My apologies if this has already been discussed and I’m just missing the thread (I searched for the term “Pet” and didn’t find anything recent).
So I’ll admit I didn’t participate in recent Testlive but based on some recent Youtubes by popular Conan streamers, it appears that pets are being nerfed (the theory being devs don’t want pets to be more powerful than thralls)?
If true, then why even maintain the pet system. To be honest pets weren’t that great to begin with (other than a couple like the greater sabertooth “one shot”) and were highly vulnerable to poison gas arrows (no way to protect them). We would raid bases and wipe out armies of pets with gas arrows.
If the couple of actual useful pets get nerfed I would recommend just scrapping the entire pet system (they are basically just cosmetics at this point) and save us some space on our computers.
Heya. Yeah, this has been a very controversial measure. Although weaker pets are getting a general buff, stronger pets are getting nerfed a bit. This brings both extremes closer to the median. Some people, obviously, aren’t happy with this, because it doesn’t make pets competitive with thralls in the slightest.
However, this is supposed to be the first step in the overall process of rebalancing pets (key words “supposed to be”). As far as I know, there isn’t a lot of detail on what the plan is. This could be setting up for something like changing damage multipliers for pets (like how thralls have multipliers based on class), or it could be something like increasing the number of active pets you can have (similar to how you can have more zombies than thralls).
For my part, I’m staying cautiously optimistic that Funcom has a plan beyond just what we’ve seen to this point. Others will point to other rebalances and tweaks that have so far been left unfinished, but I’m too new to the game and community to say much about those. (I’ve only been playing since about a week before Patch 3.0 landed.)
So there is a plan to make pets more competitive with thralls. It’s just a matter of whether it will be enough and whether it will be fully realized.
It is my understanding that this is the first step in the process of balancing the pets. Some of them are too strong, and others are too weak. This was done with thralls several months ago.
Good input and I missed the part about weaker pets apparently getting a buff. Still atm pets are pretty pathetic (too squishy) and the only decent pets were ones like the greater sabertooth (thus my concern when hearing they will be nerfed).
Pets may have a place in the PVE servers but for PVP there really isn’t a point of using them for base defense till they implement poison gas protection.
If you capture very good npcs, have luck with the rolls, use the proper gear, sacrifice an entire town for elixirs (because sometimes rng sucks) and use the proper perks, you can still have fairly decent thralls. If you ask me, it’s more trouble than they are worth now. IF I capture one that I really, really, REALLY, never want to lose, I might go through all that trouble. Other than that, they are canon fodder. If they die, they die.
Well since @stelagel poked me on this. I’ll add my two cents on the matter although I did speak about this before.
The dev team needs to figure out what direction they are going and let me explain.
Here are two conflicting facts.
They like the idea of max level is 60 and relatively quick to move up the levels. They have stated this repeatedly that they understand action on the player level usually starts at level 60 so they wanted to the journey to 60 to be relatively short.
They stated pets are early to mid game thralls.
With those two combined and the 5 to 6 hour window you gotta wait for the pet to come to age and hope its a greater version, this all doesn’t make sense. Statistically, you would have to fill a normal 5 slot pen to get a greater animal if you fed it the right food. That’s minimal 5 hours but the time to gather five babies. Many of the better pets are in areas you can’t get to easily till you level a bit anyways so all in all this is a very time consuming process that means you may get a day or two worth of pet love until you evolve past them and require a heartier thrall like a beserker or RHTS…both of which are fairly easy to get removed from a mob and truncheon out to a WoP anyways…a lot eaiser than collecting 5 frost wolves or 5 sabrekitties to statistically ensure a greater. Level time is the same and so you get a meh animal for the the same time as an end game fighter thrall…just doesn’t make sense on PVE or PVP. It’s RP yeah no doubt but RP can be on either server type.
You did a far better job at explaining the situation than I initially did.
If we are going to nerf the couple of upper tier pets that kind of made sense to go thru the trouble of getting (as you point out at level 60), then why even have the pet system. Scrap it and save some space on my computer (the game is already the largest on my SSD).
So they are giving us house cats but nerfing the cats we actually want? Yep seems like more “eye candy” stuff being added (house cats) that after the novelty wears off most folks will not care about it.
Actually their logic for the pet nerf is questionable. They are going to nerf pets so that MAYBE they can tune them up later? Whatever — I’ll just stick with the easy to get Treasure Seekers or zombies.
As is I felt like sabretooths were kind of “glass cannons” in that they hit extremely hard but not that difficult to kill (especially with poison gas arrows).
Zombies or RHTS?? Because RHTS got nerfed to a shadow of their former selves already! I concede you can still make them very strong, but it gives a lot more trouble to achieve it now… in a way it makes those you really want to keep alive, no matter what (and not in pvp), more special.
Zombies need a nerf just because. And I totally support them nerfing them to oblivion! (joking… just a little tweak)
Honestly, since 3.0, I just stick with Berserkers. I love my RHTS thralls, the variety in them makes them special, and to be honest, with full authority they can kill everything, but berserkers are easy to get ( one pops in the mounds every ten minutes ) and have the highest DPS with their multiplier.
You can get RHTS very easily from the Wine cellar, @JJDancer . Perhaps a little more difficult than the Berserker, but you have several spawns there (10, but not all will be fighters). I used to place at least one greater wheel outside the temple quarter entrance and capture them like there’s no tomorrow, one after the other util I filled the wheel (or wheels). I don’t know how their HP bonus per point is right now, but the difference between dmg multipliers between them and berserkers used to be negligible while their higher health more than made for it. Overall, they were superior. Now that doesn’t stand?
Nope, their multiplier is only 0.002 higher than RHTS… do you really think that’s something to write home about? On the other hand they gain 0.4% damage from a strength point while RHTS gain 0.825, so even a flimsy RHTS with 15 STR gains more bonus damage than a Berserker with 30. On top of that the RHTS will have on average ~2k more HP… So they’re just better…
Despite that though any of the higher end thralls will do just fine as in most situations there is no need to “minmax” unless you’re OCD about it
I did an unscientific test earlier. I got very lucky in raising my pets and have 5 greater kitties and one greater wolf. All of them have been fully leveled to 20.
For the test, I copied my game.db from my live game to my testlive game.
In both games, I admin teleported with both of my Sabertoothed Kitties to the same Alligator World Boss. Then without helping them to kill the beast, I kicked back and watched.
In both cases, they suffered the same amount of damage. In the testlive game, they also took twice as long to kill the World Boss.
Yep seems like more “eye candy” stuff being added (house cats) that after the novelty wears off most folks will not care about it.
