[PET SCALING]: What does it mean?

[Bengali]

There's a lot of talk about the pet scaling issue, but I think it would be useful to discuss exactly how deep the problem goes.  It's not just about the pet's max hit not going up as much with better focus effects.  So with that, I'll list some of my thoughts on the subject:

LEVEL:  I think this is overlooked a lot.  Level plays a factor in a lot of things.  For one, defensive abilities such as dodge/parry etc are influenced by relative level among other things.  For example, if you equipped some lightstones so that you wouldn't riposte and attacked an orc pawn, you'd find that you blocked/dodged a lot more of its attacks than you would against a level 73 mob.  Also, level plays a factor in landing spells.  You'll land a lot more spells on a mob that cons blue to you than on one that cons red.  So, what's that mean for warders?  Well, defensively, their lower level means that they will be less effective as offtanks because they dodge/parry/etc. less effectively against higher level mobs.  Offensively, it means that more of their damage will be avoided by mobs who will dodge/parry/etc. their attacks, and it means that they will have a harder time landing procs on mobs, or just plain hitting.  As long as the pet's effective level is lower than ours, they will lag behind the content we're fighting.  There really doesn't seem to be any reason why pet levels can't go as high as our level (especially when focused), since just because a pet is level 70 doesn't mean it will be equivalent to a level 70 mob.

DAMAGE:  This is the easy one.  But first, a little history.  My belief is that pets originally were designed to take the place of double attack somewhat, moreso than spells.  I say this because when beastlords were first created, we didn't have a "line" of cold nukes -- we had one, blizzard blast, and we got that one in the high 50s.  Later on a lower nuke was added -- not so much to create a line of damage but so that we would have some way of training evocation before level 59.  Even now that we have a lot of nukes, they are hard limited by severe recast times, so they don't really add a lot of dps in the overall scheme of things.  Also, because of the recast, we take a large dps hit from a resisted nuke because we have to wait a long time to try again.

Anyway, the point of all that is to emphasize that our "total melee" seems designed to include our own plus our warder's.  If I'm not mistaken, there were even some points in the progression where my warder did *more* damage than I did (but that was back in the olden days where a 17/28 weapon would be considered boss -- gogo Stave of Shielding!)  Fast forward to now, and things are a lot different.  My max crit is well over 600, my warder crits for 175 tops.  I was able to increase the amount of crits via Veteran's Wrath, my warder's stayed the same.  It's normal max hit is 107.  Moreover (and this relates to some other areas such as level and gear, discussed seperately), my hit percentage hovers around 65%, while my warder's is around 50%.  The bottom line is that my pet has gone from possibly outdamaging me to being a fraction of my damage, such that it doesn't come close to making up for not having double attack.  My spells theoretically could pick up some of that slack, but they would have to see huge improvements in dps/resist rate.

GEAR:  This is another one that gets mentioned a lot, although a it's not always carried to its full conclusion.  Most of the time this is mentioned in the context of weapons -- as I upgrade to a better weapon, my melee damage goes up, but my "other melee" damage (i.e., pet) stays exactly the same.  Pets are supposed to compensate for a lack of certain melee skills, yet when we upgrade our melee via weapons and gear, our pets get no upgrades.

This also applies to non weapon upgrades.  I have 35% strikethrough, which increases my dps because mobs avoid fewer of my attacks.  That gear has no effect on my warder.  I also have accuracy, cleave, worn attack, and combat effects, none of which affect my warder.  So when content is designed to take player gear into account, pets end up being woefully inadequate to deal with it.  There aren't enough different levels of pet foci to adequately reflect the various permutations that players may have, and there currently isn't a way to get "gear" for your pet aside from conscripting a mage.  One simple solution would be to make it so that our warders benefitted from our worn mods.  They would crit more with Cleave, proc more when using weapons because of combat effects, hit more with accuracy, have a chance to strikethrough, etc.  That way gear changes don't mean you outstrip your warder.

