Pet Pathing

[________Pinkcrusader]

Yeah right, I gave this game a six month break after being totaly frustrated with my engie, to be honest it wasnt a great surprise to find little has changed for us spanner bandits. Pathing is still as painfully bad as ever, oh the joy of watching that great white galoot run in the opposite direction or try to make love to the nearest item of furnature, or even better rubberband 20 times through a doorway before aggroing every mob in the nearest 400 square meters. As for anything else its nice to see some lame arsed combat buffs, and sheilding buffs that attempt to stop roots and such. Nice to see that we still have to produce more rings than a high street jeweler to even get 1% of the way to our next level.

Is it a wonder that the engie becomes a lepar after level 125, the only saving grace is to let botty boy tank the boss, if you can ever crowbar the white love machine away from the table he was last seen humping. Ahh well some things never change.. it would be moderatly good if we could be classed as a support role.. Come on funcome the other professions have had a tweak give us somthing to make our tinkering ways a little more fun.

BUBBABEBOBOB social outcast or engineer to the sarcastic.

[Skyhigh]

What's funny is that they are still saying that it's there number 1 priority but with each and every patch, no improvement whatsoever.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Aguitha
What's funny is that they are still saying that it's there number 1 priority but with each and every patch, no improvement whatsoever.

Well you can be optimistic or pessimistic. Optimism says they're rewriting the pet pathing from the ground up. Pessimism says the programmer assigned to do that took one look at the code and submitted his resume at Turbine

[____________Scofflaw]

I have some insights into why they probably do not wanna leap in and put in a /pet warp command.

First off, it's a kludge and anti-thematic. This isn't a fantasy game, it would be odd for engies and crats to be magiclly summoning their pet right to their side, I guess for a meta this wouldn't be too out of character though. That alone probably wouldn't be a reason to not put in /pet warp at least temporarily.

The main reason I suspect they will not add this ability is that it would nullify the ability to snare/root pets. The owner could simply run right next to their foe, /pet warp their pets to them and have them attacking again. While I think pets are too vulnerable to roots and snares right now, the solution isn't to make them completely useless against pets.

So considering the command makes no logical sense in the game world, and would introduce a possible exploit, I think we're stuck waiting on a long term fix to the pathing issue.

Though I suppose if it was possible to make the /pet warp command fail if your pet was rooted/snared, then that would cover the only real exploit to the ability and would give us a short term fix for the problem while Funcom works on a long term fix.

[__________rdelambert]

I see some opportunities for abuse of /pet warp too. Still, as many have pointed out, it is frustrating to watch your pet do just about anything other than that which will keep you alive.

Perhaps a good start would be commands to move the pet one step in a direction, not too much different than the current commands.

/pet right
/pet left
/pet forward
/pet back

This would also help with pet behaviour with placement when you are trying to loot, unlock, peek -- the only commands I have found that will, sometimes, put the pet in a place other than right in my face, are /pet wait and /pet terminate. Everything else puts the pet between me and the object (even /pet behind puts the pet in the exact spot I am occupying -- since the engie pets are always in motion, there is little opportunity to see past it.)

Don't get me started on pets vs. the new OE rules, or the fact that when the server crashes you out of a mission you are dead meat when you log in again -- all the MOBs reset and no pet. <g>


WarningShot
Struggling Engineer/cartographer

[Peep]

I would not hold your breath on this one.
It seems FC has given up on it.
2 years later and if anything it has gotten worse.

Give them another 6 mths and they may shift a table or two in some missions and then proclaim the problem fixed :P

[Xtremtech]

The main reason I suspect they will not add this ability is that it would nullify the ability to snare/root pets.

I'll direct your attention to the Pet Warp command and PvP balance issues? thread from the PvP forum. This was the summary posting in that thread.

It wouldn't be too hard to implement a /pet warp command that didn't work when the pet was rooted/snared or in /pet wait mode. Given that the programmers have struggled to deliver good pet pathing for such a long time, it's reasonable to assume that they're never going to get it working well enough. In addition, since pathing is also strongly affected by all kinds of lag, synch issues and other external factors, not even the programmers can ever hope to get it right. Pet pathing has been Customer Service priority #1 for the dev team for over 4 months and yet new static content such as the new PvP dungeon includes any number of pet traps....

They should give pet owners the /pet warp command just because they know they'll never fix pathing and - even if by some miracle they improve it enough to make a real difference - it'll still get broken again down the line by new content and new issues.

X

[Tentumbs]

And: Bump.

[mrrobbit]

Originally posted by Teras Kasi
I don't really see how the size of the room matters, but my MP pets do work much better outdoors than in so larger rooms might help. And the only time I have trouble outside is on hills, so unless they put some hills in the missions I think it may help. Besides the pathing can't get much worse. So I'm hopeful, but I have been wrong before.

Stuck on Hills I've seen, but I've seen it where they have been stuck behind a tree!

Pathing can be fixed by all rooms (they are not randomly designed - just randomly put together) if they implented waypoints. Or allow the pets to walk through tables etc, if they can float through the top of the door, they should be able to float through a table!

[kristen27]

I don't feel I should need to learn the current system just to get it to work... I have found many tricks for getting pets to follow better, but ultimately it shouldn't be necessary.

The funny thing is, as an MP, I currently use an x-3 and heal pet. No attack pet because of the pathetic pathing. I don't lose the heal pet even once in a mission when I tag it onto someone else, and can switch its target about. So long as it's not trying to follow me, it never gets lost even in the "rooms of death". So maybe some sort of Attack pet follow command could be used for coupling it to the tank or something?

The pathing doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be competent. MP pets have a fairly large range on them, and so long as they are in the room with you, will deal damage from any position within a give radius of a mob. I don't believe despite the limiting factors, competent pet pathing cannot be achieved.

An MP using an x-3, and an evocated Attack Pet, could be one of the most potent damage dealers. But at the moment, I am just a demi-agent with a floating HoT