[Skill] Energize MP cap

[Skouth]

TLDR: You can only get X amount of mana from Energize every 24 hours because good petmasters are OP, similar to how you can only use MV 40 times
Hey you ever wonder how Good aligned factions get their petwalls built so quickly and to such gross numbers? Well wonder no more, the brain engineers at MJI (if you know you know) have figured out the secret to this despicable violation of fair play.
Enter, the Energize skill.
https://wiki.nexusclash.com/wiki/Energize
So for 1 AP (!) and up to 30 MP a lowly shepherd can siphon mana from itself to a petmaster, at no cost to the petmaster, AND GET EXPERIENCE FOR IT (!!!)
So we're looking at a petmaster who can, with enough faction support, summon 72 (seventy-two (LXXII) ) pets in one ap cycle. Now I don't know about you but with the changes to affinity potions not giving immunity anymore and the damage floor for everything being at 1, I'm not sure I can handle a petwall of that size! Maybe for 2 or 3 retaliation turns but even an IB would be pressed for health after such an onslaught.
But wait, that's not all, Good Liches and Elementalists (Elementalists to a lesser extent because of summoning caps) also benefit from that! Liches as well to a lesser extent due to the need to summon a corpse to their location (or use wights and willowisps I guess, lol)
"But Skouth" - you say, desperately trying to hold on to your perceived high ground - "what about DARK HEART?!?!?!"
I'll tell you about Dark Heart. With Dark Heart you need to use your own AP to get back a paltry 10 mana from your factionmates, and since Evil hasn't been blessed with the ability to pray mana from thin air - "BUT SORCEROR'S MIGHT" - OR THE EASE of healing that Good factions have via aethersprites, you're arguing in bad faith if you think Dark Heart is in any way comparable to Energize shenanigans, mr. Strawman. Sure, your Wizard can pretend to be an emo MP battery for you and almost die every 4 hours or something, but once SM ticks out he's not going to be immediately healed to full by the 80 Aethersprites in your SH, because evil does not have Aethersprites.
So after no small amount of rambling I hope you'll have seen what a toxic skill Energize is and will agree with me that steps must be taken to curtail this rampant aggression against game balance. What I'm proposing is a simple cap to how much mana you can receive from Energize per day, say, 100 or something. That's enough for 5 FREE judgemasters that you're not paying anything out of pocket except for your own 5 AP, and the rest is up to you, friend. Rev up that prayer button and grind it out like the rest of us, no more freebies for you. I even think that 100 is too generous but hey the numbers can be tweaked

[SaltedSalmon]

TLDR: You can only get X amount of mana from Energize every 24 hours because good petmasters are OP, similar to how you can only use MV 40 times
(I mulched the rest of the OP because its too long)

AP and MP given to the Petmaster is not "Free", someone has to spend their time giving them that instead of doing something else.

I'm going to go and repeat my rundown on how Good/Evil petwalls currently work.
If you do this change, you'll cut the abilities of Good Petmasters in half while nerfing nothing about Evil Petmasters.
Evil Petmasters get to upgrade their pets to do massive damage, while still having some swarm ability with Dark Heart.
Good Petmasters forfeit having that in turn for being able to summon massive swarms of Pets.

What abilities matter for that?
Good gets Energize, Miraculous Works, Faunabound, and Caretakers Blessing, and maybe Vitality of Justice.
By clipping Energize you're also clipping the power of all abilities that empower Good's petwalls, as they all empower each other. This will make Good Pet walls unthreatening and easy.

Meanwhile, look at evil.
They get Dark Heart, Mutagenic Touch, Summon Chain Gremlin + Ancient Trickery, Scribe Pact, and Command Thrall.
(Namm help you if the Dark Oppressor in the faction you're raiding chose to go Command Thrall, that's more titan pets than anyone can reasonably deal with all being stacked into one person. And surrender if he is active, because Terrifying Aura and Curse of Blood will destroy your Tank).

If you nerf Energize, you must nerf Evil Petwalls too. And I don't think that's the way to go. I think people like feeling powerful.

[Skouth]

AP and MP given to the Petmaster is not "Free", someone has to spend their time giving them that instead of doing something else.

This is a game where infusion is a thing and where people have made characters specifically for the sole purpose of barricading. That's it, just barricading. I don't think it's a far cry to believe someone will willingly spend their day's AP energizing and praying so they can energize more, especially given they get experience for it.

Evil Petmasters get to upgrade their pets to do massive damage, while still having some swarm ability with Dark Heart.
Good Petmasters forfeit having that in turn for being able to summon massive swarms of Pets.

