Pet Combat is Baaaaaaaaad

Ok then, @Dreadwhisper - what should the dev's focus on first ?

 

Nothing. Get a skilled designer who can take the many parts and bake them into a nice cake. One bandage at a time isn't going to help.

That means a design document from someone familiar with the new, fun aspects of games. Chris can keep tweaking combat forever while that someone spends several months writing up what the finished product will look, play, feel like and how the many parts will interact in delightful ways. A document that sprinkles fun and delight throughout the entire process, so anyone coming in or returning falls so in love with the crafting that they just can't wait to log back in.

Then, that lead designer hands the finished document to the PROGRAMMER and short term contracted UI Artist, to implement.

Some months down the line, if the programmer can stay on target, we have a fun and delightful crafting system, the retention rates begin to rise, and the game is saved.

 

Oops, sorry, this is the pet thread. Hold up.

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Nothing. Get a skilled designer who can take the many parts and bake them into a nice cake pet system, find the fun, and make a yummy pie out of it. One bandage at a time isn't going to help.

That means a design document from someone familiar with the new, fun aspects of games. Chris can keep tweaking combat forever while that someone spends several months writing up what the finished product pet system will look, play, feel like and how the many parts skills, gear, and buffs will interact in delightful ways. A document that sprinkles fun and delight ferocity throughout the entire process, so anyone coming in or returning falls so in love with the crafting taming that they just can't wait to log back in.

Then, that lead designer hands the finished document to the PROGRAMMER and short term contracted UI Artist, to implement.

Some months down the line, if the programmer can stay on target, we have a fun and delightful crafting taming system, the retention rates begin to rise, and the game is saved.

 

lol

 

I wonder if they use RNG in the coding as well

Like, this is the correct line of code for what we want in the game

But theres a 25% chance X line of code will be inserted instead.

 

I play tamers in all the MMO's I play if possible and SOTA is by far the least satisfying.

For all of the points you put into the tree all you get is a meat shield. It does tank and hold agro ok (depending on pet) but there is no interaction apart from stacking Frenzy (which in real world play seems to have little impact on the pet DPS anyway). Then I just ignore my pet apart from the odd heal. I don't really feel any connection to it within a combat situation because all of my focus is on whatever other skills outside of the Tamer tree I am using. As a tamer I want my pet to be my focus in combat, not Fire or Blades or whatever that I have to supplement it with to feel like you are doing anything.

DPS seems ok but it is random and you have no control over it. You can't click an ability at will (dependant on cooldown) to get your pet to burst DPS as you can in other trees. There is no Knockdown, Break Armour, Leg Sweep or Coup de Grace type skills.

Comparing it to Project Gorgon for example the Taming tree has activated skills you use for your pet when you want. A taunt, some skills that do extra damage or a special attack. A skill somewhat like charge or intercept.

Lot's of bugs with regards to movement, reaction, navigation also.

I wonder also if creating all of these tough mobs that can be tamed takes away from the spirit of it for more casual players (or any of us really). There will be many pets that are not tameable for lower AL players. Maybe pets that are easy to tame but can grow into the finished article would be better (keep the tough ones as well maybe).

At the moment it just feels like an XP expensive cosmetic tank. Maybe that is the idea.

One big issue I forgot is itemisation. You can't get taming focused crafted armour I believe and the Taming artifacts only have taming skills on them (no stats). You need to use some of the artifacts or the pets are less tanky, which is their only good point, so you lose out a lot in focus, intelligence, strength, damage etc. Your whole build centres around a pet that just tanks and your other skills that require strength or intelligence or dexterity or anything else are weak because of it.

 

Well there's two aspects being discussed here.
One is basic functionality (sending pet in to attack, the speed at which pet engages, pet aggro and skills)
The other is actually making taming more dynamic than 'send pet, wait a minute, shoot it'.

