I added an absurdly high attack modifier (cold damage) to summon hellhound, and it made no difference whatsoever to any of the hellhound’s attacks. My understanding is that modifiers affect the SKILL itself, and Summon Hellhound is a proxy skill that summons pets, so the pets themselves do not currently inherit the bonuses intended for them, despite what the tooltip says.
I then tried another approach, where I added a skill modifier as per usual (Skill Modifiers → modifiedSkillName1 / modifierSkillName1) to the item in question, and from THAT skill modifier, under the Pet Bonus section, I referenced a pet bonus record in which I added the same cold damage. The outcome?
It works as intended. The downside? By doing it this way (unless you leave the pointless modifiers duplicating them on the initial modifier) you don’t get the tooltip to show you the bonuses applied, since it is a pet bonus of a modifier on an item that is modifying a skill, PHEW!
@Zantai it would be wicked to have this looked at for perhaps the 1.2.0.0 patch you teased, as there are many such pet items that do not work. And things like resistances do not work either, as again they are on the item cast (not the summon which is a result of the skill being cast).
did you remember to resummon your doggo after equipping veilpiercer?
also remember that true pet dot’s do not show/display dmg numebrs, so you wont see the “ticks” from the burn, but you can see on the dummy it is burning
Can you give an example of this being down for pet damage so I can check? Is the same done for resistances and such? That would explain the issue! So the modifiers themselves (aside from the hidden abilities) will work on the base skill when it comes to modifying properties of the skill itself (energy cost/duration etc.)?
Every pet modifier that doesn’t alter the base ability’s fundamental functions (cost, cooldown, # of pets), function this way. They are essentially granted skills.
Edit: not to mention it’s a trivial test to confirm the existing modifiers work if you’re going to be modding them…
You’re absolutely correct! I must have been using an outdated source file as a base. I see that the flow is item → modifier (SkillSecondary_PetModifier) which then references a custom pet skill (petSkillName) → Skill_Passive which is ultimately where all the changes to the pet happen! Thank you so much for clarifying, I made the changes based on this and they are working as intended.
You mentioned adding ranks to hidden abilities, I’ve seen this done for example in an item granted skill where you can specify the level of the skill given, how is this handled for the pets? I noticed the skill modifier has a skillMaxLevel of 2 but I think I’ve failed to miss where in the chain this is set.
Is it possible to scale a passive (modifier to a pet skill) based on the skill level of the skill being modified itself?
@Zantai I actually stumbled across what I believe caused all this confusion in the first place, so I’m going to break it down and perhaps some sense can be made of it.
The item in question is Mythical Will of Bysmiel which adds 240 Electrocute Damage over 2 Seconds to Summon Familiar.
The modifier file is located at records/skills/playerclass03/pets and is called modifier_necklace_d001_summonfamiliar.dbr.
If you look under Offensive Parameters → Offensive Duration → Offensive Slow Lightning you will notice there is a value set under offensiveSlowLightningMin for 120.0 and the duration under offensiveSlowLightningDurationMin of 2.0.
This was the file that I initially used as a reference, and whose bonuses to pet damage (like the above) were not being applied, even when given an absurdly high value to test for a visible change.
Is there something specific/different that allows the Summon Familiar (Raven) to benefit from the above, or does it not actually work as intended, given my original post?
EDIT: I made an absurd change to the values in the above file, and it does actually (?!) work for the Raven on its auto-attacks. So that bonus works, because of the projectile changes then? Which I guess explains why the extra damage for other summons did not work (using the same template) as they’re just straight summons and not adding projectiles.
I just made an edit above. Am I correct in assuming the only reason the damage is working is due to the projectile changes, or that it is working on the auto-attack of the Raven somehow?
EDIT: Sometimes it is good to take a break! Triple-checking all the references, the issue was I was directly referencing a modifier instead of going through the SkillSecondary_PetModifier and having it fire off from there. D’oh! Thank you for putting up with me.
@Zantai I finally understand (I hope?!) how the pet modifiers work.
From what I’ve seen after digging around, there are 2 changes that are made that I incorrectly assumed can all be done in one edit.
The skill modification, which makes changes to the skill itself, such as damage, summon count, etc. using the template skill_modifier.tpl.
The pet changes, anything relating to their speed, damage, resistances etc. which is done via a proxy file using the template skillsecondary_petmodifier.tpl which then points to a skill_passive.tpl template which has all the changes in it, which finally gets added to whichever pets are being modified directly to their Skill Tree, under skillName which answers my question of where the skillLevel was being called…
Wow! This seems like a ton of effort to make pet change modifiers, and I have absolute respect for you guys!
Now my question is, is there no easier way to apply something like resistances to pets (specifically modifying a skill so it is just to a specific summon, not all pets) other than editing ALL levels and variations of the pets? Which in the case of the Raise Skeletons is a whopping 104 files!
