A lot of pet items are bloated with OA

[Maya]

I feel like some people on this forum need to review what homogeneity is. It comes up an awful lot in nonsensical ways.

I am just using it because the word gets used as an argument against balance requests and personally I am of the opinion that it should be irrelevant or even purposefully ignored if needed.

Essentially all I ask for or am asking for even if my wording might have pointed to something else, is pretty much how the 3 races work in Starcraft(I don’t like SC2 and will argue BroodWar as the best iteration, but that is for a different place and time). Yes, I am comparing an RTS to an ARPG and balancing 3 races with a handful of units to hundreds of different items along with all the skills, devotions etc creating the potential variability of a multitude of options. But it is easier for me to do it since I am not the one in charge of actually having to deal with the balancing and can easily avoid the headache.

But to put it into GD’s terms and in the context of pets, For eg; I would want Skeletons to swarm Callagadra while Blightfiends explode repeatedly in its face, Reap Spirits doing what they do right now, Familiars acting as mobile turrets and shooting it down from a distance while you kite, Briarthorns straight up getting in its face along with the Primal Spirit, Hellhounds doing… I am not sure what niche they are supposed to fill yet, so I will just leave them as support for Familiars.

However, in the end, I would want all of them to be able to tackle Callagadra with similar levels of efficiency even if using/employing different tactics. Is that Homogeneity? If so, I have a problem against it and if not, I suppose I have no reason to bring it up further.

Hybrid pet builds are a weak point in the GD build spectrum, I freely admit that we did not hit the mark with that play style and realistically probably won’t at this point in the game’s life cycle.

Are hybrid builds viable for most content? Sure. Will they be setting records or make the list for endgame suggestions? Unlikely. Could the issue be addressed at this point? Not without some serious review and likely undesirable repercussions echoing across other builds ( Cough Bane of the Winter King Cough ).

Yet Hybrid Pet items continue to remain as they are without seeing any change.

On Death or On Crit procs could be changed to On Attack or On Hit even regarding things like Deathgrips or the infamous Dracarris, which last saw its time in the spotlight back in [1.0.0.9] Dracarris Incarnate - Pet/Fire Hybrid Pyromancer, 6s Mad Queen, Solo Gladiator Extra Spawn

Or, the most recent one I can think of being the Ghol set’s gloves proc’ing spiders on Crit. Ofcourse, one can go the other way and make OA easier to access on Pet builds if the On Crit function is to remain, but asking for the player to get the kills on a Pet build is unrealistic.

Bane of the Winter King, personally atleast feels like it is fine actually. Maybe a little bit of nudge on the pet part to make it more attractive, but it is still usable even for endgame purposes. Perhaps not on a Pet Trickster, but on a Pet Conjurer for eg; more than viable though if I am allowed to be greedy, I would ask for Mana regen or CDR on it, atleast Mana Regen…

Personally, I would prefer all the hybrid options to be changed to either Pet or Player or having 2 different versions to satisfy both crowds, but that would mean more work in balancing both though.

We’ve heard that opinion about pets and sets for a while, so we are taking steps to reduce the impact of sets on pet builds with the next update.

This will largely come by taking some of the power pet sets provide and baking it into baseline stats for pets from all sources. Bonuses such as increased summon limits for the non-skeletons in the room will remain the domain of sets however as that much power simply cannot be on a single gear slot, history has shown that gets out of control fast.

Baking increased summon limits into the base skills could happen, but not without significant rebalancing, which is ill-advised at this point. It would not be as simple as cutting the base damage of those pets in half as anyone building pets knows well that each additional pet has major implications for endgame damage scaling. Not to mention that halved damage would be undesirable for the leveling phase.

Extra summon limit being a Set Bonus is fine and I do not argue that scaling can get out of hand due to multiplicative effect of Flat damage, not to mention having multiple bodies in the field to tank for you has another advantage of its own. And I rather not see early game gutted just to make endgame more viable either.

Ofcourse, personally I would like to atleast try and see if making extra summon limit a part of going 26/16 on a Pet would be workable or not, but summon limit is technically not the problem.

My issue with it is simply that if I make a build without using the 4 piece Set bonus, it feels like I deliberately gimped myself regardless of how I try to make up for it using other items. If I can find other items to provide the build a comparable amount of strength, that would make up for it. But so far, even going that route tends to favour individual items of the Sets rather than standalone ones.

One question I have asked myself regarding Sets vs Non-Sets however, is how to make the full Set attractive then if Non Set items provide similar levels of power. And if they do not, Sets will continue to dominate endgame while non set items act as placeholders until then.

Hence why I brought up the case of Conduits as I vaguely remember them being considered as something to enable weird, out of the box and quirky builds. Endgame Pet sets are limited in number, but I am not sure how reasonable it might be at this stage and yet, that is what I personally think Set bonuses should gravitate towards > Enabling builds otherwise impossible, but not necessarily stronger than the non set options.

But at this point it is more just spewing out all the things that come into mind, so I will just wait for the next patch to see how it turns out I guess. Meanwhile, I still haven’t forgiven you for taking away my Blightbombs and instead I will be heading off to make Puppies Explode. (Hellhound buff feels nice even though I don’t want to admit it)