Fixing enemy-reliant summons

[Night]

Regarding powers which require an enemy to be in a certain state in order to summon a pet. Mainly, Haunt from Darkness Manipulation and Dark Extraction from Warshades' Umbral Blast. Starting with Haunt: it requires the target to be alive at the end of the animation, otherwise it doesn't summon the two Shade pets to help you out. It's super easy for your target to die with damage flying left and right in a big team, even if your target is a boss, then the power goes on cooldown with nothing happening. For Warshades, their pet summon, Dark Extraction, requires a defeated enemy target, which unless you pay close attention to your targets in the heat of battle, the corpse can fade away during the summoning animation with no results and eating up the power's cooldown as well.

 

I think Thugs Mastermind's Gang War works on the same mechanic, also requiring your initial target to be alive to continue summoning the set number of Posse, and if so, that power would require a fix as well. Hell on Earth from Demon Summoning could also receive a more reliable treatment, despite depending on one of your pets to remain alive through the duration of summoning the tiny pets instead of the enemy.

 

As for fixing it, I'd suggest removing the target reliance once the power activates. Summon the pet earlier in the animation, or at the very start of it since the pets have a brief animation where they can't interact or move themselves when they're brought into being anyway. In the case of Gang War, you could even have the Possee spawn around you as they run in to help over time instead of spawning on the target. I don't know how it works in the spaghetti code, but I hope it'd be doable. Perhaps it could be solved by making them work like the Dominating Grasp's Fiery Orb pet summon proc that spawns the pet on you upon power hit regardless of enemy's state of existence.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Night

[Greycat]

Warshade-wise, it's worse during an invasion, since the bodies (as I recall) are set to vanish more quickly. (Might be just zombies, might be all, I don't recall.) So, yeah. I'd love to see "you started on a valid target, the power works."