"Massive damage", Jamie pull some numbers up, alright. So let's compare the humble Hellhound, with Master of the Pack with the abominable Judgemaster, with Soldiers of Might. MotP Hellhounds get 9Fire 8Piercing, which can be upgraded (at 30MP if you're lucky, 40mp if you're insane and bought Nether Grafting so you can specifically get those damage bonuses) to 13Death (good luck against revs and liches lol) and 12Piercing. They also have a chance at a crit I guess so if you're lucky and you have enough pets (you won't, because you spent the equivalent of having an extra 2 hellhounds into buffing your one megahellhound) you will consistently be hitting for 20Death 18Piercing... at a 10% chance PER >>>HIT<<< at 70% accuracy.
Bear in mind this is on a class that is easy to single out and nuke. What's the WM going to do, bleed acid on your Greater Smite for 1 point of damage?

Now for the Judgemaster, you get a 12Holy 8Impact pet for 20 mana, that's it, no strings attached. if you spend the same amount of mana as the WM spent you get 3 of them. You can also change the damage type of every single one of them for 5mp and knowing a single spell of another element (granted that's more for active combat defense). And that's on a class that is very hard to nuke down in a raid situation because, wow what the hell they can just summon up to FOUR aethersprites for 20 MP? And you can reduce the summoning costs of everything by 5 with a 60cp skill too? Damn this class is weak, we need buffs stat.

So yes, WMs technically CAN get big damage numbers at insane MP costs (MP that they can't easily recoup, you need to spend 7-9 AP buffing your hound so it'll be slightly stronger than a baseline judgemaster). The way I'm seeing it Good gets to have massive swarms of good pets while Evil gets to have a small number of megapets that can be reduced to damage floor or very close to it by a Seraph with a GInvul and Invul. Yay.

Dark Oppressor thing

If you get an active with any sort of combat skill defending a raid your raid's already on its way out. It's disingenuous to lump DOs with the worse vassal tree into this argument.

I don't know if you've done much tanking this breath but the name of the game here is numbers. What good are ten pets with big damage that still tickle your tank because he's hopped up on invul potions compared to 50 pets that are going to tickle your tank to death in 5 ticks?

[SaltedSalmon]

AP and MP given to the Petmaster is not "Free", someone has to spend their time giving them that instead of doing something else.

This is a game where infusion is a thing and where people have made characters specifically for the sole purpose of barricading. That's it, just barricading. I don't think it's a far cry to believe someone will willingly spend their day's AP energizing and praying so they can energize more, especially given they get experience for it.

I don't see the problem.
Anyone can spend all their MP/AP energizing someone, its the same as spending all your AP building cades or making enchants or infusing the ground. This hasn't been discouraged. In fact, one could say its encouraged, given the playerbase loves putting all their focus on something: Kandarin is a dev and they're responsible for around one fifth of all Transcended infusion because of one of their characters focusing on constantly infusing Cordillera.

If you want to dump all your power into a massive petwall, the choice should be there, and doing that should provide a damn good boost to said petwall.

[Pet Comparison]

Okay let me start saying something.
Nether Grafting wrecks everything.
Lets go over it.
Everyone - Apply mutations to a skeleton and watch the world burn because now their petwall is dealing 15 death damage at 70% accuracy.
Nobody can lower this down to 10% hit chance and 1 damage. Revenants are not tanks, they will be destroyed by your other pets should they try to do such a silly thing.

More specific notes on current tanks:
Eternal Soldier - 45% defense isn't nearly enough to stop 70% accuracy hellhounds/skeletons/others from biting them. They do have enough aura damage to melt Hellhounds, but that'll be nerfed in a future patch because that ability is absurdly overpowered.
Nexus Champion - Tattoo of Adaptation is wrecked because now pets are randomly dealing either their default damage type, Death damage, or Acid damage. This was NC's biggest asset and, by all rights, its gone.
Seraph - This class currently sucks and is slated for a buff. We'll see how they stack up after they're buffed.
Infernal Behemoth - This class is a bit overpowered at the moment so yes, they'd absolutely beat Wyrm Masters.
They will be nerfed though, most notably a dev is looking to reduce their Acid soak which will absolutely hurt against fighting WMs.

Bear in mind this is on a class that is easy to single out and nuke.

Imps still block attacks because smiting someone through their pets and melting 500 MP is bad.

If you get an active with any sort of combat skill defending a raid your raid's already on its way out.
It's disingenuous to lump DOs with the worse vassal tree into this argument.

The good alliance raid yesterday against RRF succeeded despite actives.
DO's Command Thrall had already been buffed before anyone started using it because I pointed out that it was weaker than usual. It will likely be buffed again if the devs still find it underwhelming, so thinking its "disingenous" that I brought it up is pretty silly of you.

Being able to rest easy during a raid is a comfort not many people have.

