Balancing Pet Souls

[Blease]

Out of all the souls that are obviously underpowered and need significant work, the most numerous are the souls that have pets, Necromancers, Elementalists, Druids, Rangers and Beast Masters.

With this common denominator it should be obvious that rift has a major flaw when it comes to handling pet classes. Rift continues to try to balance these souls, but a significant issue will always stop this from ever being possible.

For a pet to be useful and centric to a soul that pet must be a significant factor in that souls game play. There are two ways of going about this in rifts current soul system.

1. Make the base pet a significant entity that deals considerable damage/healing/buffs, separate and in concert with the player.
2. Make the base pet nigh useless with most of the talents being spent buffing the pet and the players interaction with the pet. This is closer to what Rift currently does however in Rift pets even with significant investment remain weak.

The first option presents the problem that with little investment into a pet soul the player gains a significant and possibly overwhelming advantage. The second option has the problem that if the soul is centric to the pet then there is intrinsically little synergy with other souls.

As can be seen the problem isn't that pets are overpowered or hard to balance. It is that they are hard to balance and combine with non pet souls.

Imagine that all pet souls in the mage, rogue, warrior, and cleric callings were replaced with other souls or revamped so as not to use pets and a new calling was created called something like Overlord.

The Overlord Calling would be based around pets. Each soul would have one pet that you got as a base ability and would scale based directly off of your gear.

The reason this would work as opposed to the current system is that every soul that had a pet would be within the same calling. These souls would no longer have to be balanced against non pet souls in addition to pet abilities, because you would have no interaction with non pet souls. Talent trees in the Overlord calling could be focused solely on pet mechanics.

In addition by doing this it would allow for new and interesting game play within the game.

• The pets could be scaled by the point investment in that soul as a base mechanic and allow multiple pets, one per soul. This would allow either one powerful pet or multiple less powerful pets.
• You could add a soul that builds and controls turrets, like those already in the game at onslaughts.
• You could add a true tanking pet soul.
• You could make druids a viable healing soul.

But the most important aspect of this idea is that by separating pet souls from the other souls, you are freed to actually develop real game play for those who like using pets.

[Relair]

Wow. I love it! Instead of having to balance other non pet souls around the fact that they could have a pet, just make a whole new calling that ALL has pets. I would kill for this, no matter what role you swapped to you would have pets be the central theme of it. Of course since its awesome and makes alot of sense from a balancing standpoint it will probably never happen.

With the way Rift is set up now it wouldn't be that hard for them to fix the problem though, all they need to do is make pets scale much much better with gear and gain the benefits of consumables their master uses, that would bridge the gap considerably. Maybe add in pet focus items like EQ had, could be a trinket slot item that greatly enhances your pets. Or pet buffs, I kind of miss those. Give every pet class a 51pt ability that lets them cast a 1h buff on the pet that increases hp, dmg, armor, attack speed etc by 25% or something.

[nocks]

You nailed the problem with the pet classes, but your proposed solution of the new Calling is just unrealistic at this point. I hope they do the smart thing and let the pets scale better the more points you put into the Soul, so that with 51 points in Beastmaster your pet will be twice as strong as it would with 25 points, etc. They need a sort of scaling damage modifier like Warrior tanks have for health/armor. (Each point spent in soul increases pet's damage by x%).

[Blease]

I think I can explain why I think a new calling for pet souls in necessarily in a better manner.

In every non pet soul the basic flavor of the soul is used throughout. For example, an assassins main points are that it uses stealth and poisons. From zero investment in that soul to full investment you can use the abilities you gain all the way till 50 and those abilities are either a mechanic that does not need to scale, a percent based mechanic or a mechanic that levels up as you level up. Every ability from all souls follow this pattern except pet summons. Lower level pet summons stop leveling up at level 30. This means that after level 30 investing less than a large amount of point is useless when it come to pets.

I find this ridiculous, this is like making low level root heals for cleric not scale past level 30 or making it so that riftstalker beginning teleports don't work in high level areas unless you have over 30 points in the tree. Why can't a riftstalker that has points in ranger use a razorbeast as an expendable offtank. Why can't a justicar with a druid subspec rely on a fae pet to help out with some of the healing.

