Animal pet damage needs to be re-balanced

I think that the animal pet damage got nerfed too much, its no match to the weapon damage that is provided by legendary weapons, even when using greater pets at max level. Some players prefer to use animals instead of golems or thralls, and by nerfing animal pet damage they are basically becoming useless. Would be great to increase the damage as well as add an option for some special skills or behavior that can be chosen as animal pets level up, just a suggestion to make the game better and more enjoyable :slight_smile:

6 Likes

Totally agree! I loved my Greater Sabertooth before AoW . After AoW I lost him while trying to do a vault on Siptah. And since losing that cat I have tried leveling at least 4 more and lose them before they get to level 15.
Granted if I spec 20 points in Authority they become much better. However I don’t like or necessarily need to have Authority maxed all the time.

3 Likes

They’re attack need ap,too.

2 Likes

Pets badly need help.

My suggestion is to give Animals a single equipment slot: Collar.
Bone, Iron, Steel and Star Metal tiers. Perhaps even legendary ones.

Give pets 3 Behaviour states they can be switched between.
Reckless - Increases raw damage.
Wary - Increases Armor.
Savage - Increases Armor Penetration.

Use the tier of the collar to determine the bonus amounts provided by each behaviour.

Would make Pets be more flexible by changing their stat bonuses on the fly, while Thralls are less flexible (Unless you carry spare gear everywhere for them) but perform better in the role they’re fully geared for than a Pet.
Golems already serve as literal expendable canon fodder craftable enmasse with fixed stats and useful, purposebuilt effects (Lotus Burners, headlights etc) with a secondary benefit as a passive gatherer.

4 Likes

If pets had the same powers as humans, the non-vertigo advantage that pets have would overwhelm humans

1 Like

Pets were getting reworked slowly over time last I heard. Whacked with the nerfbat then retweak gradually.

1 Like

Very gradually.

At least now they have some hitpoints. But it’s painful to watch an Island lynx struggle against a 25-hitpoint bird.

I don’t think pets should ever be as powerful as human thralls with legendary weapons. Pets don’t need equipment, so they’re a good low-budget follower for people who maybe don’t want to build big permanent bases. Pets can also carry more stuff than humans (excepting bearers, who are unimpressive combatants).

But pets (at least the fighting variants such as great cats, apes and scorpions, as opposed to “bearer” animals such as deer, elephants and rocknoses) should be capable combatants. Admittedly, I haven’t bothered checking their performance in recent months because of how sub-par they became after the nerf, so I can’t say how they perform now.

2 Likes

I find myself in very firm agreement with this. Pets have always lagged behind thralls since their inception into this wonderful game. However this should not, and need not be the case. Furthermore, I do not buy the narrative propogated by some that pets should somehow be an inferior alternative to thralls, but instead argue that they should be their equally powerful counterparts to thralls. How this should be achieved I am happy to leave this to the brains trust at Funcom. But the widening disparity needs to be addressed and pets raised to the level of an equally viable alternative.

3 Likes

What bothers me the most about how badly pets are treated by Funcom is that they are legitimately harder to raise than a human Thrall.

T4 Fighter: Camp Sinners for a few minutes or grab any of the guaranteed spawns (Blood Crystal/Obolus included) throw them into a Wheel for a few minutes with the easiest food in the game and out comes the best kind of thrall to have. Imagine if your T4 fighter had an 80% chance to just die on the wheel lol.
The only drawback is needing to equip it… but that isnt exactly hard.

Compare that to pets, needing you to first find a baby animal, then build the pens, then find its best food that grants a chance to produce a Greater and then start praying.
And what you get in the end is a below average thrall that cant keep up with the damage of a Human thrall, cant be given gear to scale its armor like a human thrall and all you get in return over that human thrall is … 5 more inventory slots.
You cant even change their appearance after placing them.
So unlike a human Thrall that you can transmog any cool new DLC armor onto, you have to commit that pet to a single look for the rest of its life.

I 100% agree that all Thrall types should be equally viable.
Fix pets Funcom :frowning:

6 Likes

Awesome responses, thank you, hopefully @Funcom takes a note :slight_smile:

1 Like

I’m a big pet guy and have 19 different pets. I have tested all of them. Only the greater sabertooth and greater wolf still do any significant damage. Everything else is doing 4-22 damage per hit. Armor values appear to be completely off, as I lost a greater saber to Rotbranch in 3 hits. Meanwhile a corrupted spider took very little to no damage at all. Seems like if armor value is under 1000 it is very vulnerable, but if armor is over 1000 it is almost untouchable. Unfortunately doing 4 damage per hit doesn’t allow it to hold aggro, much less kill the target.

4 Likes

Thanks for sharing, all pets need to be re-balanced, and their attack frequency increased too in my opinion, as that is what makes animals different from humans - speed.

3 Likes

Pets in general have less hitpoints since Age of War than they did before. And with NPC’s hitting harder that is NOT a good thing for their longevity. I even brought this up during the beta but it’s still exactly the same.

Exactly my point. NPC’s hit harder. Pets have lower HP and hit lower as well. Heck, a Newly raised Komodo hits hit to half HP by one regular attack from a crocodile. How do you except to level these things up if two hits (3 most if you are lucky) will kill them? Only way I found plausible was to leave them 15m back and on “attack nothing” while I killed everything in site so they could gain XP and level up. That’s not what having a pet should be about.

See above :point_up_2: :wink:

3 Likes

Maybe let us by default have 2 pets (4 with authority)

Wouldnt be much different from zombies then

And nerf their HP Values (again i know) but buff their damage. You shud un theory have twice the amount of dps with two pets instead of one out.

Also my suggestion was allow is to level regular pets to 20 and then thst turns them into a greater varient that starts at level 10.

4 Likes

I also tested many large pets, however, the sabertooth could not be grown, but the rest were. My white wolf was out of competition (~150 damage at zero level), then there are a large bear and a jaguar, and the rest, as you wrote, are many times smaller, especially large lions, tigers and panthers.

1 Like

I would also reduce their physical size, as they tend to get stuck when going through doors and stuff :slight_smile:

Even if you have two pets, their HP is already garbage so nerfing it even further means they would die to 1 hit! Maybe 2 if you are lucky. Increasing their damage and having two of them wouldn’t matter if they just died instantly to crocodiles, in noob river. Forget about going anywhere else, they would not last 1/4 of a second.

You would would have in practice ZERO dps out because your pets would be dead. Plain and simple if you nerf their HP any further they WILL DIE pretty much instantly to anything. Sure, greater pets will last longer, slightly, but not much. And sure, if you ALREADY have a bunch of level 20 greater pets the will last longer yet, but they will still die.

Heck they get stuck on rocks and trees because they are too large and dumb.

1 Like

I guess it would be nice for pets to have higher armor, either from the start, or scaling more from their grit stat :eyes:

Because I made the calculation on a specific example recently, and my 2.5k HP Cannibal Brute with Heavy Armor had slightly more effective HP than my 8k HP Greater Sabretooth :notlikethis:

2 Likes

Pets with low armour are definitely taking a massive beating from Rotbranch, but I can tell you that even a thrall with over 1700 armour is losing between 1000-2000hp in a 30 second to minute long fight, if I wasn’t doing half the damage, the thrall may even die. The thralls are eating Roasted Haunch, not a meal, but still, the damage Rotbranch is inflicting is wildly high!

I did notice that my Wolf pets were only doing 30-50 damage per bite, around the same as their counterparts in the wild. At some point last week or the week before my Wolf pets started doing between 150-300dmg per bite again. Not sure if they announced a fix, but something definitely changed for the better!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.