Right now pets are tuned so if you go all-in they can and will do the fighting for you entirely. If you scale them with player stats they have to be tuned down to the point where they are an assist to attacks, can’t (quickly-ish) clear content on their own. So why on earth would anyone make a pure summoner if fully invested pets are now balanced to only be an assistant at heavy investment?
That is the problem with pets scaling entirely with player stats, the need to rebalance pet power downwards. Would make pure summoners 2nd teir if it didn’t destroy them outright.
This is just completely false. If I use skill X and skill Y and suddenly have access to skill Z at the cost of some, or all, of the power of skill X or Y, skill Z doesn’t need to suddenly be tuned out of existence. The assumption in literally every single one of these arguments is that pets would be overpowered, but there is legitimately zero solid reasoning for why that is because you are still limited by point investment. Why would a 16-12-12 Blight Fiend suddenly have grossly more power than a 16-12-12 Trozan’s Sky Shard?
If I want to build around poison damage on Shadowstrike, why would 16-12-12 Blight Fiend be more powerful than a fully fleshed out Ravenous Earth? Or replace SS with some other pet, you’re still fundamentally limited by the amount of skill points you have.
It in no way kills summoner builds, it just opens up pets for use outside of them.
As someone who plays a Summoner in every aRPG I disagree with pets scaling with player bonuses - it makes pets a must have in a ‘attack’ build with no drawback to using them and becomes too hard to balance - Diablo 3 did it this way as there was no ‘option’ but in other games its fine.
Blade Spirit anyway does what you are asking and its a top skill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5wIy4paKYo - this is why you cannot have extremely strong pets scaling off player bonuses - this is DAIL mod from a while ago broken OP Fangshi class where Soul Calibur swords acted as pets but scaled off player bonus and also had %weapon damage so they leech’d for you as well.
I believe as a Summoner you are basically a ‘captain/leader’ style where you dont actively fight, you buff your team, debuff mobs and you manage your minions - you basically track whats going on, completely different playstyle to an attack build - you need no crit/accuracy/dmg etc
This is a good example of jow itd be great for non pet builds but bad for pet builds actually. So lets say we scale poison/acidn great! Now what other pet(s) scale with poison/acid? One devo proc (not ecactly stellar) ine bad amulet cast, and the leap of shaman temp pet (which means you just gave up on good stackable res shred)
But on the bright side a transmuted player scaling blight fiend is litterally the strongest poison skill in game.
Things get worse with other pets where the natural damage synergy is a spam attack. Primal strike + shotgun raven? Firestrike + hellhound? Both pets can be used together currently thanks to generic %pet being prevalent, if it was player scaled they become at odds with eachother but great dots to add to already existing builds.
Player scaled pets work great if you want hybrids, or if there are multiple serious options in a single damage type, but if you tried to shoehorn such a system in now it’d mortally wound pure summoners while buffing others quite a bit (especially the one-trick-pony type chars as mentioned above)
Player based summons would definitely be better for the game imo.
Sure you’d have to balance them a bit more but the build diversity would increase dramatically while also cutting down a lot of fat when it comes to Itemization. Going for a pet build most items are just ignored since they don’t have any pet stats - and that’s a ton of items - when other builds can still get gains via % total damage, OA, Spirit/Cunning and so on.
However as has already been stated that amount of time and effort to make a full transition happen would be daunting which is probably why it won’t happen.
For myself the game feels like it’s trying to make you go the hybrid pet build route but it just feels so gimped and restricted because no matter what you are still getting a bunch of stats that don’t really help you at all.
The “easier” fix would be to add pet stats to a lot more itemization + devotion to encourage build diversity and hybrid builds but that’s just a band aid that would simply make itemization even more bloated then it already is (not just amount of items but the amount of text that eventually make you scroll down all the stats like it does now).
Another problem is pet agro and how many enemies will either run really fast to your character while ignoring the wall of pets that you try to put up - or they’ll have some sort of dash/charge ability to do so even faster.
Put it into perspective. At level 2 of your toon vs. 1 skill point investment in any major pet. They already outscale you. 5-10 fold. Now if they were to scale of your own equipment naturally the way you did, that would entirely break the game.