Yes I know technically those things can occur, but, because those pets are maxed at level 30 they are so ineffectual as to make it pointless to use them at all and with aggro issues even detrimental to use.

Right now all pets are seriously underpowered, why? I am not entirely certain but my best guess is one or a combination of two things.

First, they may believe access to pets is somehow powerful. I think if this were the case then you would see a huge amount of pets in raids. I just don't think even if these pets were 50 that these pets would be a significant factor and even if a very well played character could get a small edge from a pet from a subspec. I say good for them because generally keeping a pet alive is not easy. So, even if this is their reason I think its an unsound premise.

Second, they may believe that game play should be centered around the character not an extension of the character. I have seen this attitude surface from other mmo's and their developers and frankly it makes no sense, The reason pet classes exist is that some people enjoy managing pets, so why limit that mechanic to the point that having a pet is at best subpar and at worst detrimental. Basically if this if the reason the developers choose to keep pet souls as they are, then why bother having pets at all? Why not just remove pets all together?

I think the developers need to realize that some people really enjoy pets and want to play souls that emphasize this mechanic that in fact make it a central part of their play style. My suggestion of a new calling is one way of doing this but frankly if they could do anything to make even one pet soul a serious dps/healing or even tanking choice in raids then I would be very happy, and I think so would many others

[fetuseater]

not a bad idea but what would happen to the pets soul we have now would they be removed or would they be revamped

[rptb1]

Just a half-formed thought, but what if the pet soul talents allowed you to *transfer* some of your power (in the general sense) to your pet, at a cost to yourself. This could prevent the problem of someone having a really strong pet, and then adding a really strong soul for themselves as well.

For example, you might chose Ranger/Riftstalker, and then transfer some of the defensive capability of Riftstalker to your pet, losing it yourself.

This is only the beginning of an idea, but I'm trying to get at the balance problem: a strong pet must be balanced by a weaker character.

[Relair]

I don't mind the level cap on the free starter pets, it would be silly for every single person to have a pet out, and they would, unless they were weak enough that they died to one big aoe..in which case it would be pointless to have even if they were 50 so why bother? What I hate is the fact that you can put 51pts in a pet soul, base your gear around max stats instead of sp/ap/crit to beef up your pet, get pet crystals, pet essences..and still even the best pet class is subpar at best =/ It just doesn't make sense for them not to address the scaling issues at the very least, if not a radical redesign like the op outlined.

[dkny]

they should make the pet soul be able to tame monster any kind beside elites and bosses and you get that mobs skills with the pet

[Kedoss]

Imagine that all pet souls in the mage, rogue, warrior, and cleric callings were replaced with other souls or revamped so as not to use pets and a new calling was created called something like Overlord.

The Overlord Calling would be based around pets. Each soul would have one pet that you got as a base ability and would scale based directly off of your gear.

.......

But the most important aspect of this idea is that by separating pet souls from the other souls, you are freed to actually develop real game play for those who like using pets.

You hit the nail on the head in my opinion. Consolidating the pet souls into one calling will make balancing them considerably easier and allow developers to point the other callings into other, appropriate directions.

You'd take 2 souls from Mage, 1 from Rogue, 1 from Cleric, and 1 from Warrior for a grand total of 5. They could come up with 2 new souls then for 7 total to match the other callings (and add a new one to Mage as well to bring it up to 7). Your idea defiantly has merit and I applaud it.

My main in Necromancer, so I'd like to see where this goes.

[tro44]

how about, instead of the level 30 lockout on pets,

we had pets scale by the number of points in the tree.

Pets would be max level, but a percentage of the effectiveness of the full pets.

[Sarim]

I hope they do the smart thing and let the pets scale better the more points you put into the Soul, so that with 51 points in Beastmaster your pet will be twice as strong as it would with 25 points, etc. They need a sort of scaling damage modifier like Warrior tanks have for health/armor. (Each point spent in soul increases pet's damage by x%).

