UF 2nd release AA ideas

[kharthai]

Prolific Minion should be/remain a fluff AA that does minimal dps if it returns at all, if pet/swarm dps is considered too low it should be boosted on the warder (and yowl pets), imo.

[Nusa]

% of "our" dps is a flawed measure, unless you define "our", which nobody seems to do. You can say "my", which is specific, but still usually unknown to anyone but the speaker. You can say "your", which is completely ambiguious without a specific reader. But it's patently impossible for the pet to be the same percentage of dps for every beastlord. Heck, half the time, you don't even know if the speaker is a grouper or a raider, never mind how well geared they are. 15% for a bleeding edge raider might translate to 70% for a casual soloer, remembering that pet power is mostly fixed, while player power comes with weapon/aa upgrades.

I suggest speaking in actual numerical dps terms. What is it now, and what do you expect?

[Sharrien]

Prolific Minion should be/remain a fluff AA that does minimal dps if it returns at all, if pet/swarm dps is considered too low it should be boosted on the warder (and yowl pets), imo.

Why should it remain a fluff AA?  Why not get a functional dps tool out of it?

[Sharrien]

% of "our" dps is a flawed measure, unless you define "our", which nobody seems to do. You can say "my", which is specific, but still usually unknown to anyone but the speaker. You can say "your", which is completely ambiguious without a specific reader. But it's patently impossible for the pet to be the same percentage of dps for every beastlord. Heck, half the time, you don't even know if the speaker is a grouper or a raider, never mind how well geared they are. 15% for a bleeding edge raider might translate to 70% for a casual soloer, remembering that pet power is mostly fixed, while player power comes with weapon/aa upgrades.

I suggest speaking in actual numerical dps terms. What is it now, and what do you expect?

I'm not going to get into a discussion about parsing out my pronouns.  I was just trying to use Hzath's suggestion that our pet dps seemed low compared to personal dps as a way to get people talking about Prolific Minion, which I think has good potential to be a useful and fun AA.  Squeaky wheel gets the grease!

[kharthai]

Why should it remain a fluff AA?  Why not get a functional dps tool out of it?

Because there are too many pets, and swarm pets, etc, in game.  If it is remade as a significant dps boost, it screws over raiders, who are forced to either use it and deal with more lag, spam, push, people complaining about the absurd amount of pets, or not use it.  It's also a vulnerable form of dps, assuming it takes hits like most other swarms, AE ramp and such would make short work of it.

I'm fine with them bringing the AA back so people can fill their screen with fluffy things if they feel like it, but if we need dps upgrades I'd much rather them be more on the functional side.

(Also think the pets should spawn off the player so they can be "aimed" like yowl pets, instead of just spawning a mass of them whenever the warder is)

[Sharrien]

Actually, spawning off the player rather than the warder was one of the suggestions I sent to Elidroth a couple weeks ago.

I agree that it is vulnerable to ramp (unless their hp are as high as Yowl pets), but so were the pets from the fabled weapons when they were popular and so also are the pets from Attack of the Warders and mages' Host.  Not every AA is best for every situation.

Pet lag is mostly due to pet deaths/expiration which is mitigated or eliminated by turning off the journal.  I have absolutely no sympathy for people who complain about numbers of pets or text spam. The widespread use of fabled pet weapons when they were popular along with the existing mage/necro swarm pets didn't keep anyone from winning a raid after all.  A valid concern is additional push, but that is something us pet owners deal with already and I don't think that PM pets would be that much harder to manage, fabled pet weapons (assuming the proc rate is comparable) didn't make positioning any harder in my opinion.

If there are beastlords who don't like pets (???) and would chose not to use this AA and feel screwed over it, I have trouble understanding that position.  With all of our pet dps AA and extended swarm, Prolific Minion could be a real step up for us on the parsing ladder.

[kharthai]

I don't dislike pets, but I absolutely hate the sheer number of pets on raids.  I don't know anyone who still runs with journal on, but I know a fair amount of people who curse when everyone whips out their minions at once.  Even if not lagged, they typically end up on the same side of the mob regardless of the original effort in positioning them, and then you have an annoying amount of push to balance.  Yeah, we have to deal with it already.. why make it worse? 

