Why do we pet lovers seem to get shafted in every update?
Ever since I bought this game they’ve been nerfed over and over to the point that with this new update, even @Maya 's signature builds can’t kill the superbosses anymore while she sips some tea.
It eventually always devolves into this in every ARPG I play.
Look, I’m not good at these types of games, I’m a filthy casual who doesn’t have the patience/time/energy for all the grinding. Budget pet builds make games like this doable and fun for me.
Devs need to learn to accept that pet builds are the “easy-mode” and stop nerfing them into oblivion. There’s no such thing as balanced pet builds, they’re either too strong or too weak. Either accept the former or remove them from the game entirely.
Pet builds aren’t really that heavily nerfed? They’ve had damage added in a lot of ways, and a bunch of other positive updates to them. How do you feel they’re being shafted? They’re also still going to be the safest build to play by a long shot… And let’s be honest, should there be builds that let you obliterate the hardest bosses in the game while sipping tea? Isn’t the point of a superboss to be very difficult to fight, for anyone?
I can’t say. I don’t know about the game enough to know if I’m overreacting or not, but I have the impression that if I was, you’d be presenting at least some counter argument to how Maya’s made a mistake in her assessment in how this update affected her own build.
If you had asked that same question before releasing the game, then I’d have accepted whatever conclusion you arrived at. But the reality is that for the longest time pets have been able to beat everything in this game with fairly ease but this has been getting eroded in each subsequent update.
Please don’t do something and then take it away. Diablo 4 devs have just recently learned that same painful lesson.
I mean, I’ve been playing with these changes for a while, but seeing the pets go from 100% damage spawned on kill to neutered damage spawned on attack to still further neutered damage just because we felt like it just hurts me in the soul, man. It cuts deep. I want to see some item-granted pets get to do big damage, that’s what makes the legendary items worth it!
Actually, I’ve just come across the final pet changes topic and that makes it clear as to why you played dumb with me by asking me if I was overreacting.
Correct me if I’m wrong:
The update was supposed to be even more disastrous for pets but the devs seemed to have reverted a few of the changes based on the feedback given.
However, the bulk of the nerfs - including the most important ones which are linked to survivability - have not been reverted.
The focus seem to be changing from making pets tanky, to making them paper thin, but increase the DPS.
But as others pointed out, you can’t have DPS if the pets are dead most of the time; and pets don’t have the same “commandability” as players. Pets can only rely on their survivability.
That change forces the player to run around like a headless chicken recasting the summons, because that seems what constitute “skill” to GD devs.
Finally, in that topic you have claimed, and I quote:
Which was then followed by some great remarks by @thepowerofmediocrity and @Maya pointing out that pets don’t have access to the same features as the player and need survivability in order to function and to do proper DPS. I’d love to read your response to that. Maybe after listening to your reasoning I’ll be more inclined to think that I’m overreacting.
So far though, all these negative changes have dampened my initial excitement for the new expansion.
I can well see those other changes going through in the end in future updates, but we’ll take a measured approach. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Maya has a certain way of playing pets and has very particular expectations, so without taking all of 1.2 into consideration and hearing more voices on the matter, I would consider a knee-jerk reaction to the changes to be just that…an overreaction.
Consider as well that even Maya later beat the superbosses without the new changes mentioned in that thread, so it does not seem like pets are suddenly off the table for beating the toughest boss encounters in the game?
If pets are truly struggling in endgame content (we do not consider superbosses to be a metric for tuning the game), then we are always happy to revisit past balancing decisions.
I mean…with pet attack command and their far greater movement speed, they almost have superior repositioning capability. 1.2s evade certainly provides players with a new edge though.
For what it matters, this time I actually play tested before giving my “feedback”.
Rather than overreaction, I would say it is difference in terms of approach. I would have preferred to see Pet damage nerfed instead of pet survivability if Pets were overperforming.
Would still bring them back in line while not making them frustrating to play.
Yes, you can micro them. Yes, they can tank for you.
But, when non pet builds can just use pharma and just facetank everything while evading sunder, barely having to reposition while also having less buttons to push, it is like Pet builds went from casual and laid back to APM intensive in a single patch.
That is not easy to adjust to after getting used to years of the game. Easier to just transition to non pet builds.
I must add this for the sake of clarification - Out of all the builds I have, I managed to do that with a single one, a Bleed Beastcaller Briarthorn Conjurer, that could afford to give up Pet damage conversion for the sake of stacking as much Pet Physical resistance as possible, thereby ignoring things like Sunder and still have the pets tank everything.
No other Pet build can afford to that (except perhaps Diviner’s Reap Spirits since the ghosts are immortal, but then you have nothing to keep the player safe).
So, I don’t think that particular instance really counts as it is an outlier.
