Pet Overhaul Brainstorming

[Saxony]

This is a suggestion about overhauling pets. This is really more brainstorming and about starting a conversation. This kind of change is really big and I don't expect it to be implemented even if most or all of the development team liked it. I understand everyone's developing the game for free in their spare time. I like making suggestions though, and I thought this might be a fun idea, and perhaps someday down the line this suggestion or another pet overhaul suggestion could make its way into more serious conversations about a new pet system for nexus clash.

I just returned from a years long hiatus from the game (I have some files kicking around in my folder for this game from 2015, wow), and I've been reading the archives of the changelog and proposed changes, and it gave me some ideas, so I thought I'd make this suggestion.

Thanks for reading.

Idea:
Overhaul pets.

Goal:
In general, get rid of ways that pets work very differently from other combat systems. Petmasters can get very big numbers, sometimes they have restrictions on playstyle, sometimes those big numbers don't really mean much. Many times petmasters don't really care about damage or accuracy as long as they have a huge quantity of pets. They are overall quite different from other classes (this is sometimes good, sometimes bad).

This is mostly a nerf, but there are some buffs. Basically it tones down the really big numbers but makes the result more usable/user friendly and more compatible with different playstyles.

Reason to change things:
Pet classes being immobile is unfortunate. This probably isn't that big of deal, since you can wander around with your one super pet like a wrackwyrm or fossil monstrosiy and a small squad of lesser pets.

Pets doing 20 or 30 attacks while being summoned for 1 AP is hilariously overpowered from the point of view of AP efficiency. Sometimes summoning a pet is much much better than casting spells to attack.

Having 30 pets who can obliterate just about anyone (other than anti-pet specialists) is extremely powerful. It's awesome, feeling like you have a pet army that can tackle any challenge (and usually can).
It's overkill for the most part. It almost doesn't matter how much damage, what damage type, or how much accuracy your pets have. That's unusual. You'd think there would be a difference between dealing 4 damage and 8 damage. But there really isn't. Furthermore, it really doesn't matter if your pets have 40% accuracy or 80% accuracy. If you have a pet army, they just have so many attacks it doesn't matter.
If you are summoning 1 pet to take down 1 guy, again, that one pet can attack 20-30 times and costs 1 AP to summon. So damage and accuracy also don't matter that much.

Against the character who has an answer for your pet army, your pets won't be able to kill them and instead will all die. That feels not that great.

That represents two extremes. Either a big petwall obliterates just about anything, or gets wiped out by 1 or 2 tanks with damage auras. It's either awesome or it gets defeated pretty consistently. If there wasn't an answer to petwalls, they might be overpowered. They're awesome, but not mobile. They can kill just about any character, but get wiped out by 1 or 2 anti-pet specialists.

I don't like game design where something is really good but gets countered by one thing.
Also: I'm not sure if damage auras were ever intended to be the main response to pet walls. Seems kind of counter intuitive.

The changes in conceptual form:
Change pets so that overall quantity won't matter as much, and quality will matter more.
Allow petmasters to move around more freely.
Balance petmasters closer to other classes in terms of how they do damage.
A petmaster with one super pet and a squad of lesser pets (Like a Wrackwyrm and a few Hellhounds) will basically play the same. A petmaster with a huge army will play differently.

The changes:
Pets no longer have MP or AP stats at all. They still have HP.
Pets no longer incur AP cost by moving. They move for free.
Pets no longer attack using their AP and MP. Instead they attack using their petmaster's MP. Each attack costs 1 MP. If the petmaster runs out of MP, the pets can no longer attack.
Pets no longer suffer any form of decay. Some limit to stop huge pet armies (100+ or 1000+) from forming might still be necessary.

What does this mean:
You can move around with your full pet army. Now travelling costs your pets nothing. Feel free to take that vacation you've always been dreaming of. You deserve it.

Having a huge pet army will do less than currently.
Having a larger number of pets only increases the speed your pets can deal damage, not total damage.
Having more pets just means they drain your MP faster, but they won't attack more times.
10 ghouls will eventually get as many attacks as 30 ghouls, but they will do it 3x slower.
This is probably important if you want your pet's counter attacks to be meaningful, since having 1 ghoul defending you 1 attack at a time is much less powerful than 10 ghouls all attacking at once. Eventually they will attack the same number of times (assuming someone can survive the number of attacks necessary to drain your total MP), but clearly 10 ghouls counter attacking is better than 1 or 3.
This is also important for defending a stronghold with your pet wall. Having 30 ghouls is much more menacing than having 1 ghoul even if that 1 ghoul could theoretically attack 30 times and do the same amount of damage as the 30 ghouls just attacking once each.
So you still want a "large" number of pets in your pet wall. Perhaps as many as possible.

