Wishlist idea: Idonwannadie Pet

[Bionitrous]

OK, so let's assume I want to play the part of the annoying pest in a tower battle. That means running around like a fruitcake and putting debuffs on people like one of them fruitflies that has an affinity for yer ear and nostril hairs.

Q: What happens when you do this? A: They make you dead.

Q: Why do MP's die so fast? A: We got no defense nanos and the worst hitpoints of any profession in the game.

What do I propose to address this situation? Well, I think we're ok, in the solo mission deal, and passible when teams give us pity invites. I'm looking at a way to help us survive on the battlefield so we can run around like pansies and Curse and Dominate and MindQuake while the other guys have fun. Hell, if they don't want me to have fun, at least let me stay alive to watch others do it.

Current attackpets, Demon and Enmity don't cut the mustard. They don't help you stay alive. Balbuto and Belamorte don't help me stay alive either. All Bela does is delay the inevitable by about 5.8 seconds.

What's the problem here? I'll tell you. The other players totally disregard any and all of our pets and head (rightfully so, mind you) for us. Once we're dead (easy task), our pets are out of the equation. Might as well kill the MP and get 4 thingies off the battlefield in one fell swoop.

How about this idea for an attack pet? I make this an attack pet so you have to choose between Caco/TE and this thing. What I want is for the other 3 guys who would be killing you to have to focus on killing this thing first instead of just wiping the floor with your limp dead body.

First part of the equation has been mentioned before, I think: this pet will take 90% of the damage inflicted on you. OK, see why I made it the attack pet? Belamorte can keep up with damage done to you unless a full team decides to unload on ya. It would have to have easily double the hitpoints of Cacodemon to be worth anything in PvP or alternatively quite respectable regeneration (probably more dynamic considering PvP encounters).

Second part of the equation takes away any damage this pet would do. It's damage is 1-1(1). This is the tradeoff for you staying alive: you lose the damage potential of the TE/Caco so that you can stay on the battlefield for more than 8 seconds and fill the Debuff Queen role more efficiently.

Third part: innate Nanoresist of a straight 1k. The entire point of this thing is null and void if it is rooted/scared/charmed/snared/ ummm any of the million ways to turn off our pets. If it can't do damage, then it best be able to follow me.

Fourth part: It's gotta have a time limit on being able to re-manifest. Constantly chain-casting these things as they die would provide invincibility mode. How to do this using current game mechanics? It'll have to go into the Combat nano strain and place a hostile nano in your NCU that lasts as long as the pet would have lived if it didn't get killed. I like this as you got a chance to fumble it being a hostile nano (I'm a sadist). 30 minute pet? You can make one every thirty minutes. (Or sooner if you get sent to reclaim). You'll get the 'better nano running' message like the Agent crit buffs. You can always try to field an old-school attack pet if your hp-sink bites it as they're in another nano-strain.

I suppose it needs some sort of 'attack' to add some character. If not damage, then what? I'd reserve the init debuff for the Mezz pet so we have to look somewhere original. Everybody hates blinds, so that's out. Ah, I got a good traditional RPG element not implemented in AO yet: knockback. This thing lands a hit on you and does it's 1-1(1) damage and throws you 10 meters in the negative vector from which it attacked. Nice to keep them pesky Enforcers off its tail.

So I'm running around with my fairy boots on spreading my debuff dust of joy on the battle field and finally annoy people enough to want to kill me. They start beating on me, but notice that it's probably not the wisest strategic move as I'm fairly resiliant now. Now, they get smart and realize that if they kill my hp-sink manifestation, I'm back to the sitting duck they expect out of the MP. This gives time for my team to come assist me, perhaps for me to Quantum Wings out of there, run away, try to fight them, if there are 1 or less attacking, etc.

I guess I'm just sick to my stomach of getting to enjoy tower battles 15 seconds at a time every 5 minutes because I have no defense tools or escape mechanism. I'd actually sacrifice pet damage just to stay alive.

[Machineshop]

We are a pet class...other than that we kinda suck , so why not get SELF adds while the pet exists .
Why not put a lil ooomph to the summoned pet.


ala....

(Insert pet name nano here)
(insert normal reqs here)
Here is the oooomph...
Add Health Self + ##


or for the higher lvl summoned pet :
Add Health Self + ###


Neurogroove

[Alpherah]

Make cacodemon give the owner a 50% reflect.. that stacks with RRFE!

Perma TMS baby

[Toxinator]

Make it so they have to kill caco before they kill us

[Xtremtech]

There was an interesting idea of a pet that exploded if we died doing AoE 8000 damage (Bio's idea?? I thought). That'd make people think twice about killing us before the pet.