Overall pet diversity was on the up in this patch. I obviously disagreed with the level of survival bonk in the final patch, and Z has rolled back quite a bit of it, so will see when the patch hits live. We have temp pets now that weren’t available in 1.1.9.8 and base mastery pets improved across the board along with improvement to the non-primal instinct relics, so I think with the final changes that were reversed we’ll be in an okay enough spot defensively. It’s not going to make any difference for campaign, it’s mostly an SR75-76/crucible 150-170/Superbosses thing.
Given that my initial reaction was about pets getting constantly nerfed and that still stands true, I honestly don’t see where I overreacted.
I never implied that they weren’t end-game viable, just that it sucks to purposely buy a new expansion knowing that I’ll have to play with a worse pet build than when I last did.
You had a whole topic with the most dedicated and knowledgeable pet players championing their disapproval on this matter. What else you need? A petition signed by every pet player in the world stating that changing the play style from a laid-back, lazy easy-mode approach to a caffeine infused APM intensive RTS style is an obvious mistake?
I truly wonder why though. I mean, whatever changes you make will have an impact for any other enemy, not just superbosses. A pet with its survivability nerfed will survive less in any situation regardless of whom it’s fighting against.
pet builds aren’t dead btw, they are just not the same ultra lazy afk “can be played while sleeping” against Supers, they can still kill supers if you pilot and tweak your pets
Pet builds are supposed to be “ultra lazy afk”. That’s why they consist of, you know, pets.
If you have the need to micro manage something, that’s what your non-pet characters are for. The moment you insert non-pet character middle management busywork into pet builds their purpose perishes and they functionally become just like any other non-pet build but with added extra annoying steps to play it.
Besides, even if I wanted to pilot them I wouldn’t be able to. I use a controller to play this game and micro managing only my character was already painful enough, let alone micro managing multiple units that have been nerfed to the point that they now die at the drop of a hat.
As someone who has recently bought a controller, pet builds are definitely not the only ones where using controller isn’t the best choice. I’m enjoying the controller (mainly to give my wrist some rest from mouse) and it works great for some builds but there will always be builds which need keyboard + mouse to fully use their potential (and frankly, I think the pet builds have always been the case).
says who? that’s a selfmade up rule/build criteria, which you can still do; it just wont clear supers, since devs don’t want those to be ultra lazy afk it seems
^ So besides fighting a few superbosses, what did you playtest exactly before making your public service announcement about how pets are cancelled?
You really want to tell me with a straight face every patch has nerfed pet builds? Not to mention the substantial changes and buffs pets are receiving this patch.
Posted hours after an update with a few superboss attempts. The comment about Ghol builds was fair and Ghol would have ended up with buffs in v1.2.1.0 most likely.
The nerfs did not make pets unviable for endgame. And if they did, I’d love to hear about it after the patch has cooled off so we can make informed decisions in the future.
I mean, if that happened, I would certainly take it under consideration
Yes? That was the point. Pets were already too tough before v1.2, and now they were tough AND had much better damage. You can disagree, like Maya has, about which of those two should have been nerfed, but something certainly had to be. And when the goal was to bring pet damage in line with damage of non-pet builds, their survivability has to eventually be brought in line as well.
Where is this dictated? Last I checked the A in ARPG stands for Action, not AFK.
And honestly, I’d love to see proof they’re not anymore. Except maybe against superbosses which, again, is kind of the point.
Pets don’t struggle in Crucible (unless naked + extra spawns or something) or SR 75-76, but no endgame builds really do, unless you are trying to speedrun them and consider the “struggle” to be based on whether or not you can complete those within an arbitrary, community specified time limit.
Compared to that, superbosses can and have become simply impossible for particular builds rather than being simply slower. I know that it is supposed to be “working as intended” when not all endgame builds capable of doing other content still struggle or fail against superbosses, and that we will never agree on that. But, that is besides the point. I am comparing pets in 9.8 vs 1.2 and making note that my builds perform worse in 1.2 compared to the previous patch.
Hm?
If you are asking me to say that pets are fine, I cannot. Because atm, the playstyle they used to allow upto this point is being changed in the name of making the game more active to play, the point of which I don’t really get since if someone wants a boring playstyle in a single player game, that should be ok?
It is like asking that melee builds kite and taking away their sustainability to force that. We just disagree on how it should be, I guess.
I am only posting here because my name got mentioned btw. How other people feel about the changes or how much my subjective opinion on this matters, is entirely upto them.
And the whole #DeadPets thing is based on how they perform compared to non-pet builds rather than something looked at in vacuum. If you can juice yourself up on half a dozen potions and then facetank the superbosses on non-pet builds while simultaneously getting similar or better Crucible and SR 75-76 performance, why shouldn’t pet builds allow for lazy gameplay.
that’s a selfmade up rule/build criteria, which you can still do; it just wont clear supers, since devs don’t want those to be ultra lazy afk it seems
