Patron Pet summoning does not replace existing effect.

[Ratch_]

Filing this under bug reports although, there is potential for this being a suggestion and/or feedback instead.
 

Patron pets last for 240s, and at the end of that they desummon. In the instance your power recharges before the 240s mark, if you use it again to replace your patron pet, instead nothing will happen and your power goes on cooldown. Dark Servant does not have this behavior, and it would be a HUGE QoL change if patron pets were to adopt the same behavior as Dark Servant, ie. "Replaces Existing Effect" vs the current "No stacking and new effects ignored".

Thanks

[Hedgefund2]

I'm going to shamelessly necro this because I was about to write this up but wanted to see if someone had already reported it.  The answer seems to be yes.  I just want to nudge this some.  It's quite frustrating, especially if your pet dies and you resummon before the 240 seconds for the prior pet expires.  There's no way to know what this countdown is and when it will be safe to resummon.  

 

I really hope this goes into a queue for fixing.

Edited July 7, 2023 by Hedgefund2

[tidge]

It's hard to tell from the video, what I *think* I saw was:

1. A patron pet was out/summoned (i.e. 'not dead')
2. The summon power recharged while the pet was still alive
3. The summon power was clicked while the pet was still alive
4. The pet died when its original timer (from previous summons) expired, frustrating the player because now they have to wait the whole cooldown period again.

If this is what happened: It's not a bug, as it is the default way many pet (not henchmen) powers work. This is particularly noticeable with Crabberminds: if you have summoned 3 Spiderlings (*1), 1 dies and you resummon to get the full roster of 3 again, all three will expire when the original batch go kablooey.

 

This is different than how henchmen work, and obviously this is not observed on other pets that don't have an inherent self-destruct timer. If the new summons destroyed all of the (remaining) original pets (like how respawning a FFG before the old one blows up gets you a brand new one) then we wouldn't see this. A potential workaround is that the controlling player could create a macro to toggle between destroying the old patron pet and summoning a new one. (of course, macros won't show cooldown timers)

 

I suppose it is fair to make a suggestion that this be changed (to force destruct then summons), but I don't think it is a bug.

 

As a practical matter: this is only observed for players that have an embarrassingly huge amount of global recharge... and whose patron pets don't get defeated before they would naturally expire... so it feels like a 'first-world problem' to me. YMMV. Without considered potential (enemy) slows; whenever I have a patron pet in the build I try to have just enough global recharge so that the patron pet summon power is a couple of seconds shy of (what might be called) 'perma'... specifically to avoid this potential frustration.

 

(*1) I suggest Spiderlings is the easiest to observe this phenomenon because the cooldown for Spiderlings is inherently short enough that slotted recharge plus global recharge bonuses can easily have the power recharged before the Spiderlings self-destruct by themselves. IIRC the Disruptors have the same timers as the Patron pets.