Not sure what to make of this idea yet and I'm dog tired and ready for bed.

X

[Machineshop]

There must be SOMETHING they can do to MP and Engie pets to make things a little more competative without unbalancing . I dont understand why something like this has gone on so long without a lil love hit .

Groove

[Alpherah]

Engi pets have a chance to root the target now (when buffed).. Meaning the engi CAN escape if he/she wants.

[_________Primordious]

Would the effect be some kind of aura effect???
Or could I hide my pet and leave it out of site???

[Bionitrous]

I suppose you'd have to have your pet within a certain range of you. There's issues with FunCom when we try to ask for new game mechanics and transfering damage to another person or in this case pet is not implemented yet. So, maybe we can simulate the pet taking damage instead of us:

Basically, I think we could work it like this: essentially, the new pet would have a 'heal' nano that it executed on you. The attack and recharge on this nano would be such that it would be 'instacast' or at most 2 seconds between 'heals':

Modify target health 300 - 300

Modify Self Health -900 - -900

(Numbers just for illustration)

As it was 'giving' you health, it would be hurting itself. If you were at full health, it would not be dieing. Kinda fills the bill as far as a 'hp reservoir' is concerned. Assuming that the pet had low weapon defenses, it would be the likely target before the owner.

Like I said, just trying to come up with a way for us to stay on the battlefield at least long enough to enjoy the show and maybe contribute in other ways. Also trying to balance this new 'attack pet'. Hence, no TE or Demon while your Tank Pet is up.

[_________Primordious]

I'm liking this idea...

Maybe a slow nanopool drain could be its attack???
And perhaps not make it look like another meatball if possible...

[Bionitrous]

OK, let's play with that idea Primordious. Something that might be doable. Assuming that this pet will only respond to /pet heal with it's owner as the target, then it really won't be able to 'fight' (can't attack and heal at the same time). We're trying to get this to work within current game mechanics.

I'll assume that pets can now execute nanos of their own accord based on the Slayers being able to snare the enemy these days.

What if it had a nano that it could execute that put a damage shield on itself. But, here's the rub: instead of physical damage, when you hit it, you are hit for a number of nanopool damage:

"Asterik's pet Love Pump's damage shield hit you for 189 points of nanopool"

I think that might be doable.

[Toxinator]

Ya know i like the nano pool idea and all but i think that would be better as a nuke type thing, what i want to see in pets is what um loss on the name but the elemental demons. Was a nice idea and a nice change could add variety picking which demon to chose so that it can NOT hit the target =P hehe. Could be like high end, and have higher req... could always help.

[Xtremtech]

I'll assume that pets can now execute nanos of their own accord based on the Slayers being able to snare the enemy these days.

The Heal and mez pet both execute nanos so it can be done. FYI the slayer snare is a pulsing aura buff cast by the engineer.

X

[zophee]

If damage transfer is no option, we perhaps could have kind of aura the transfers health from pets to ourselves like the trader HP drains.

[Xtremtech]

Darkzone,

That's an interesting one. A sort of pet DoT might work. Something we cast on our own pet that takes (just plucking figures out of the air) 500 off the pet's health and gives us 250 HP each tick on let's say a delay of 3 seconds - whether we're damaged or not.

• We wouldn't ever use it unless we were under attack, because it would kill our attack pet in 3.5 minutes for no reason as we wouldn't be taking damage.
  
  So we'd only use it when we were directly under attack and the demon was being ignored. It would represent a sizeable HoT for us though at 250 every 3 seconds which would make us a good deal harder to kill.
  
  It would give the opposition the option of attacking both us and the pet because any reduction in the pet's HP would also be a reduction in the length of time of our HoT.
  
  If we were severely outclassed, the opposition could still focus on killing us, since the HoT could only counter so much damage - so it wouldn't necessarily be a "you have to kill the pet first" implementation.
  
  It would have pros and cons with regard to demon Vs Enmity too, we could choose Demon for better length of HoT but lower damage and Enmity for better damage but shorter HoT.
  
  You'd need to scale a line of them to take into account the different pet HP values... but that would also mean that you could choose the best one for the job based on how much trouble you were in. So if you were being whittled away by a weaker opponent, you could cast a smaller one that lasted longer due to reucing the attack pet's HP by less each tick. But if you were in really deep trouble and getting clobbered, you'd cast the biggest one you could...

Just thinking aloud really... but I like it... I think. You could say that in our fear and pain at being hurt we take back some of our anger from the pet and use the energy to bolster our constitution.

