Pets are cool but awful ??? [SPICY]
Re: Pets are cool but awful ??? [SPICY]
As someone who mains a Lightspeaker, Wyrm Master and a Lich it's been incredibly boring. I spend all day building pet walls to watch them vanish in a raid, or to donate endless amounts of pets to Elysium. Next season I'm definitely trying something else. I wish I could give good, actionable feedback. Sorry about that.
Re: Pets are cool but awful ??? [SPICY]
I feel that pets are necessary part of the game to create some difficulties for raiders. Many (most?) raids are done without active defenders, and the only defense is from pets. Without pets, the only goal of an efficient raider is to maximize your damage per ap, and there's no reason to make any other build.
Without pets, raiders wouldn't need to pause for tanks to grab agro, or be as selective in their targets. Raids would be over and done even faster than now, severely limiting the chance for an active defense.
If pets are going away, I think you need to rework raiding to make active defense much more common. Two ideas:
1) Make it so that a ward tap not only pings the defending faction in game, but there's also a bot that pings their discord channel.
2) Change wards to not be damage based, but time based. As an initial suggestion, have it be so that every 200hp of current ward strength translates to 10 points of defensive capability, and each attacker causes a point of defense to drop every minute. An attacker needs to initiate a ward attack and stay in place, not hidden or invisible. So, a 1000 ward that is under attack by 5 raiders will fall after 10 minutes, giving the defenders enough time to see the notification and get an active defense ready.
Without pets, raiders wouldn't need to pause for tanks to grab agro, or be as selective in their targets. Raids would be over and done even faster than now, severely limiting the chance for an active defense.
If pets are going away, I think you need to rework raiding to make active defense much more common. Two ideas:
1) Make it so that a ward tap not only pings the defending faction in game, but there's also a bot that pings their discord channel.
2) Change wards to not be damage based, but time based. As an initial suggestion, have it be so that every 200hp of current ward strength translates to 10 points of defensive capability, and each attacker causes a point of defense to drop every minute. An attacker needs to initiate a ward attack and stay in place, not hidden or invisible. So, a 1000 ward that is under attack by 5 raiders will fall after 10 minutes, giving the defenders enough time to see the notification and get an active defense ready.
Re: Pets are cool but awful ??? [SPICY]
I have a lich and a wyrm master. I enjoy both of them even if the gap between them in terms of effectiveness was somewhat pronounced until the recent WM changes. (I don't want to definitively make statements on the effectiveness of WM this soon after a patch with some pretty significant buffs!)
I kinda feel what SithBob said regarding pet classes, generally--there's a lot of investment involved that can go away very quickly.
At the same time, I've also been part of raids that failed because of overwhelming petwalls, and I've also been the *reason* for overwhelming petwalls.
There were some points made earlier (like, two years ago lmao old-ass thread) that PMs can print damage, to which my answer is... "yeah, I'd sure hope so, for an AP cycle (and potentially a faction's) worth of prep that they don't see the return on unless someone actively seeks them out." Hunter classes, ESes and IBs print damage too. Seraphs and the turncoat classes put out some really respectable numbies too, and you can't avoid those by just looking at the timer and leaving the building when it reads XX:XX:X4. It also doesn't go away if they tap the wrong font, but that's a whole other discussion.
After some thought, I'm feeling "remove pet decay and put in a cap on the amount of pets," tentatively.
I kinda feel what SithBob said regarding pet classes, generally--there's a lot of investment involved that can go away very quickly.
At the same time, I've also been part of raids that failed because of overwhelming petwalls, and I've also been the *reason* for overwhelming petwalls.
There were some points made earlier (like, two years ago lmao old-ass thread) that PMs can print damage, to which my answer is... "yeah, I'd sure hope so, for an AP cycle (and potentially a faction's) worth of prep that they don't see the return on unless someone actively seeks them out." Hunter classes, ESes and IBs print damage too. Seraphs and the turncoat classes put out some really respectable numbies too, and you can't avoid those by just looking at the timer and leaving the building when it reads XX:XX:X4. It also doesn't go away if they tap the wrong font, but that's a whole other discussion.
After some thought, I'm feeling "remove pet decay and put in a cap on the amount of pets," tentatively.