Having a larger number of pets means they will survive longer, like usual.
10 ghouls still last longer than 5 ghouls.
Having a larger number of pets means there is more fodder to waste AOE damage on and potentially spare actual characters from getting hit by AOE attacks.
Theoretically, just having 1 ghoul could be sufficient to do damage (albeit very slowly), but if that 1 ghoul dies, you don't have a pet any more. If you have a pack of ghouls then it will take more work to wipe them all out compared to just having 1.

Other than that, I can't really think of any advantage to having a huge pet army.
This is intended. The amount of pets people can get is sort of ridiculous. It is kind of awesome to have a huge pet army, but it's sort of pointless. Either it obliterates anyone who can't handle it but you always stay in your stronghold any way, or all the pets evaporate on a tank with a damage aura.
You also can't move around with that huge pet army, so you can't really use it. It just sits there being a defense for your stronghold.
I'd like pets between the extremes of obliterating just about everyone while being wiped out by 1 or 2 prepared anti-pet specialists.

Petmasters will need to keep high MP to keep their petwall useful.
Con/Counter point:
This one makes me dislike the suggestion. It could really cripple the petmaster classes for stronghold defense unless they always keep their MP up. If they can't ever use their MP, then it's basically the same as using up all their MP to rejuvenate/summon pets. This could be overcome by changing playstyle to log in throughout the day and partially using up for MP multiple times instead of using all your MP at once.
This downside could be counteracted by giving petmasters Cosmic Affinity (+15MP).
Pro/Counter-Counter point:
This actually won't be that big of a problem. Once the petmaster gets 15 or so pets, that will be enough as getting more won't really do anything for them. Instead of constantly using their AP and MP to maintain their petwall, they will get up to a certain number of pets, call it good, and then stop using their MP to maintain the petwall. So their MP won't be constantly drained in upkeep like now, meaning it will be there when it needs to be used.

Any class can thwart a petwall now, as long as they can survive enough attacks to drain MP from the petmaster(s).
That means damage auras aren't required to overcome petwalls.
Tanks also need to survive less overall petspam.
Let me do some basic math (forgive me if it is off). IBs kill ghouls after 8 contacts on burning aura.
If an IB needs to clear out 20 ghouls summoned by 1 lich, they need to survive 160 attacks.
In the overhaul, they only need to survive 40-50 attacks if the lich has full MP.
If 1 lich had 40 ghouls, the IB would still need to survive only 40-50 attacks.
If an IB needs to clear out 40 ghouls summoned by 2 liches, they need to survive 320 attacks.
In the overhaul, that would be 80-100 attacks.
And if the lich in question only has 10MP, then the character would only need to survive 10 attacks, which would disable the entire petwall.

Having a big petwall will be more about the number of petmasters than the number of pets.
I think this brings more of a focus on the player rather than the NPCs they create. It feels like a good change.
Having 1 petmaster with a lot of pets is less useful than 3 or 4 petmasters with a medium number of pets.
1 Lich with 40 ghouls will only do so much. Once the ghouls use their petmasters MP, the big number of pets doesn't matter anymore.
3 Liches with 10 ghouls each will actually be able to do more, since there are 3 pools of MP to fuel those pets and keep them active.

Having pets with more damage, more accuracy, or a better damage type actually means something.
Currently, having 1 Fossil Monstrosity compared to 10 ghouls makes the FM seem a bit lackluster, even though the FM does 15 damage at 65% accuracy compared to 10 damage at 60% accuracy.
This is rather unusual. Comparing 15 slash damage / 65% accuracy to 10 slash damage / 60% accuracy should be a big deal. In any combat class (like Void Walker or Nexus Champion), this would be a big deal. But because you can have a billion ghouls, it doesn't matter. 10 ghouls are better than 1 FM.
With this overhaul, pet attacks cost MP so the petmasters care about which pet is attacking and how good those attacks are, just like combat classes care which attacks they use and how good they are.
Would an Infernal Behemoth use an attack that does 10 damage when they could be using an attack that does 15 damage, all other things being equal? Of course not. Again, with the pet spam, damage doesn't matter and I think that's a bit peculiar.

Conclusion:
This is mostly a nerf, a bit of a buff, and simplifies the petmaster classes a lot. It makes them more mobile and require less upkeep while nerfing the effectiveness of a giant pet wall to balance the lack of upkeep. Having a huge army of pets would mostly just be for bragging rights more than anything else.

I hope pets are still good, but not ridiculously overpowered in certain scenarios (obliterating someone who steps into your stronghold with pet spam, or summoning a pet for 1 AP to deal with a single target).

Discussing the nerfs, this opens up more options for overcoming petwalls and that would be a big change. It means you don't need damage auras. Furthermore, if all else remains the same, a Seraph or IB would have an easier time overcoming a petwall if this overhaul was implemented. Something might need to be done to counterbalance that nerf to petwalls.

