What is up with the new pet changes?

[AwfulAtParrying]

Don't get me wrong I am all for the pet experience portion of the change, I think that it is long overdue to have your pets actually level up actively while you fight instead of bugging it out on a roof in town for hours on end.

What I want to know is who asked for any of these other changes? When I tamers complain about pets it is usually about how they suck below max level or they just do not feel strong enough to base a whole build around, and when I see non-tamers complain about pets it is usually about how playing a tamer is non interactive and you just point at someone and click all kill.

So why is this new change 1. Making pets deal 50% less of their max damage, and 2. making pets even LESS interactive. "now your pet will automatically start attacking your last target and attempt to use the triggered ability when you use a beast mastery ability while targeting someone" So you no longer even have to click all kill? It seems that instead of making pets stronger and MORE interactive, they made them weaker and LESS interactive which at least from my viewpoint seems to be the exact opposite of what both tamers and non-tamers were asking for.

Why not instead of all of this make it so lower level pets are closer to the power of higher level pets? The pet gaining experience while you fight wont matter if your pet is useless in combat before max level.

Beast mastery abilities is another thing entirely, I haven't been keeping up with all the abilities beast can do as any time a pet is in a fight it dies before I can see any of the abilities. but I've read that some pets will sit still to activate the ability only to be out of range by the time the animation happens.

Pet experience change - Good
Make low level pets viable to even use while leveling
Make pets more interactive and also viable instead of less interactive and less viable

That's all I got.

 

[Jackdstripper]

I assume that the lowering of pet damage for non-max level pets is because they want to force people into a full tamer/dominator build to get the high pet damage. As it should be.

Otherwise, now that anyone can ride just about anything AND most pets have armor, pretty much any class can be fitted with a fighting pet that deals good damage. This is obviously too OP and forces everyone to have a fighting pet just to not be gimped.

Pet armor has made most pets a lot tankier which is fine, but the damage a pet does should only be significant if you are fully specced for it. This wasnt the case for the last few months.

 

[Rhias]

The reason for the lower pet damage of auto attacks is because they want to buff pet abilities.
Right now most pet attacks are useless because they do only barely more damage than an autohit and you loose focus, which results in lower damage of the following autohits.

They plan to do the following things:
- Buff Pet Abilities
- Targeting an enemy and using a Pet attack will cause "Attack + Use of Ability". Right now you need to first say Attack, and then you can cast the pet ability.
- Lower auto-attack damage
- Focus no longer affects auto-attack damage

So all those changes clearly indicate that they want to make beastmaster more pet-ability based and less press attack button and just wait.

 

[Rhias]

but the damage a pet does should only be significant if you are fully specced for it. This wasnt the case for the last few months.

I didn't read anything about it in the notes. So I assume BM will still be a +30% damage buff.

 

[Rhias]

Why not instead of all of this make it so lower level pets are closer to the power of higher level pets? The pet gaining experience while you fight wont matter if your pet is useless in combat before max level.

Different pets will require different amount of max-exp. So I assume some basic pets will be much easier to level than e.g. a White Bear.

 

[Emdash]

50% dmg reduction? Tek suggested, and it seems good to me. Call it step one! I do think pets need a theoretical rework. I really think a lot of MO is just bad theory.

There is probably an idea that they have to do a lot of programming to change things, and they probably have to do some, but probably not more than much other stuff. I am not a programmer, and I can tell them ideas of how to get the desired outcome using what I have seen AI do in the game.