Another solution (albeit a radical one) that could be used in conjuction with this would be to add "+pet power" mods to weapons.  I'm not 100% sure on the implementation, but the concept would be that better weapons would also directly increase pet melee so that when we looted a weapon upgrade, it would upgrade ALL of our melee (us + pet).

ALTERNATE ABILITIES:  Similarly to gear, there are problems when we get AAs that increase our melee but our warders (which again are a partial melee substitute for us) don't get any benefit.  At the very least, whenever we get an AA that increases a melee bonus (i.e., Veteran's Wrath, Ambidexterity, etc.)  our warders need to either benefit from that ability or get a similar upgrade path.  To take a page from Tastian, instead of "Veteran's Wrath", which increases the damage from our melee crits only, we should get a "combo aa" such as "Savage Lord's Wrath" which increases the damage from our crits AND from our warder's crits.   Or, we could get a seperate aa that allows our warders to automatically gain from the passive benefits of our AAs.

[Dummkopf]

Thanks Beng, a lot of points we all tried to point out, most of the time in single cases, here now summed up pretty good.

[hakaaba]

you totally stole my idea! anyway you put it a whole lot more eloquently so its fine :) and i couldnt agree with you more.  I like your +pet power idea.  It could realistically be implemented without too much work and make up for the failures of the 'focus' system.  They could even split it up to +pet max melee, +pet ac, +pet accuracy, +pet attack and whatnot if they really wanted

One thing you didnt really mention is that there kind of already are combo aas...theyre just split up seperately.  For example a beastlord could get veterans wraith to increase their crits but then they have to go and spend the same amount of aas again to get the pet to crit.  This is part of the very root of our spending more to get less problem that would be (at least partially) solved by intelligently creating combo aas. (since our power is divided into many catagories)

[Bengali]

What exists currently aren't really "combo AAs" as we've envisioned them, but rather what I described as a "similar upgrade path".  That is what needs to occur at a bare minimum, but of course that is less than ideal because it forces beastlords to engage in much more work to get the same benefits that everyone else does.

Moreover, right now we don't always have similar upgrade paths.  Warder's Fury (pet crits) was from a couple of expansions ago, and even that was added seemingly to help pets "catch up" to the fact that we already were able to increase our melee and spell damage via AAs.  During this expansion, there were more ways to upgrade melee and spells, but there weren't any ways for us to upgrade pets aside from the foci, and we all know how well that worked out.  The problem with relying primarily on foci is that even if they aren't totally disappointing (which they are, btw), they upgrade in such a lockstep fashion that they are either too powerful at the time you get them or they aren't powerful enough, assuming there are noticeable differences between them.  In other words, you go for a long time using the same focus, while upgrading yourself so your pet lags behind, and then you finally get the next level of focus and (theoretically) your warder catches up.

It's variation of the "hybrid problem" that has been dealt with a lot, but still exists in some areas.  Take spells for example.  Hybrid spells start off "balanced" against other spells in terms of cast time, mana cost, effect and so on.  Then those spells are upgraded via focus effects and AAs.   The problem has been that for some inexplicable reason, the "hybrids" don't get the ability to upgrade their spells to the same extent as the casters -- apparently based on the mistaken assumption that casters need *extra* AAs and focus effects to maintain their "lead" over the hybrids.

Of course, that makes no sense mathematically, or from a design perspective.  If I am properly "balanced" vis-a-vis a priest in terms of healing using my base spell -- let's say I have 50% of the healing ability of a priest -- then if the priest can upgrade that healing ability another 50% using AAs and focus effects, then I *also* need to be able to upgrade my healing ability by 50% or the relative balance between us shifts.

So to use more specific examples, if my base buff durations are properly balanced, then I should be able to upgrade those durations by the same percentages that casters can.  But currently I cannot, given that they can use SCRM and I can't, and they have access to duration extending effects that I can't readily use.   Similarly, if our nukes are balanced against caster nukes at the base level, then there isn't any reason that I shouldn't be able to increase my crits to the same extent they can, or get access to the same level of foci that they do.  It's not about stepping on anyone's toes (to coin an overused phrase), but it's about maintaining the same relative positions via similar upgrade paths.   Any other approach guarantees that either beastlords lag behind once upgrades occur, or that beastlords are too good before upgrades are factored in.   But we learn in basic algebra that you can't balance an equation by increasing one side of it more than the other, and yet time and time again that is what happens to hybrids in expansions.