The first - basic functionality - is kinda there. Its clunky. Its awkward. It needs fixing.
The next - making taming an attractive yet balanced skill tree that is fun to use with pets being more diverse - is a much larger overhaul.

The main reason why I stay away from pets in Sota now is that with the exceptions of very long fights, 99.9% of the time I have killed whatever I'm trying to kill before the pet even closes half the distance. Making them utterly pointless. If anything, pet going haywire, aggroing stuff, tying stuff down across the room, etc. makes them do more harm than good.

Tying the pet to the necklace slot and requiring focus basically means that most people are going to pair 'taming' with archery, since taming it with any flavor of magic is unappealing since you lose the warlock chain ( a biiiig source of attunment) and significant amount of focus. (bard skills also scale off focus). So you see a load of tamer/archers but not many tamer/other things.

We went from pets being "totally overpowered" in the early days, with people stood around on a CP chatting while their 8 spiders tore stuff up,
to a long period of "totally pointless" don't bother with them at all
to now - awesome, my bear/boar/scorpion can tank the dragon while I slowly pewpew it to death, assuming I can get it to engage the dragon before I die in a ball of fire.

The lowest hanging fruit really is - increase range at which pet will 'go bite it' and increase gap closing. That would fix a large part of the problem.

The larger picture - pets having variety, usability, utility, etc. can come later as the system matures. I've had great experiences with pet classes in other MMOs that all add their own flavor to it (Age of Conan necromancers with their armies of undead, etc. Everquest 2 has many classes that get a pet of some sort and they all play differently,your typical summoners get tank/dps pet variants but there's also channelers with their constructs that are completely unique in how they work (its more a catalyst for the caster), and various other classes get permanent pets that do different things, i.e. mystics get a pet that applies buff to the team when it hits stuff. EQ2 beastlords, which actually go and tame animals, have synergy with the pets, the pet creates openings for special attacks, that sort of thing. Illusionists get pets that are a clone of themselves, and so on.) They manage to be fun and satisfying to play without making you gimp yourself, sacrifice gear slots, deal with pet permadeath. etc. You can bind 'pet attack' to a key or hotbar and when you press it, the pet either immediately leaps into action or you get immediate feedback that you're too far away. When you want the pet to disengage? Simply press the follow button and pet comes back to you (and whatever was hitting it, follows it). Pets can also be set to auto assist or auto protect the caster. basic functionality that all works has allowed a huge amount of variants in what pets can do and different types of pets for different archetypes. Pets don't just need to be mobile meatshields, and they don't just need to be "crappy dps supplements ."

 

That is the main gripe - Basic functionality


You got

Pet doesn't follow you around properly

You can't target something without auto-shotting it

You can't send the pet in to attack

You can't drop aggro


Now that's about as basic as pet combat gets.

How can ALL of those be in a broken state in a modern video game?

TBH I am beginning to suspect it may not be from lack of time or effort lol



At any rate, MIGHT want to consider having this in working order in the off chance someone downloads this game and wants to play a tamer


Imagine if just one of these was broken in a popular video game lol

 

Wait..... your six stack of immulation last 8 to 9 minutes and your specced???? wtf. how high are your levels?? mine last 49 minutes or so....

 

I want to touch on something no one has mentioned and a reason why @Chris said early on he didn't want to create powerful pets. He did not want to create a system where people HAD to choose a pet, the pets were an "I win" where you release them "like the spiders" on the CP and you sit back and drink your coffee and eat your donuts while they kill everything.

Ok...... That was BEFORE you came out with specialization and at the time I did not fully agree with it but It made some twisted sense but...... We have specializations now and you can ONLY pick 2 trees to specialize in.

