QoL suggestion: About Temporary (but actually permanent) pets

[RabbitUp]

I'm talking about pets like Traps: Force Field Generator or Dark Miasma: Dark Servant (except the Mastermind version). These are pets that, out of the box, have recharge equal to or lower than their duration, which makes them effectively permanent, only you have to resummon them every couple of minutes.

 

In the spirit of QoL improvement, like making anchor toggles persist if the anchor dies, how about increasing the duration to 99999s, like it is for control pets and henchmen?

Edited December 27, 2019 by RabbitUp

[Galaxy Brain]

I dig it

[dangeraaron10]

Voltaic Sentinel too, for that matter.

 

Even if most people don't take it, it'd be great not to re-summon it every minute since, at least according to Mids, has a 60 second duration and a 60 second cooldown.  I'm reading that right, aren't I?  Does the cooldown begin after the Sentinel despawns or as soon as it is activated?  

[Galaxy Brain]

As soon as its active, and you can only have 1 at a time anyways

[SeraphimKensai]

Dare I say Warshade fluff balls too? Nah that might be a little too much, but then again...

[Mr. Vee]

I'd imagine more people would take voltaic sentinel if it weren't so annoying to resummon every minute. Probably make the whole set more popular too. Don't think it'd work on ws fluffs though since you can already have multiples of those out. At some point there'd be enough of them that everything would die too fast to kill any of them, producing more corpses to be extracted til you'd eventually have a tribble situation. At that point instanced maps would be the only thing preventing city of fluff balls.

[Galaxy Brain]

Essentially, any pet that you cannot have more than 1 of and are essentially perma out of the box should just be made perma

[boggo2300]

3 hours ago, SeraphimKensai said:

Dare I say Warshade fluff balls too? Nah that might be a little too much, but then again...

you can stack Bob though (called Bob cos they bob around)

 

Though for all the other examples given I think this would be a good QoL

Edited December 27, 2019 by boggo2300

[RabbitUp]

17 hours ago, dangeraaron10 said:

Voltaic Sentinel too, for that matter.

 

Even if most people don't take it, it'd be great not to re-summon it every minute since, at least according to Mids, has a 60 second duration and a 60 second cooldown.  I'm reading that right, aren't I?  Does the cooldown begin after the Sentinel despawns or as soon as it is activated?  

Good call, completely forgot about Voltaic Sentinel. Both the Stalker/Defender/Corrupter Blast and the Dominator Assault versions are permanent out of the box with 60s duration and 60s recharge.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

love this idea +1

[Outrider_01]

So basically you want to save slots because you cannot bother to set recharge of any kind, from any IO set (was preferred -tohit back in the day), and too lazy to resummon every 4 minutes.  When again, slotting a recharge or mix will reduce the the recharge and still have that 4 minutes timer, it could back in 2 ish minutes and kill the old one.  All IOs have recharge, ACC for checked casts casts (not auto hit like tarp patch), endurance reduction, and what ever you want to slot for that pet; dark servent has heal/-tohit/various other wack abilities, ice pet could use slow if thats your preference.

 

Why not ask for permanent buffs and auto-hit 1 time at the door the aura heals which ticks 200+ every six seconds until you zone/exit ?  Auto melee that spams attacks while you watch.  Just one simple thing, cast a pet every 4 minutes at least.  MM, thats another matter....because it is the pet class and build/designed around it; though when you hit 50 the 3 redshirts die fast, the 2 guess stars may or may not die/barely make it, and that 32 pet is the main star. 

 

Those short duration, long recharge pets were nerfed that way to prevent armies until I4.  After that they tagged it single pets sans fire, you couldn't even get more then 1 pet and it would die.  Just resummon it.

[Galaxy Brain]

36 minutes ago, Outrider_01 said:

So basically you want to save slots because you cannot bother to set recharge of any kind

No, all these pets we are talking about are essentially perma out of the box and its just annoying to have to resummon them when they have 100% uptime already.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

49 minutes ago, Outrider_01 said:

So basically you want to save slots because you cannot bother to set recharge of any kind, from any IO set (was preferred -tohit back in the day), and too lazy to resummon every 4 minutes.  When again, slotting a recharge or mix will reduce the the recharge and still have that 4 minutes timer, it could back in 2 ish minutes and kill the old one.  All IOs have recharge, ACC for checked casts casts (not auto hit like tarp patch), endurance reduction, and what ever you want to slot for that pet; dark servent has heal/-tohit/various other wack abilities, ice pet could use slow if thats your preference.