[SaltedSalmon]

I forgot but add Wytchfire for a easy +4 damage to your pets. Its supplemental damage, but supplemental damage got changed in such a way that if the tank gets hit with this they're taking +4 damage.
Even if they tank all that, the damage floor is increased to 2.

EDIT: I forgot about Corruptors being able to steal 5 Titan Pets, and at this point I'm unable to keep counting the ways in which Evil petwalls can get horrifying.

[Klapaucius]

So the wytchfire supplemental works with pet attacks? Can someone verify that? I assumed it didn't.

Nether grafting has a lot of potential, but honestly it's best when applied to other people's pets. WM are kinda meh otherwise and self applied nether grafts are mostly inferior to ele/lich/(corruptor) grafts.

Energize has a lot of utility. Particularly when you look at an advocate doing 1ap prayers/other Shepherd magic gen buffs. Having half the faction with the ability to focus build the petshield with little in the way of active cooperation is very strong, then once it's set up they can go back to their normal business. However, I suspect the mp gen plays a bigger part in what let's those pet shields grow quickly.

[SaltedSalmon]

So the wytchfire supplemental works with pet attacks? Can someone verify that? I assumed it didn't.

I assumed the same initially, but the wiki entry for the debuff says "any" damage, in bold.

EDIT: Okay apparently not. Wew.

Energize has a lot of utility. Particularly when you look at an advocate doing 1ap prayers/other Shepherd magic gen buffs. Having half the faction with the ability to focus build the petshield with little in the way of active cooperation is very strong, then once it's set up they can go back to their normal business. However, I suspect the MP gen plays a bigger part in what let's those pet shields grow quickly.

Quite correct, Evil's Petwall takes a bit more to build up.
Still scary when you consider that people often give factions some de-stressing time, so they don't get raided immediately after coming back.

[Nayru]

the hell is this thread

wm wouldn't compare so poorly to ls (which also got screwed) if it was still in b4 state

and yes a revo absolutely can tank and obliterate your pets if played well, but a lich (death immune) could do it far easier

nether graft is [eep]ing awful now and pretty much only exists to buff persistent pets, mostly titans, with wm's own titan type being excluded from nether mutate (which doesn't +damage your secondary mind) so yes that needs buffs

but so do all the summoners that aren't lich, if elem the least of such

the entire reason the mv cap was introduced was because of hazardous synergistic other mechanics like heartlight (which was deleted unceremoniously) and failsafing against anything similar in the future, not to gank the skill

which it still does by interacting horrendously with sm-mv chaining but well step-by-step and all that, not gotten to fix yet

Okay let me start saying something.
Nether Grafting wrecks everything.
Lets go over it.
Everyone - Apply mutations to a skeleton and watch the world burn because now their petwall is dealing 15 death damage at 70% accuracy.
Nobody can lower this down to 10% hit chance and 1 damage.

60 def es with death armor says what

More specific notes on current tanks:
Eternal Soldier - 45% defense isn't nearly enough to stop 70% accuracy hellhounds/skeletons/others from biting them. They do have enough aura damage to melt Hellhounds, but that'll be nerfed in a future patch because that ability is absurdly overpowered. stop inherently? no, but massively massively mitigate more than even 40 phase would (which was deleted)? yes, + solicit advo/conduit for more def
Nexus Champion - Tattoo of Adaptation is wrecked because now pets are randomly dealing either their default damage type, Death damage, or Acid damage. This was NC's biggest asset and, by all rights, its gone. randomly might be assuming heavy usage of this skill and a lot of damage-altering procs, you're jumping the gun here because even at the base 15 mp per this won't be all that common (and there are far better and far easier ways to ping adaption, one of which used to be hellhound/gnak/nether/hellhound/gnak/nether/hellhound/gnak/nether which is horrifically mp inefficient to do now)
Seraph - This class currently sucks and is slated for a buff. We'll see how they stack up after they're buffed. two levels in t2 for defensive stance --> two levels in t3 for defensive stance, bit more permasoak for substantially less status soak, clockwork cloud nerf down to spell aura damage.......... mmboy
Infernal Behemoth - This class is a bit overpowered at the moment so yes, they'd absolutely beat Wyrm Masters.
They will be nerfed though, most notably a dev is looking to reduce their Acid soak which will absolutely hurt against fighting WMs.9 acid = even +2 damage gnak does 1, acid blood does 1, fire immunity + 7 pierce soak = hellhound does 1 after hitting a 0, chitinous was set up in 2012 to make wm a complete non-factor and it really shows, just +2-4 damage the elementalist's titans and the ib will die, that's the gameplay now

gosh i wish i could go back to sleep field report: i went back to sleep and was out for like 13h, clearly due to this thread