The Engis should get one too that has a better ratio - say 500:325 or something. That might finally give them something to cheer about too.

Nice idea.

X

[coldwarkid]

We (ie. Engies) have toyed with the idea of a damage transfer nano before, something you could cast which for a short period of time would transfer a high proportion of damage onto the pet. However, a pet health-funnel-over-time sounds great too. I wouldn't turn my nose up at either one, to be frank with you. Despite our AC buffs, reflects and special attack shields, we're still disturbingly easy to take out with regular damage or nukes, which of course is what usually happens.

The pet snare aura is a bit substandard for PvP, by the way. A runbuff of equivalent level will easily cancel it, it only ticks out every 20 seconds and it only lasts for 20 seconds, so even a low level rootbreaker stim will cancel it easily and let you escape. However, it's great for PvM because it comes with a fairly significant taunt attached, which obviously helps in the aggro stakes.

Fun Engineer Facts #27! Die while the bot is running a snare and he'll snare everyone at reclaim. If any of those have autoattack (player) turned on, they'll attack him and start PvP. A cheap way to title farm, but a good way to make enemies...

Cheers,

~R~

[Bionitrous]

I'll take a drain I can execute on my Cacodemon in a heart beat. The thought just never occured to me in that manner. This thread was to try to get ideas flowing in that direction. It's doable within current game mechanics and fitting with our profession.

Like you said, X, the anger manifestations are just that, born of our own endorphins and rage. We should be able to harness some of that back to our own corporeal self should the situation become dire.

My proposal tried to temper the damage dealing ability by disallowing the offensive capabilities of the attack pet in exchange for improved surviveability on the battle field. This can probably be addressed to a certain degree by requiring the target of the drain to be in a fight and including the 'cool down' before being able to execute this nano a subsequent time.

My fear is that this particular implementation might be a bit exploitable. Create a Cacodemon outside the battlefield, execute a health drain on it and then run in.

In any event, the key is to try to utilize the lost potential of we were supposed to have of our demons stated intention of being tanks. Just as in missions, I'm tired of not only the ineffefectiveness of the demon to have any appreciable impact, but even moreso the fact that it is utterly ignored. If it is to be ignored, then I'd like any balancing of our profession regarding Notum Wars to be based on the idea that the demon is not in the picture whatsoever.

[Xtremtech]

Fun Engineer Facts #27! Die while the bot is running a snare and he'll snare everyone at reclaim. If any of those have autoattack (player) turned on, they'll attack him and start PvP. A cheap way to title farm, but a good way to make enemies...

Lol yup, I heard about that on the engi board. The snare has its drawbacks as that thread drew out in the end. Still it's something and I'm glad you got it. The auras (like the blind) can be broken easily too by damage so they too have their drawbacks. These are drawbacks that you can I'm sure imagine that the MPs would love to be complaining about.

My fear is that this particular implementation might be a bit exploitable. Create a Cacodemon outside the battlefield, execute a health drain on it and then run in.

Partly... you could do it - but only for a few minutes before the pet died of course... We could attach a range restriction to the drain... but then of course we'd have the problem of the pet being drawn away from us and snared to deal with still. I suppose it would depend to an extent on how greeat the range was....

What does everybody think?

X

[Bionitrous]

Partly... you could do it - but only for a few minutes before the pet died of course... We could attach a range restriction to the drain... but then of course we'd have the problem of the pet being drawn away from us and snared to deal with still. I suppose it would depend to an extent on how greeat the range was....

Thought about this on the way to work. What we need is for it to be a quick pulsing aura type nano with a short'ish range (20m) that executes a transfer nano on each tick. We'd need to be somewhat near our attack pet everytime it pulsed in order to get the transfer. That is perfectly acceptable and also plays off well with tempering the safety of using a ranged attack versus being closer to the action. The fears of the crowd control specialists are also tempered via this implementation.

I like the idea of the MP being in proximity of ('in touch with' so to speak ) his anger enhancing his performance.

We gotta admit that surviveability is our #1 issue regarding mass PvP. Something needs to be done to address this.

[Xtremtech]

Yup I considered that but then what duration would you give it? Aura style buffs are usually quite long in duration and we'd end up constantly killing our own pet if it were within range - without 'needing' to necessarily because we weren't taking damage.

It should be something we'd only want to use as a last resort - like nullity or evac... something that gives us a chance of getting out of trouble - even if it's only a short respite.

I reckon a simple instacast and very short recharge (3.0/1.5) nano that we cast on the pet. Give it a range of 30 metres but we have to stay within range to get the HP add. If the pet is out of range, it still loses HP but we're not getting the benefit.

Would that work?

X