There is one final thing that needs to be dealt with in the context of pets: Their role buffs. I must confess that I would rather this be done sooner than later.
The most obvious examples of why these role buffs are terrible design are the three Training buffs for the WL.
Trained to Threaten is obviously designed to make the pet more tanky, so that the pet can act as a distraction, but there are problems with this approach:
- The pet doesn't have any means of pulling attacks onto itself
- The pet isn't getting any Strength so its attack damage is pathetic
- The pet gets Toughness and Wounds passed from the master, but if the master is meant to be dealing the damage, the master needs to stack Strength and not Toughness
Trained to Hunt's real problem is that it passes 50% of the master's stats to the lion. That's not acceptable scaling.
Trained to Kill's problem is similar to that of TTT, but less pronounced; the master is supposed to pull attacks off the lion (in Mythic's design dreams
), and the lion is meant to be the major player in terms of dealing damage, but no defense is given to the lion, and the master has to stack Str to give the lion any damage to begin with.
My general solution to the problem of pet stats, therefore, is this:
Firstly, a pet should receive most stats from the master's items. I would always pass the following stats:
Willpower, Initiative, Parry, Dodge, Disrupt, Resistances, Armor, AA speed, AA damage, Crit Rate, Crit Damage, Strikethrough
Secondly, in order to preserve the intent of the role buffs in making pets more specialised towards roles, I would propose reworking the stat passing completely. Currently, stats are passed from the master's stat to the pet's stat, which forces the pet to mirror the master's stat layout. My proposal for handling this is as follows:
- Consider the stats that are commonly passed from master to pet: (Str+WS/BS+WS/Int), Toughness and Wounds.
- Find the master's item stat bonus in all of the relevant stats, and accumulate this to make a total.
- Divide this total out to the pet's stats according to some distribution ratios, based on the pet or the training buff in question.
For example, TTK would have a distribution favoring Strength and Weaponskill, and TTT would favour Toughness and Wounds. TTH could be implemented either as balance, or as a direct pass of the master's stats to the pet.
This way, the pet retains its particular specialisation from its Training or summoning buff - but it also scales, absolutely and undeniably, with its master.