I don't know if fabled weapons have kept people from winning raids, but pet push gone bad has surely wiped some.

As far as the parse ladder, something like the aforementioned beastlord version of frenzied burnout could also help us, while being still pet related and having less downside.  I don't know.  There are enough people that seem to want PM that it seems likely it'll make a return, but making it powerful will detract from other options we might have that'd be more effective.

Anyhow, agree to disagree I guess.

[Mazame]

Ok playing on a ranger alt they have a spell that makes a pet for 20 min that is a copy of an animal but it a tiny little thing.
the mage swarm pets are also tiny. bst pets are screen blockers. to me I think thats why ppl dislike them so much it like spell effect more ppl have some if not all turn off because other way it like looking at a dico ball.

the new wolf / cat familiars from the market place are about 1/4 the size of or pets. and 1/2 the size then our pets are shrunk so I know the grafic are in game to make our pets a LOT smaller. if they could make the size of our swarm pets all of them from the Howl to the aa or the pet proc'ed I think that would make most people happier. having 500 pets on the screen then they are 1/4 to 1/2 the size of shrunken players would mean they don't fill the screen and piss ppl off.

As a Bst I love pets that why I play a pet class getting less pets for me is no fun but making them smaller so other can play and enjoy the game I can fully support and agree with. swarm pets of any time should be very very small. on raids they add up and on raid 90% of the time ever one is shrunk so we can fit and see  so pets should be 1/2 the size of us or smaller to not prevent what were trying to do when when were asking everyone to shrink. 

[Zunar]

I really liked the idea someone had previously, giving us a new AA pet to summon, and use as an offtank.
This pet would have substancial HPs to live a while, and at death it'd cause memory blur on the mobs in it's hatelist.
Mages got something similar already iirc too?
This is useful utility imo, and it involves pets...very beastlordy hehe.

[Hamtarro]

The magician AA you guys are thinking of is not an offtank really, it is a quick summoned pet that will grab aggro and memblur the mob, giving the magician an escape route.

I tend to think that if there are SOME people on this board that say their pet can tank in Tier 7 or Tier 8 (whichever it was), then this must be possible. What is likely is that the people who don't think the pet can tank probably don't have all the mitigation/avoidance/HP AAs spent on their pet (I know I don't and I am approaching 2250AA soon). While, yes, it would be nice to have a beefy pet out of the box, I am not going to complain if I have to spend AA for it. It is our choice afterall to go after DPS or Pet tanking AA first if we really wanted it that bad.

If it comes down to it, I would rather just get the developers to work on our buffing/paragon/etc utility and that will make me happy enough. I don't really mind if I am doing 8k DPS and my pets are only 10-15% of that, because holy shit I am doing 8k DPS!

PS: If people are really giving you that much crap for the size of your pets, tell THEM to /feedback it to Sony and quit complaining to you. Worrying about the size of our pets is the LAST thing we should want a developer spending his "Beastlord Time" on.

[yravon]

The AA is called companion of neccesity.
Its nice...but i wouldnt want to copy everything over from mages.

(Altho idd like their pet dmg copied over heh)

My personal prefferance would be to make the group spire ability worthwile.
(and thats not 100 dps in days where 10k is broken often enough)
So we are more wanted in a dps group (with sham/bard pressent)

Also more ranks of trip/bf or flurry would be nice to increase personal dps.
Cause they dont seem to want to give our pet reasonable dps..
Ofc that would be even nicer but that belongs in the spell catagory. (buff warders dps!)

cheers

Yra

[Eatmice]

Wurine AA to allow us to zone with illu.

Preshrinked pet, make all pets summoned max shrink size.

increase resists AAs

more levels on pet snare. make it a longer snare.

making summoned pets (yowl and swarm) able to buff, haste
(aka auras mgbs if they are up during that time)

[Khauruk]

Locking this post thread as the 2nd release of AAs already happened.