The idea is to make petwalls overall less powerful and require less of a specific "counter" to overcome, which makes pets less all or nothing, but it is a big nerf so it might need some reworking.

Again, thanks for reading if you got this far.

[Saint_Jimmy]

I should apologise - I've had a reply mostly finished sitting on my desktop for a while and never got around to posting it So here it is:

So this is a really interesting idea. This is going to be a bit of a disorganized mess but I'll try and keep it orderly.

* The damage and accuracy of pets aren't as irrelevant as you think. Yes, a prepared tank (or two, depending on the amount of pets) will burn through your pets, but the amount of potions that are required will vary. I'll deal with accuracy here: when you're tanking you want as much dodge as is reasonably possible, because anyone can tank pets down to dealing 1*accuracy damage. What differentiates the good tanks from my wizard filling in is that they can reduce it down further, often via dodge but sometimes via things like phasing or adaptation. Damage vs tanks is less important, although still relevant in the case of things like Fossils (which can be difficult to soak to 1) or Netherhounds (which can crit). It also requires more potion expenditure from the tanks, particularly lower quality tanks. Damage becomes much more important though when you're trying to clear vs people who have some soak but not seraph/active tank levels of soak. That might be because forts aren't entirely removed, or because people were silly and didn't kill the tanks first (or they might not have had enough ap to kill all the pseudo-tanky people). Breaking the soak floor and doing more than 1 damage can be incredibly important in these cases, especially if you don't have a huge pet swarm for whatever reason.

[Nayru]

s'a lot i could say about this (like how without 3-digit something mp summoners with psycho mp regen it'd be completely untenable to have whole classes based around this)

but i'll primarily just note that thinking of pets top-down in their maximum capabilities (<1% of scenarios) is a bad idea and lead to some massive injustices in class design

[Dissident]

[Edith]

Try having spend 180CP for Keening of the Dead and the targets are getting like 7 damage each. SMH

I don't login with that char anymore

[Saxony]

Thanks for your feedback everyone. I like getting new ideas and bouncing them off of people, so this really helps me out.

Some new ideas:
Change petmasters so they can buff their super pets, turning them into super duper pets.
Thanks to Dissident for this idea. Petmasters could get new options for buffing their pets (either temporarily, like casting a spell that lasts for 10 status ticks, or more permanently like how rejuvenating a hellhound turns it into a netherhound). A quick and easy way to describe this would be giving Anoint and Holy Transfer to all petmasters, but they can only use that skill on their pets. You could buff your pet's accuracy, dodge, soak, give them an affinity potion, etc.

A less expansive system would be giving each petmaster a new skill (perhaps with some child skills) that gives them a streamlined version of that. You could spend 1AP and maybe 5-10MP to give your pet +2 damage, +10% accuracy, +10% dodge, things like that (the AP and MP costs would need too be balanced against just summoning another pet or rejuvenating one you already have to heal it and give it more attacks). Maybe even a damage aura (though that would be possible with the Anoint/Holy Transfer idea). A child skill could expand these buffs to something like +4 damage, +20% accuracy, +20% dodge. Those are some rough numbers. Right now a petmaster really only summons their 1 super pet if they can, then spams out whatever other pets they have to form their petwall. And every super pet is exactly the same. I think there could more depth there (though again, it would need to be competitive with just summoning more pets or no one would use it).

Drastically reduce the amount of MP pets have.
This idea would keep everything in the current pet system, but just reduce the amount of MP pets have. Change it to 5MP or 10MP. An IB kills a ghoul in 8 attacks, so that's roughly similar to what exists now. A character with an aura spell kills a ghoul in 10 attacks. This would severely change the math on how many attacks a pet gets when newly summoned. It would bring the damage potential of summoning 1 pet more in line with casting 1 spell, though summoning 1 pet would still be better than casting 1 spell. It's also a less sweeping change than the original idea and is much easier to implement. It also allows tanks to try an endurance strategy and tank without an aura (like an ES).

Reducing the MP cost, or use something else instead of MP costs.
This is really just tuning down the nerf side of this suggestion so it's not so drastic.
Maybe 1MP per every pet tick (meaning all your pets attack on the pet tick and that costs you 1MP). Perhaps 1 MP per 2 attacks, or 1 MP per 3 attacks. Dissident suggested the MP cost could only be paid on successful attacks. The cost could also be changed to AP, or perhaps a new resource could be used for petmasters to attack with their pets independent of MP (that one sounds kind of complicated).

Nerfing tanks to balance the nerf to petmasters.
This opens a whole new can of worms and seems overly complicated. It might be necessary to balance the nerfs in my original suggestion, so that might mean the original suggestion could do with some tweaking, or just different ideas entirely.

[Kandarin]

We're already committed to a certain way of doing pets, though part of that approach is one class whose pets handle resources differently from other pets.