Nerfing the bonus stats on pets would make non-petmancer build suffer. Not giving pet specific stat bonuses would cripple pet builds.This has been the devs formula for handling pet builds since Titan Quest, and it’s there for balance purposes
Other ARPGs have handled pet buffing differently, but with relatively the same effect. THough they have never unified the stat bonuses for pets and playing characters for obvious reasons.
I completely agree with both of u. Playing as a summoner since D2:LoD era I too believe pets should only benefit from +pet/+minion bonuses & never from player bonuses on items. A player should choose to specialize in a melee/ranged hero or a summoner hero. To make pets scale off player stats/bonuses would mean pets can be adapted to virtually any build out there. The player won’t have to change anything by much other than to put some points into a pet skill or use items that grant pets. Then said pet(s) immediately gain benefits from the player centric bonuses without any sort of pet centric specialization just seems to convenient to me. The one thing that I can accept scaling to the player is their hero level only, maybe every 10 levels the pets gain additional perks. Personally a summoner is like what Shrukn mentioned, a captain/leader that directs his pets/minions to do all the fighting while buffing them with auras & dropping debuffs/curses/slows/dots/etc on enemies from a safe distance. Being more of a support hero rather than frontline heroes that deal most if not all the damage themselves.
This has been rebuffed time and again with zero acknowledgement. I can accept that there is just a difference of a opinion and that people, including myself, will ignore objectivity in favor of their opinion. The idea that pets are just suddenly overpowered and impossible to balance and everyone wants them because of it just does not hold up for me. Using a level 1-2 character example for why pets would be OP is fucking idiotic. Max out any skill 16/16 at a low level and you 1 shot everything for ages.
This was originally a question about rationale and thoughts, I appreciate the feedback. I definitely don’t understand the desire to be forced to go all in on pets, or not at all, because I do think – objectively – it limits the amount of potential diversity, but I can respect that some people enjoy that aspect of the game. Even if that aspect of the game seems counterintuitive to me.
Also, to the guy using a mod as an example, while it might potentially demonstrate why pets scaling with the player is a bad idea (ignoring the fact that a lot of skills that used to scale with pet stats and were changed are perfectly fine because the devs balanced them), it also demonstrates that whoever designed the skill just did a shitty job balancing it.
Personally I like that pets are scales separately. It makes them feel like something more than a different spell with a fancy skin. Also it feel it’s more appropriate…a user of minions has them because they do what he can’t or doesn’t want to do. The frail caster has pets do his killing, whereas the juggernaut with a giant war mace needs no help.
If pets were to scale off players…well then to have beastly pets I would have to be beastly myself…but then why do I need pets? Also how could I justify not being a hybrid at that point? Every pet build would have to be hybrid because every pet build would have a strong player.
Lets look at your example provided. The Blight fiend has more DPS, a bigger AOE, better CC, DA reduction, 23k base health, takes aggro, and even benifits from flat damage.
In a vacuum it is simply more value per point than shards.
If I use skill X and skill Y and suddenly have access to skill Z at the cost of some, or all, of the power of skill X or Y, skill Z doesn’t need to suddenly be tuned out of existence.
So it’s probably better to say the new skill Z is not just better than both skills X and Y, but also A and B. Hence as a player scaled pet it would need to be equivalent, and have it require at least 2-3 times more skill points than it currently requires.
I think I’m done responding to these same posts with what amounts to my same answers because, to me, we’re both just ignoring what the other person has to say and circling back to our original feelings.
The primary counterargument seems to be about balance. There’s an assumption that a pet would just ALWAYS be better than some other skill and everyone would be making hybrids, which as I, and others, have expressed is not an absolute reality. This is why balancing passes exist. People argue that this balancing pass would hurt pure summoners, but I just don’t think that’s true because of conversion, etc. You’d still be able to have multiple pets, and they’d still be viable. You just wouldn’t be forced to absolutely play that way. There’s no reason, in my eyes, that Crate couldn’t figure out how to make this work and I guess that is where our views differ. Again, there are skill point limitations.