 

Why not ask for permanent buffs and auto-hit 1 time at the door the aura heals which ticks 200+ every six seconds until you zone/exit ?  Auto melee that spams attacks while you watch.  Just one simple thing, cast a pet every 4 minutes at least.  MM, thats another matter....because it is the pet class and build/designed around it; though when you hit 50 the 3 redshirts die fast, the 2 guess stars may or may not die/barely make it, and that 32 pet is the main star. 

 

Those short duration, long recharge pets were nerfed that way to prevent armies until I4.  After that they tagged it single pets sans fire, you couldn't even get more then 1 pet and it would die.  Just resummon it.

i think they just they want the pet to have infinite up time instead of dropping dead at full health when its baked in timer ends.....maybe?

[Outrider_01]

8 minutes ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

i think they just they want the pet to have infinite up time instead of dropping dead at full health when its baked in timer ends.....maybe?

So would they prefer MM pets, which are permanent until they die?  Summon, Summon, Summon (all 6), Cast 3 buffs specifically for pets, and call it a day until its dead.

Or a controller/dark maisma pet....summon and don't have to buff it, not counting the buff sets as anything benifits from those.  Out the box, its ready to go with no pet specific buffs.

17 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

No, all these pets we are talking about are essentially perma out of the box and its just annoying to have to resummon them when they have 100% uptime already.

Hmm, I see what your saying.  Where controller pets nerfed to long recharge but permanent while being kill able?  Its been forever since I played a fire controller, but I am pretty sure it wasn't a 4 minute summon.

And same with dark servent but it has a limited duration with the same recharge as a controller pet, don't think it was so long either.  but its been like 15 years since I played.

Correct me I am wrong.

[Call Me Awesome]

These pets have a duration equal to the recharge of the summon without any slotting so it's fairly pointless having them expire.  It's a completely different situation than say Phantom Army which CAN be Perma with MASSIVE (+300% including slotting) recharge bonuses.  Having to constantly resummon Fluffy even though his base recharge is the same as his duration is just fiddly.

[Leogunner]

11 minutes ago, Outrider_01 said:

Where controller pets nerfed to long recharge but permanent while being kill able?

I think they've always been persistent (control powerset pets) but they were nerfed at some point to not stack (having multiple sets of fire imps/multiple jack frosts/etc).

[RabbitUp]

1 hour ago, Outrider_01 said:

So basically you want to save slots because you cannot bother to set recharge of any kind, from any IO set (was preferred -tohit back in the day), and too lazy to resummon every 4 minutes.  When again, slotting a recharge or mix will reduce the the recharge and still have that 4 minutes timer, it could back in 2 ish minutes and kill the old one.  All IOs have recharge, ACC for checked casts casts (not auto hit like tarp patch), endurance reduction, and what ever you want to slot for that pet; dark servent has heal/-tohit/various other wack abilities, ice pet could use slow if thats your preference.

 

Why not ask for permanent buffs and auto-hit 1 time at the door the aura heals which ticks 200+ every six seconds until you zone/exit ?  Auto melee that spams attacks while you watch.  Just one simple thing, cast a pet every 4 minutes at least.  MM, thats another matter....because it is the pet class and build/designed around it; though when you hit 50 the 3 redshirts die fast, the 2 guess stars may or may not die/barely make it, and that 32 pet is the main star. 

 

Those short duration, long recharge pets were nerfed that way to prevent armies until I4.  After that they tagged it single pets sans fire, you couldn't even get more then 1 pet and it would die.  Just resummon it.

Recharge doesn't change a thing, my dude, the pets we are talking about already have recharge equal to or lower than their duration, so even if with no slotted recharge and 0 global recharge, the skill will be up by the time the pet expires. So, at that point, it's just an inconvenience that you have to resummon them every 4 minutes (or every minute for Voltaic Sentinel).

 

17 minutes ago, Outrider_01 said:

So would they prefer MM pets, which are permanent until they die?  Summon, Summon, Summon (all 6), Cast 3 buffs specifically for pets, and call it a day until its dead.

Or a controller/dark maisma pet....summon and don't have to buff it, not counting the buff sets as anything benifits from those.  Out the box, its ready to go with no pet specific buffs.

Hmm, I see what your saying.  Where controller pets nerfed to long recharge but permanent while being kill able?  Its been forever since I played a fire controller, but I am pretty sure it wasn't a 4 minute summon.

And same with dark servent but it has a limited duration with the same recharge as a controller pet, don't think it was so long either.  but its been like 15 years since I played.

