Umbra Beast- easy fix

[Talesin]

Currently the Umbra Beast has a 4 second recharging power in Shadowy Binds.  This power has a 2.8 second animation time and has an 80 ft. range.  It uses this power too often due to those stats, meaning it is locking itself in loops where Shadowy Binds is every other attack.  It is not efficient for a pet with 5 attack options.  I suggest simply making the recharge on Shadowy Binds to be 10-12 seconds.  It should cycle through its attacks better then.

[Psyonico]

Does it not use the other 4 powers?  Pretty sure everything it has gets used right now, and if that’s the case, why nerf it?

[Talesin]

It does use its other powers, but it tends to spam Shadowy Binds much too often.  It would not be a nerf to increase that power's recharge time because it has plenty of other attacks it can use.  It would be a buff to its overall attack flow and would be easy to implement because no complex recoding would be required.

 

For example, it has Claw Rake which has a 3 sec recharge time and a 1 sec animation time.  It has Vicious Bite which has a 7 sec recharge time and a 1.4 sec animation time.  Changing the recharge on Shadowy Binds would also tend to force the pet to move up to melee anyway.

[srmalloy]

6 hours ago, Psyonico said:

Does it not use the other 4 powers?  Pretty sure everything it has gets used right now, and if that’s the case, why nerf it?

Short-recharge power spamming is why pets were made immune to Speed Boost and other global recharge-reduction buffs. What happened was that when you SB'd a pet, it's bottom-tier attack would recharge much faster than other attacks could, so that by the time their bottom-tier attack had completed its animation and effect, it was recharged again, so the combat logic for the pet would just use the bottom-tier attack again, rather than any of the others. What the OP is describing sounds like a miniature version of this effect. I think, though, that tripling the power recharge is whacking it a little too hard with the nerf bat; I would suggest starting with a 50% increase to six seconds, letting an Umbra Beast loose with combat logging on against a harmless target like an MDC, and seeing if that corrects the distribution of attack use before bumping the recharge higher. Alternatively, changing the combat logic for pets from "use the lowest-tier attack that's recharged" to "use the highest-tier attack that's recharged" or "use the least recently-used attack that's recharged" might give better results.

[Talesin]

14 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Alternatively, changing the combat logic for pets from "use the lowest-tier attack that's recharged" to "use the highest-tier attack that's recharged" or "use the least recently-used attack that's recharged" might give better results.

I agree, your solution here would be good, but I don't know if the Devs are capable of such changes in the logic underpinning the way the game's logic works with regards to pets and all mobs in the game.

 

My recharge time solution does work.  I made a similar suggestion on another Ourodev server and they implemented the change and it worked out very well.  The Umbra Beast ran into melee more frequently (which is its preferred combat posture) and it used its other powers much more effectively.  Most other control pets have fewer powers to draw upon, so a change to the logic may not be needed to fix this one issue for this one pet.

[srmalloy]

The change in attack order preference would be a system-wide change for all pets, not just Umbra Beast, and if it works could result in the 'pet attacks not affected by recharge reduction' change being reverted if it fixes the 'spam first-tier attack' issue. But I agree that it's a deeper code change, and would require more digging on the part of the HC developers.