[bham]

I agree with everything you have said except this bit about acquiring focus's. (foci?)

they upgrade in such a lockstep fashion that they are either too powerful at the time you get them

I cant possibly imagine anyone getting a focus that is too powerful for them at their level of progression in the game. If you were bazaar geared and got gimped into qvic to loot the sandal mold with ritual summoning then maybe. But thats not an item that someone should be getting at that level of progression.

There are currently 6 levels of pet focus? Each one should add 17% to DPS, HP and mitigation. Then a top focused pet would have double the DPS of an unfocused one, which would be about right. It would also last about 4 times as long tanking a mob, which is about right. Would this overpower mages? Probably not. Would it overpower necros? maybe. Would it go a long way to fixing beastlord power progression, yes.

A top geared beastlord will have about twice the DPS of a bazaar geared one and last 4 times as long tanking the same mob (approximately!) why shouldnt his warder be the same??

[Bengali]

I was speaking theoretically about the system -- I wasn't suggesting that I personally believe that a given focus is too powerful.  However, I'll give an example to clarify.

Let's suppose Minion of Eternity is roughly balanced to provide a boost to pets that is comparable to the boost that a melee would get from PoTime weapons.  But there's nothing stopping a beastlord from looting an item with Minion of Eternity before they've had the chance to upgrade their weapons.  So you could have elemental weapons but a PoTime focus, which would mean that at *that point* you'd have a focus that was "ahead" of you.  However, then you upgrade your weapons and susch but your focus stays the same until the next progression, so then it's possible that your focus is outdated while your weapons aren't.  It's kind of a "leapfrog" effect instead of a smooth progression, because there can't possiby be enough foci to approximate all the incremental upgrades that people can get.  That's all I really meant.

Basically, pet foci follow the spellcaster mold in terms of how they progress -- i.e., the primary upgrade for a caster is supposed to be the base spell, which is then upgraded further by focus effects and AAs.  But casters tend to have even more ways of upgrading spells than we have for upgrading pets.  You can increase dps via spell haste or via improved damage of some sort.  You can also seemingly increase the damage of a spell or line of spells much more than you can with a pet focus.  While a 50% damage focus isn't always a 50% damage increase, even if it works out to an average of 25% more damage, it doesn't seem that a pet focus effect will increase pet damage by 25% over the base.  That's excluding gains from AAs, gains from gear, and even gains from buffs, which only sometimes apply to pets (pet affinity is a huge step, but my pet isn't *always* buffed to the same extent that I am either), which further contributes to the way they upgrade in "lurches," for lack of a better term.

Not to drag the other pet classes into this, but I think anyone would have a hard time arguing that the other classes suffer as much from the lack of a pet as we do.  Mages claim that they nuke about as well as druids for the most part, which isn't all that bad, and necros do a bunch of damage even if they have no pet up.  Obviously pets are integral to those classes and they have their own issues which I woudn't feel compelled to discuss even if I were competent to do it, but they nonetheless can serve vital roles without their pets (which is a whole different can of worms -- our lack of a useful role beyond "halfass replacement for someone else").  Our melee is severely gimped without the pet, so when it doesn't scale properly it's very apparent.  The fact that so many of our own ablities boost our own melee/spells but do nothing for the pet doesn't help (discs, gear effects, etc.).

[hakaaba]

Theres already instrument mods on random bard usable items, so theres nothing really stopping them from implementing pet mods similarly.  And if they feel that each pet class would need varying amounts of boost with this they could simply itemize it in this way since beastlords rarely share items with necros and mages anyway unless they are all/all or the rare bst/mag/nec only item