Correct me I am wrong.

MM henchmen and Controller/Dominator pets are all permanent. By permanent, we mean that they don't expire, but can be damaged and killed normally. (Technically, they just have a super long duration of 99999s).

 

I'm not asking for buffs, invulnerable pets, or anything like that. The powers will be as effective as they currently are, the only thing different will be that you don't have to press the button every couple of minutes to resummon your pet. This is not a balancing factor, it's an annoyance.

 

[Galaxy Brain]

First off, I kinda wanna afk in a mission for 27~ hrs to see my pet expire lol

 

Second, pets like Dark Servant / Etc practically do not benefit from Recharge to begin with since you cannot have multiple out. The only upside is to replace them faster if they die, but that is a sort of X factor to all this. The vast majority of the time they work as intended but then you have to just refresh them randomly.

[RabbitUp]

And let's not forget that pets and henchmen used to die when you zoned. And I believe the same happened with elevators, but I'm not sure. Playing MM was torture, and so it was changed. And that was as much of a QoL buff as it was an actual buff, because MM use their whole endurance bar to summon and buff their army.

Edited December 29, 2019 by RabbitUp

[Wavicle]

uh...isn't the fact that you have to resummon these pets part of the design?

[boggo2300]

2 hours ago, sacredlunatic said:

uh...isn't the fact that you have to resummon these pets part of the design?

that achieves what? apart from being annoying?  any thing else it achieves at all?

[Wavicle]

28 minutes ago, boggo2300 said:

that achieves what? apart from being annoying?  any thing else it achieves at all?

well, if you get slowed a lot it might no longer be perma for one thing.

if you happen to be held or or out of end when you want to resummon, that could be another thing

I'm not saying this change Shouldn't happen, but it should be done with careful consideration, not a casual "sure, why not"

Edited December 30, 2019 by sacredlunatic

[srmalloy]

6 hours ago, RabbitUp said:

And let's not forget that pets and henchmen used to die when you zoned. And I believe the same happened with elevators, but I'm not sure. Playing MM was torture, and so it was changed. And that was as much of a QoL buff as it was an actual buff, because MM use their whole endurance bar to summon and buff their army.

The controller tier-9 pets used to be on a timer, and died on its expiry, or when you zoned, entered a door, or went up/down an elevator. I don't remember the details clearly, but with SOs and a recharge-heavy slotting (IIRC, the standard was 3 Rech, 1 Acc, 2 Dam) with Fire Imps, with Hasten up you could get between 30 seconds and a minute of having 3 sets of imps  at once.

 

MM pets had the same restrictions; every time you entered a mission as a MM, you had to summon all of your bets, then apply each of the two buffs to each pet individually, waiting for the buffs to recharge between. Because this was post-ED, you could only get the recharge (with Hasten) down to about 40% of base, so you'd be standing around at the mission door for 3-5 minutes waiting for the MM in your team to set up -- and do it again when you hit the elevator and went up a floor. Needless to say, this made MMs the red-headed stepchild of villain ATs, because of how much they slowed down play. People would kick MMs after inviting them to team and they saw what AT they were. IIRC, along with the release of MMs in City of Villains, the tier-9 pets were made perma -- they didn't have a timer running to kill them off -- and in exchange, you could only have one at a time (Fire Imps being standardized at 3 for this purpose, being much weaker than the other pets).

 

The problem, as I recall from the dev posts, wasn't getting the pets to transfer to the new map (whether zone, instance, or floor), but that the pets became uncontrolled when they did so, and would attack everything in sight uncontrollably. This was fixed and broken several times for elevators, but took longer for doors and zoning to be solved.

[Call Me Awesome]

3 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

The problem, as I recall from the dev posts, wasn't getting the pets to transfer to the new map (whether zone, instance, or floor), but that the pets became uncontrolled when they did so, and would attack everything in sight uncontrollably. This was fixed and broken several times for elevators, but took longer for doors and zoning to be solved.

Ah yes, just how many times was the Pet AI "fixed" and then broken again?  And now we have the permanently broken AI that insists on Melee range even if it has no melee attacks.  "Why is Phantasm trying to hug the AV?  Damn, he's dead again, resummon"

[Galaxy Brain]

1 hour ago, Call Me Awesome said:

Ah yes, just how many times was the Pet AI "fixed" and then broken again?  And now we have the permanently broken AI that insists on Melee range even if it has no melee attacks.  "Why is Phantasm trying to hug the AV?  Damn, he's dead again, resummon"

TBF, this is being fixed on Beta