Taming missed the boat

After I unlocked the skills, I was disappointed to see that none of them are active, they are all essentially:

More XP = stronger pet

/Facepalm. You could have just made Combat Training more powerful.

Taunting should certainly have been an active skill, as you don't want every pet to be a tank.

That alone would have sent the interactivity level of taming through the roof, as the only other interactive part of it is "Right Click to Attack" and the occasional heal.

While I see there are other tamers that are happy, I ( one of my specs is Taming ) don't see how this changed anything other than the pets effectiveness. More XP = Strong Pet is not interesting or interactive, it is just handy. Great, pets are stronger, but the play experience has not changed at all.

 

You realize that this is a first step of the taming revamp, not only have they added passives, but more taxable creatures, and taming artifacts. They will be making skills for the creatures in the future. They need to be careful with balance when adding a skill bar to gamer creatures otherwise everyone would be a gamer in order to get the extra skills from the tamed creature.

 

Even worse, the only way to level these up is by healing.

Adding 4 almost identical skills and 1 that should most definitely be active that is not, is not a good first step.

Great about more creatures. Great about artifacts. It's still "More XP = Stronger". Still "Very little interactivity". And still "Raise all the attack skills by using healing, the only active skill (or rez)".

Missed the boat.

 

Hold on, don't know why I'm bothering taking my pet into combat, I'll just level him up here by repeat healing him. Looking for speed bugs.

 

Taming is a viable option now. The reason Chris didn't add active skills as he doesn't have anyone to work on the effects for active skills this release. Passives don't need any effects so he's able to code them himself. So we get artifacts and passives that make taming a viable skill while we wait for the rest of the taming revamp. It's an awesome release for tamers!

 

Well, I'm glad Viable is the only bar you're holding them to then I guess this is a win.

As a tamer as well, I would really have liked to see (strictly talking skills here) more effort put into designing interactivity and interesting trade offs into the system.

No animations is not a legitimate argument. There are reused animations already, pick one from the long list and go with it.

Leveling up everything except aggro is a no brainer. Zero interesting decisions there, just a lot of Heals spam.

Aggro is the saddest part, a real loss of potential interactivity. Leveling up aggro is a one time decision, do I want ALL of my pets to tank, every time, or not?

All three combat skills could have just been folded into Combat Training. That could have been beefed up, made more viable, and been done with it.

Why do I care that 3 redundant skills were just made, rather than just beefing Combat Training? Because now we're stuck with it, and it makes building a more interesting system later less likely. The devs are going to look at the tree and go "It's already full of so many skills, even though four of them are the exact same skill, adding more is going to just make a mess."

Anyway, too late now.

 

The new skills were added to allow for taming artifacts to be made. Cooler stuff is coming for taming, for now this makes me very happy!

 

Strange that they would need to make a player skill in order to have access to your pets Speed.

Anyway, I'm glad you're happy.