This PTR Hellhounds get some much needed love in the form of Beastcaller set changes - which should prove far superior for Hellhound focused builds than the Lost Souls set (due to no MI conflict) - but are we open to discuss some issues with their alternative suicide playstyle?
First thing, is it possible to make their aura not an activated skill but a permanent buff that they come alive with? They way it plays now is that you have a 0,9s CD Hellhound ability that you need to manually guide near high prio enemies - which is unique and fun enough to play around but the issue is that they don’t have time/opportunity to activate their aura at all when played optimally. Essentially losing a big chunk of their value.
Second thing is more mundane: Damage & Radius of Blazing Death. This is a pure numbers issue, it just needs to have more oomph and radius buffed so you feel rewarded for playing it over more vanilla builds. Pet is a 3d object that can simply get stuck on things, needs to actually pathfind etc. 5m radius may seem adequate but in practice it’s quite awkward.
Third thing - not sure if doable within game engine but could they get fixed spawn location closer to character model? Ideally situated between character model and the place we target when we summon them. That’s closely related to their issues with pathfinding mentioned in the second point. It’s not that uncommon for Hellhound to spawn on the other side of a wall or some other awkward spot.
With Beastcaller’s specifically, you simply don’t have enough skillpoints to meaningfully invest in the Aura as the set deals in primarily Physical damage. You’re expected to place points in only the Hellhound skill and none of the other nodes.
With other builds, however, this is an issue. Ember Claw and Infernal Breath are designed to give Hellhounds the AoE that Blazing Death doesn’t provide, and the “suicide bomber” playstyle that you’re mentioning will be very awkward to play precisely because of what you’re mentioning.
It would be nice to have Hellfire as a timed buff (let’s say 15 seconds or so) instead of an aura. That way, Hellhounds only need to activate the buff during that time period instead of constantly turning on the aura every time it’s resummoned. That way, you can also make more hybrid pet-player playstyles viable because you only need the Hellhound to stay alive long enough to give the player the buff and then not worry when it inevitably dies.
That’s a terrible idea, especially for hybrids, with hybrids you have other things you want to use your buttons for than constantly having to resurrect your hellhound. On hybrids it should be alive almost permanently.
With hybrids especially, you don’t have the gear budget to get your pets’ resistances to the point where they can withstand the same enemy intensity as standard pet builds while also getting meaningful player damage. Naturally, Hellhounds in hybrid pet builds will be less tanky than in standard pet builds, so you need to have Hellhounds bound to a button anyway.
The mechanism goes like this:
Hellhound is summoned, activates Hellfire instantly like the player activates Blood of Dreeg without any animation.
If Hellhounds survive for the buff duration, great. If not, you still get the Hellfire buff until it runs out.
Hellhound logic goes: If Hellfire buff is not activated, activate it. If it is activated, don’t worry about it and go about doing Hellhound things.
That way, both suicide bombers and standard pet builds get the benefits of Hellfire without the clunky animation getting in the way.
I agree that the Hellfire buff should be permanent; this method is a way to keep the buff permanent without Hellhound bombers having to deal with Hellhounds constantly wasting time activating the aura every time they’re summoned.
well i disagree, for example in this build I wear entire panetti set + panetti mi and 66 skillpoints in panetti and still pets are ~permanent up to SR30
its still meme of course compared to a player build, but changing that would require a fundamental redesign of the game which i’m not even interested in and certainly you wont get there by changing just hellfire in such a way.
I think you can actually make your request much simpler by asking only for this.
But so far we ignored hellfire also improves DA and retal, which is not really synergistic with suicide tactic, so I think this is the wrong skill to focus on when balancing blazing death.
Hellfire mostly grants a fat amount of flat damage (that you can convert into pure fire with Dracarris, etc) and DA helps the summoner so I don’t get how do you see any clash there.
Main issue with the playstyle discussed - that normal summoners don’t encounter - is that your pet doesn’t really have time to activate it.
Buffs on player characters got streamlined so I’m just throwing out the idea about streamlining them on pets. Literally nothing changes for vanilla summoners because the aura is permanent.
Felt like as good place to talk about it as any because Beastcaller changes open up new Hellhound focused builds - not necessarily Conjuers.