Completely unrelated, but I’m not sure where you got the idea that blight fiend would benefit from flat damage? It has no %weapon damage component.
Again, your last point is just a complete assumption built on your feeling that pets would just be stronger/better than points allocated elsewhere. While this might be true, I don’t think it has to be.
Well currently that is actually the case because a pet has to do more than some random other skill. A pet has to DPS, CC and Tank. If your player is a tank with DPS too…well something has to give. As the player gets stronger the pets will have to get weaker, and this can be seen by how weak the current player scaled pets are. Do any of them actually tank?
Well by definition a player scaled pet would have to have a strong player, at which point you would be wasting the player if you don’t engage. Hence hybrid.
It’s Blighted Claws are weapon attacks themselves. Most pets attacks are, except for casters like the crow, the Blighted Rift Scourge, the Ch’thonian Fiends, those caster skeletons, and maybe some more.
Unless anyone’s a developer here, this whole thread is about everyone’s feelings. No need to dismiss mine so flippantly.
How would you be wasting the player any more than you are now with the current design or any other skill? Your player’s strength would be why your pets are strong, but using multiple pets somehow makes that strength a waste even though it’s what directly contributes to the power of the pet? What? Your character is the reason your pets are strong right now, albeit with a separate – and in my view unnecessary – stat template. You’d choose multiple pets for the same reason you’d choose any other skill.
I’m still not sure I understand the pet weapon attack thing. Are you saying because they’re melee attacks, they would automatically scale with weapon damage if this change were made?
Your final point is exactly what I said, multiple times, but also gives you the impression that I’m being flippant? I guess I’m confused. In this entire thread I’ve been advocating for some type of objective measurement while suggesting that myself, and others, haven’t been being objective?
Not better than allocated elsewhere per-se. If anything I think the balance would need to be such that pets, if player scaled, would generally perform worse than other more active skills. Reason is the ‘auto-attack’ style builds. Not necessarily something like Savagery really, but more the transmuted primal strike, dreeg spam, or 2handed firestrike type builds. With those types of builds you can skill up two attacks if you try. Usually there is a high opportunity cost of using your 2ndary skill - it makes you take a break from your main attack to use it - but a pet wouldn’t have that drawback. Pets would need to be balanced to account for that so someone with say Firestrike + Doombolt with a rifle would do roughly equal damage to Firestrike + Hellhound with a rifle. Do you really see that hellhound doing say 40% that players damage? Ditto for other pets that could be slotted in to builds that mostly spam one skill. I’d see that as around the number you’d need for the pure summoner to still compete, slower but not too slow as they’ve most always been.
Adding something like storm totem breaks the flow of skills to really leverage it, an opportunity cost beyond just skill points. Pets, with the potential exception of the new necro pets (skeletons are basically disposable and blight fiend + transmuter has similar recasting to something like storm totem) lack this. That would make them inherently hard to balance to a place where hybrids don’t feel penalized for taking a pet (or penalized for not taking a pet, that’d be bad too!) but a summoner still works. Would not envy whoever tries to balance that.
Then there is the question of whether or not pure pets SHOULD be viable (I’d actually be okay with ‘no’ to that…) but given the prevalence of pure summoner gear currently in game I think we can agree that ship has sailed.
Anyways, I hope that explains my position a bit better. I won’t try to post again about it.
Just because you won’t do it doesn’t mean other people won’t. The notion that the OP suggested is open to abuse/exploitation, and whether you like to admit it or not most people, especially casuals will resort to the most efficient way to beat the game. This is why OP builds are the most viewed and responded threads in any ARPG game forums. Everyone will want to use them at a certain point.
You obviously missed the point. level 1-2 character can be treated as a base starting point of your character. While 1 skill point on a specific pet is the base starting point for a pet.
At the very least for this game, you can already see that your pets (base) have higher damages and HP than you. And you want them scale the same way of the same source? This was an elementary example that was meant to make casuals understand that logic, from a balance perspective makes absolutely no sense. Is it flawed? Maybe… it doesn’t go into specifics enough, but it does get the point across.
Now, you’re just trolling… I don’t even see how this statement is relevant and how it connects to the character (base) vs. pet (base) point entirely.
