and decay go away. Having an Elementalist PM has been so freeing this breath compared to a standard PM.

[SignedName]

In general I think Pets should have their damage reduced but their hit rate increased. This makes them easier for lower tiers to deal with, but makes their damage more consistent (pets missing all their attacks and dying to an aura doesn't feel particularly good- I'd personally prefer tickle damage over a miss). Buffs to pets should come more in the form of HP and MP bonuses, or even summon limits, rather than damage, especially for Elementalist pets- +5 damage spread across 20 pets results in ridiculous issues with power scaling.

[SkullFace]

My £0.02 incoming via bitcoin transfer.

Decay mechanic is and always has been a bit grim. It rewards factioned play for sorceror exit PMs who can pump up their petwall with factional help. It punishes defiler exit PM whilst the shepherd exit PM enjoys a number of enhanced options to maintain a petwall. In theory balance would be easier with fixed limits such as those applied to the Elementalist.

Discord chat recently suggested that a single Lightspeaker can pump out 25 or more pets in a single session. if that's true then there is definitely something awry. Speaking as a former Lich/WM player I suspect the decay mechanic is about allowing for those edge scenarios where you can, rarely, summon a perfect storm of critters and bask in the glory.

...especially for Elementalist pets- +5 damage spread across 20 pets results in ridiculous issues with power scaling.

This statement is suspect and needs a reality check. For an Elementalist to gain +5 damage to pets of one element requires investment in 6 spells of that element. Minimum net cost is 60 CP at T3 for Enhanced Summons. For the elementals its 30 CP at T3 for up 3 lessers, 60 CP at T3 for 1 greater elemental Titan, 30 CP for up to 6 minors, 50 CP at T3 for spells and 30 CP at T2 for spells, totalling base 60 CP T3 and investing 200 CP (170/30) per element. Of the 10 pets yielded for an element the hit chances for the 6 minors are poor for the invested CP, and the minor's HP are less than unbeefed zeds/skeles such that they last as long as a politicians promise (gone in 2 aura hits). Overall this is doable for 2 elements to hit the magic 20 but it's a yield that has significant power differential / game impact.

No easy answers to this one IMO. Given that pets are currently broken to the point of laughability (ask the other PoR petmasters to confirm examples) we don't really have a fully-active petwall to baseline in-game results.

[SignedName]

This statement is suspect and needs a reality check. For an Elementalist to gain +5 damage to pets of one element requires investment in 6 spells of that element. Minimum net cost is 60 CP at T3 for Enhanced Summons. For the elementals its 30 CP at T3 for up 3 lessers, 60 CP at T3 for 1 greater elemental Titan, 30 CP for up to 6 minors, 50 CP at T3 for spells and 30 CP at T2 for spells, totalling base 60 CP T3 and investing 200 CP (170/30) per element. Of the 10 pets yielded for an element the hit chances for the 6 minors are poor for the invested CP, and the minor's HP are less than unbeefed zeds/skeles such that they last as long as a politicians promise (gone in 2 aura hits). Overall this is doable for 2 elements to hit the magic 20 but it's a yield that has significant power differential / game impact.

The issue isn't that Elementalists can't be defeated by tanks in a raid situation (properly prepared tanks hard-counter all pets). The damage bonus absolutely creates a massive power differential compared to other petmasters. They will shred any tank that doesn't have Greater Invulnerability on hand. And that's not talking about non-tanks, who will die in the space of a pet tick due to the combined damage of the pets. Which is why Elementalists sat outside and farmed kills early on in the breath. Not to mention Hydrodragons can chill targets, lowering soak, and Hurricanes can shock to reduce defense, which makes all pets more effective.

Of the 10 pets yielded for an element the hit chances for the 6 minors are poor for the invested CP, and the minor's HP are less than unbeefed zeds/skeles such that they last as long as a politicians promise (gone in 2 aura hits).

Actually, hilariously enough, all Water elementals, including the minor Naiads, are immune to ES's aura and Clockwork Cloud. So rather than "gone in two hits", they actually hard-counter two tank classes.*

*getting Arc Lightning doesn't even solve the issue, since Air elementals are immune to Electric damage. A Water/Air Elementalist (i.e. most of them) will be quite troublesome to deal with as a result.

[Klapaucius]

Bite sized contribution: if pets had more fancy targeting (like the ways spell traps are supposed to work and maybe more besides), they could lose quite a bit of direct power and still be very good.

[Patrucio]

THEMATIC CHANGES TO PETMASTERS?!
Lightspeaker: QUALITY QUALITY QUALITY. Those few pets hit like a fucking truck and are built like brick shithouses. See a lightspeaker with three judgemasters and a wheel behind them blaring holy hymns that make you feel unworthy of being in its presence? You probably are, and you probably should get the fuck out before you get cleaved in half by those judges.
WM: Not necessarily quantity, but... ease of replenishment. WM pets won't hit as hard, individually, as LS pets, but they will be easier to get started and get going. A hellhound pack is more than a match for those three judgemasters, especially if it has a Wrackwyrm with enough Imps to feed it...
Lich: QUANTITY QUANTITY QUANTITY. Start with regular weak zombies and skeletons that grow into ghouls and boneseekers as they get kills/feed on corpses on the ground. You can only control a limited amount of ghouls and boneseekers but zombies and skeletons are fair game. Basically this will be the closest to the petmasters we currently love(?) and hate.
Elementalist: I kinda wanna make it so their pets of different elements support each other if you have a balanced composition, based on arcane concepts like feng shui but with only 4 elements. So if you have pets of all four elements in a balanced proportion they work together as an absolute unit, feng shui is auspicious, your family prospers and chi flows properly. Some dunkass killed all your fire pets? feng shui ominous, chi blockage, family fights, divorce imminent. Don't let it happen. A problem with that is how the fuck do you do mono or dual element builds like that? not fully ironed out yet.

I'd actually flip Wyrm Masters and Lightspeakers. The theme for evil is individual power, but doesn't play well together. The theme for good is teamwork makes the dream work. So, for WM, I'd have them make a few unholy nightmares that they can mutate into true monstrosities, while for Lightspeakers I'd lean more into the abilities that allow you to summon multiple things with a singe action (like Brothers' Bond and Foo Lions). The skill sets already lean that way, where WMs pet-related abilities buff existing creatures (mutagenic touch) while LS pet-related abilities make it easier to maintain larger armies (Caretakers Blessing+Gift, Faunabound, Vitality of Justice).

I really like the idea of necromancers not being able to directly summon ghouls, etc, but gaining the ability to grow their zombies and skeletons into bigger things by eating people or pets or corpses (with the appropriate skills).

EDIT: Maybe a big thing for Lich pets, as compensation for them having to always be on the move and be aggressive to get buff, is that none of them have pet decay.