If someone chooses taming as one of their specializations what are they getting vs what are they giving up?

getting a pet that can have 2 to 3 thousand maybe more hitpoints (mediocre cool) can't really put out a lot of damage when compared directly to ANY other combat tree, can tank relatively decently most single targets taking the aggro off the player (assuming you take the taunt skill high enough and don't deliver to much actual damage to targets) can't taunt to save the players life pretty much ANY mobs cause can't really hold aggro, a pet that doesn't really listen to you as described by those other post (yes sure you tweaked their response time and its kinda noticeable but not enough)

What your giving up... Specializing in an actual combat tree. the taming tree is a "combat tree". pets do nothing else except engage in combat.... poorly. compare the taming tree directly to ANY other combat tree and the taming tree falls horribly short. The pets only saving grace at the present is that they can sorta tank bosses but you take those 200mil plus skill points and place strategically in the proper place and do the same job better by far taking that ONE savings grace away from the pets making them useless. (I'm saying that as a tamer who is dumping a few hundred mil into the tree. I understand I'm not getting the best deal here...)

The point. The taming tree is a combat tree period. Please don't try to call it a "support tree". Its not by any stretch of the imagination. It's a combat tree and as such should deliver the equivalent amount of damage out put as at the very least, the weakest combat tree we currently have. I could spec in fire and air and have the full damage capabilities of both of those trees or I can specc in polearms and earth and have the full damage capabilities of those trees. I can specc in any 2 combat trees and have the full damage capabilities of those trees without giving up much.... unless I choose taming.

Since specializations are a thing now... we need to move past the notion that taming is this cute tree where you can tame stuff and they follow you around and maybe dance on command and start to think of them as full fledged combat option. a person (if specced in and geared for taming ) should be able to deal with the enemies on the field of battle using ONLY his pet just like if your specced in fire, you can deal with the enemies on the field of battle using ONLY fire, or earth, or air , or .... you get the point.

Until you start to think about things from THAT perspective, I don't have much hope for taming. You can keep creating new things to tame but if you don't fix the core of the system and the core understanding of what should be possible from a fully specced and geared tamer, it will be wasted time. You would be better off NOT releasing any new pets and just flesh out the current actual system with the current pets. My opinion @Chris . I'm tagging you in this hoping you actually read it but to be frank, I have my doubts if you actually do read it. At any rate, that's my opinion. Take care bud......

P.S. one of these previous post made a great point of explaining how each pets should be good at specific things. NOT like it currently is where it doesn't really matter what pet your using. they kinda all do the same thing.....

 

Thx @ShurTugal , my bad .... I corrected it to 48 mins

 

Along with a lack of interaction and itemisation regarding what you lose having to wear Tamer arti's, I think you hit the nail on the head. As a combat tree it is better to just put the points into almost any tree and do much better DPS. Apart from the odd boss where the pet is an ok tank, the vast majority of the combat situations are much more efficiently handled by DPSing stuff down as fast as possible. As it is at the moment I am going to cave and try archery as nothing else really seems to work very well.

I think many MMO's struggle with pets though. There is a feeling that because a player has an extra body available to it, there needs to be certain restrictions on power that often don't play out as expected in real world gameplay.

I'd like to see another tree that supplemented taming and also summoned pets. Include activated abilities for different types of damage, an attack that increased DoT damage for spiders and bleed attacks for other pets, AOE taunt, maybe an AOE attack or 2 (not talking Fire mage level of AOEing but at least viable for a few mobs around the pet). Differentiate more between a tank pet and one that is lightly armoured but higher DPS. Lot of work for the devs though but would be nice and I guess you could add these skills into the Taming tree anyway and allow players to go all in on the one tree.

 

This has always been my hope for the taming tree. Great write up.