That's how it is already (at least for Elem and Necro). Elementalist pets for example gain +2% damage per point spent (with the talent Force of Nature). With the talent Planar Expansion the pets gain +10% and +3% extra per point for each point above 31. So, 172% max with 51pts spent.

Yet, the (dps) pets only do around 15-20% of an elementalists total damage (that is, at my current level of gear, I suppose for new elementalists the pet will do a larger percentage of their damage). If you include the swarm pets (Swarming Flames) then pets do about 30-35% of the elementalists total damage.

THAT is the real problem IMO. The elementalist as a caster is for the most part OK (of course improvements can be made and are always welcome, especially in the AE department). However the pets either need a massive base damage boost, or they need to scale far better with the mages equipment. And they need the boost, because right now there's a 400-800 dps gap between elementalists and the other current top mage specs.

As to how this can be done so it does not upset the balance with other souls? It is all shown already how it could be done, the talent Planar Expansion is a good example: you only get much of the bonus if you invest a lot of points.

[The Relic]

I ain't losing my faerie!

[Ezariel]

The pet souls are setup perfectly to work with the soul system as is imo. The only problem is that investing a large amount of points in a pet soul does give you level 50 pets but they pale in comparison to the abilities of a soul without pets. Just make them much more powerful at max level to bring them in line with the non pet souls and problem solved. There really is no need for the starter pets to scale.

[Inixia]

I think the main problem with the pet souls (aside from scaling issues with pet dps) is that pets are too much of a passive characteristic of these classes, more similar to a buff that is summoned and ignored but provides a dps benefit. Because of this if you make them too strong, its very easy to have other souls pick it up and combine it with their own main rotation. Necro and ele rotations don't get used much bc they are adjusted down to balance out with pet dps imo. I think the best solution is to have pets be a more active part of the class, something that the class works through and can influence their behavior with abilities that are earned as points are invested (something that involves the main rotation more).

[Crovack]

We currently see a system that too often suggests that the pet should be, for most intents and purposes, an automatic DoT with a visual component to it. Tanking pets in some way supply a slightly different role, but where pet classes see the most noteworthy failure is in fulfilling the primary role of their soul, which in all cases involves DPSing (so I will stick to addressing concerns with DPS pets).

The first and most obvious issue with DPS pets is scaling the pet. It must be pointed out that there are two distinct issues to address with pet scaling, the first is that of pet scaling with the soul and points spent in it, the second is pet scaling with the gear/PA of the player.

For pet scaling with the soul, the suggestions that involve abilities like the warrior tank souls' that augment the pet based on the number of points spent in the pet soul are an obvious option, however there are others as well. One way to do this would be to incorporate abilities into the soul at different points that increase both the player and the pet's ability to do things. For example, if at 48 Elementalist there was an ability:

-"Synchronized Attack" that "Causes the player to launch (some Attack) at a mob. If the players pet hits the same target with (someOtherAttack) shortly afterwards, both abilities strike with 100% crit chance and the critical strike deals an extra X% damage."

The idea of this stems to the major point of this post and a primary idea on how to make pets a more interesting and involved part of the class: make players actively control certain abilities of their pets in order to generate ideal results. This can equate to the above, this can equate to having any number of various and creative ways to cause players to take an active interest in what their pet is doing. Pet abilities can and should be part of the players' rotation. Some abilities should be able to active automatically in an auto-attack style fashion, but causing the player to take abilities of their pet and put them on their bar and use them like they would any other attack will turn DoTs-with-a-wireframe into dynamic and interesting characters.

Imagine abilities where "You and your pet attack all mobs in a front arc. Any mobs hit by both the player and the pet take an additional X damage." Other abilities could include things such as "Causes your pet to land a distracting blow. The players next attack on the target will automatically critical."

The possibilities for involving a two-person-team style play between pet and player are all but endless. All of these ideas, due to the fact that they're abilities that would work based on some combination of both pet and player, thus will have a more obvious way for scaling the attacks the same way all others are scaled.