This I actually understand, and since I’m not that good expressing myself regarding this, I’ll just layout a scenario that I personally find problematic, when following the OP’s suggestion:
Scenario A Current State w/ a Cabalist
Pure Summoner build with Support Skills.
Put into perspective just how much skill point investment, and gear allocations the player would have sacrificed to forgo other direct damage skills enhancement to be able to beat majority of this game’s content on highest difficulty.
Scenario B OP’s Suggestion State w/ a Death Knight.
Say the player used a relatively OP set/combo: Markovian’s/Warborn for example. Strong mix of HP% bonus, High Resists and Damage Modifiers from your weapons directly. Add in the components and augments bonus that could easily make Skeletons (a relatively frail pet) a walking army of destruction with mediocre skill point investment on the Skeleton and Master Aura tree.
Then the player decides to spend majority of his Skill points on your regular Soldier bread and butter melee tank essentials.
Not only did you result in a toon that can effectively clear the game by itself, but it now has access to an army of pets that has near same sustain and maybe damage as the pure summoner who invested everything he had on pets from the first scenario?
This doesn’t bother you? One way or another, if you make the player and the pet scale off the same source this will happen… It’s definitely not because:
This suggestion will lead to that PERIOD. Unlike you, I don’t see any other way of how it can be avoided. Which is probably why, it’s not in place. UNLESS, you do what they did at first with Devastation and shields. You completely disable the use of other skills when you have pets active except for support skills, but this method sparks off an entirely different debate (What skills are considered support skills, which is even more subjective in nature), which becomes more problematic and kills build variety even more.
Just because you won’t do it, someone else will can literally be applied to any overpowered combination in the game as you have done, but, again, plenty of people are NOT playing those OP builds. Just because they are most viewed/commented on does not mean that they’re being played by everyone. I frequently take a look at what others have done because I’m genuinely interested, but rarely do I end up running exact replicas. That isn’t to suggest my behavior is the norm, it’s just to point out that their behavior might not be the norm, too. Also, if the new “meta” becomes pet builds as opposed to any other type of build…so? There’s always a best/most efficient way to do things. If it involves pets, why is that a deadly sin?
I understand the base skill concept, I was just trying to point out that things in this game don’t necessarily scale linearly and that a numbers pass could resolve some of those concerns.
I do agree that it would take some work to change and I’m not expecting it to, I was genuinely interested in whether, as a design philosophy, a separate scaling for pets – all other things held equal, such as time investment for a different implementation, etc – was a better system than scaling with the player as the other skills in the game are designed. It seems like for some people, maybe it is.
U r right. Blight fiend, hell hound, briathorn & most other melee pets (cannot confirm with regards to archer skeles since its not possible to just summon archer skeles to test) benefit from flat damage if its under Bonuses To All Pets or from auras like Guile. I can confirm that the crow doesn’t benefit because its normal attack is lightning damage and not physical so Guile aura doesn’t buff its normal attack.
What I’m saying is that you would be wasting the player by not going hybrid. Currently my player is weak because I devote everything to pets. My pets do all the work and I shy away from using my player so as to not draw aggro. If pets were player scaled, my player would have to be strong. If my player is strong, why not equip a weapon and wade into battle with my pets? If I still shy away from battle with my player…that would be wasting a resource.
No I’m just explaining why pets benefit from flat damage currently. You asked how they could benefit with “no %weapon damage component”. Their attack is the “weapon” itself.
I suppose it’s the phrase “complete assumption built on your feeling”. I don’t thinks it’s necessary for us to undermine each others opinions/reasoning, but rather use our own opinions and reasoning to explain our position. I purposely used the skills you mentioned to reach my opinion, blight vs shards, if you disagree let me know where i went wrong with my comparison or give me some reasoning of your own. Don’t just say “you’re wrong because feelings”.
cannot confirm with regards to archer skeles since its not possible to just summon archer skeles to test
I have confirmed this. All the skeletons attacks(not the aura) benefit from flat damage except the fire casters. I’ve actually lowered my Raise Skeletons skill because of this.