 

The reason for speccing taming vs another tree is simple

It allows you to bypass most of this game's junk combat mechanics


No need to do things like

Stand around Pre-combat buffing with healing grace, dodge, blablablablablabla

No need to ensure all these crappy little re-castable buffs don't expire from your nameplate during combat

No need for tedious manual stacking or charging of skills

And many other things of that nature


Taming allows you to almost engage in combat like you would in other games with tons of players and fun, well designed combat

Well, it might if you could send your pet in smoothly in the first place etc etc


This is what other games combat looks like

Quick cast Flurry - 2 minute cooldown
"LOL I just melted that player/mob"

This is what Sota combat looks like

Manually stack flurry / hold button down for a few seconds - then do it again xx mins later when it expires.
"Wow I've been able to maintain consistently high yet utterly boring dps for the last 5 minutes"

 

This is actually the main reason why I kept looking at taming as an option.
Having levelled every combat tree and magic tree at one point or another, combat basically drills down to exactly what you describe:
a) stand around buffing for a while
b) engage mobs and beat them down, or set them on fire and run around in circles
c) if a boss mob, engage and run around it in circles staying ahead of its animation time to avoid any damage.

That's it for tactics. Do the dragon dance, do the troll dance, or the cabalist waltz lol.

In fact, c) is the only way to tank anything in this game anymore, since some of the "harder" bosses can 1-shot even a well geared player if they get a lucky hit, which basically ruins your day. Don't get me wrong, turtling up in heavy armor and taunting everything can be a thing in group mass-mob-killing play, sure. But never have I ever gone to kill the dragon or the troll or the whatever with a group and had the main engager stand there in tank gear. Its always hop hoppity hop spin the boss.

Taming offered an alternative: Engage big thing by having pet tank it. Its just simpler. When it works. Also prevents a lot of gear damage I reckon. Sure, you still need to buff, but recasting all the crap that lasts 30 seconds isn't going to get you killed if you miss it. It was an attractive choice for the less button-mashy of us. Except of course that giving up neck slot means pretty much the only thing I can do with taming is archery. Can't pair it with other things for various reasons related to the gear/focus penalties and mob engagement issues. I had a fun time with tamer bard despite the focus penalty before bard got nerfed to oblivion (pet grabs aggro, and I sing to the things...) Honestly, giving up a specialization to have a mobile meatshield should be enough.

But as it stands, its simply too frustrating to use. The number of times I've gotten into trouble because pet decides its going to run off and do..whatever its doing over there while my poor alt over here, who is geared in such a way to make the pet stronger, is getting pummelled, are beyond counting. The most often heard phrase is "where is my pet" or "what's my pet doing". Because of the specialization limit, and no way to change specs or builds on the fly (many games, in fact most, have build alternatives) a lot of the time joining a group, the first thing you'll be told is to put pets away, because they wreak havoc with aggro, pulling, etc. and usually end up slowing groups down. So I've put all my eggs in the taming basket but if I join a party I'm pretty useless.

So, they are unreliable solo, unwanted in groups, and cripple your ability to do anything else.
About the only thing I'd want taming for now is engaging what I call "bullsh*t mobs" that have stupid 1shot mechanics, and I simply don't spend enough of my playtime doing that to lock up one of my specs in taming. And of course its worthless without specializing.

 

Out of curiosity

When people make video games, is there a job category for people who specialize in making combat? Like there are for the visual artists?

Did they forget to hire this guy or something?



They've been tweaking combat with this thing and that thing for years now,

How can the basics like targeting, aggro and all that still be broken lol


Isn't that stuff put in as early game framework?

Or at least realize it's broken at some point and place priority on fixing it first before moving on to things like balancing classes/skills etc


So much of this combat stuff looks like it can be easily fixed

They should bring in someone who knows what he is doing on a temp contract or something to look the game over and make suggestions

Then at least the basics would be in place and all they'd have to do is balance things from time to time or add a couple new skills for expansions etc


Would seem to be worth the expense because then you could start having all the proper instances / battlegrounds etc that appear in other games of this type

 

I would like to make a suggestion as well

Equip a bow, Turn Auto-Attack on, Summon your pet and teleport to Krul

Then do a run of the instance. Make sure to explore the hallways.


You can open a map or something and see "Area not found"

and shrug it off to oh maybe its a new zone or something they haven't had a chance to get to it


There is nothing you can think of to excuse the Krul experience

It's just "Wow this game is terrible"