Dev Discussion GU 47: Earth and Sorcery Pet Updates

Please use this thread to provide feedback or report issues you find with changes to Earth and Sorcery pets.

• Earth

o Corrected an issue with Crystal’s Epicenter attack that caused it to inflict less damage than her Striking Stones attack.

o Crystal’s base damage has been increased.

o Brick Changes

 Fixed and issue with Earth tanks not getting full 50% absorption bonus from having Brick out.

 Added 25% absorption when you start summoning Brick, which lasts for 3 seconds. This will increase your absorption to 50% until Brick is fully summoned, then it will go away and you get the bonuses from transferring damage to Brick. If you fail to summon Brick, from being Controlled for example, you still get the bonus for 3 seconds, so you have time to re-summon him.

 Envelop now grants power re-gen on Brick as well as everything else it already did. This simulates casting Fortify Golem at the same time.

 Envelop encasement can no longer be destroyed early.

 Brick will now heal to full health when using Envelop.

o Crystal Changes

 In Damage role and while Crystal is active, Fortify Golem increases your power regeneration for each of the next two powers activated from the Geokinesis tree before the cooldown of Fortify Golem expires.

 Crystal does increased damage when you (not her) are within 12m of your target.

 Crystal causes additional damage for 12 seconds after using Fortify Golem or when attacking enemies afflicted with the Dazed or Crushed state.

• Sorcery

o Corrected an issue with the Fury's Transmutation attack that caused it to inflict less damage than his Soul Barrage attack.

o Boon of Souls no longer wipes Red Soul Aura.

o Fury Changes

 Fury’s base damage has been increased.

 In Damage role, while Fury is active, Offering increases your power regeneration for each of the next two powers activated from the Summoning tree before the cooldown of Offering expires. This effect is also triggered by Weapon of Destiny and Circle of Destruction.

 Fury does increased damage when you (not it) are within 12m of your target.

 When Fury applies Red Soul Aura to you after defeating an enemy, the effect now lasts for five minutes instead of one.

 Fury's attacks now begin splitting damage after two targets as intended.

Thanks for this thread. Much better already than gu37 went.

Can you verify the reinforce change for tanking made it in this update?

Also can you clear the air about what did or didn't make it in for Crystal in this update? Mepps has confused a bunch of people with yesterday's post along with his tweets.

Can't wait to get on and test this for myself.

I already made my Earth toon, she's cr 32

Tunso is the the final patch were you made fury and crystal even DMG ?? or is live the hotfix before that were crystal was a little stronger then fury ?

Hi Tunso,

Ok So after toying around with the changes on live and test, the biggest issue is power.
Even the regen doesn't lessen the burden.
Crystal is blowing through her power bar. If you can reduce her power costs or make Fortify Golem give power more rapidly to Crystal, it would feel a lot better.

For Sorcery

Please improve Fury's A.I.
The same thing I said about Crystal, follows for Fury.
offering giving more power at a more rapid rate would make him that much better


Thank you for working on the Pet AM Tunso.

I just check it out tonight !!

In the first iteration, Crystal had a slight damage buff over Fury based mostly on feedback that Earth was underpowered, baseline, compared to Sorcery. However, it was removed as there turned out to be little to no discernible difference in damage potential between Sorcery and Earth baseline, so the buff to Crystal was simply making Earth better for no good reason.

If new information comes to light that shows a definitive, reproducible, difference between Earth and Sorcery we can look into it further but for now the buff doesn't seem necessary. Definitive and reproducible means you can say "When I use this loadout/rotation/gear with these attacks I am causing X DPS with Sorcery. But using the same gear and this loadout/rotation/attacks with Earth I consistently do much less".

Keep in mind that quite often, the difference isn't with the power. But it's with the loadout, the execution of your attacks or other X factors that. But in those cases you will often see someone chime in to describe what's missing from the contrasting report to account for the difference.

Definitely makes sense. I'm sure plenty of testing will be done soon. My question was more for what Mepps posted yesterday. It caused a lot of confusion about which build, if any build, was coming over from test. So can you just clear that up please?

Also reinforce's tanking change? Did it make it over?

Hi Tunso,
Thanks for the response and looking into this!

After the very last patch to test, I did some checks with essentially the same loadout for both Sorcery and Earth and I actually was noticing there is a slightly lower damage from Sorcery, even if it can clip everything with Weapon of Destiny. After watching my tests, it seems that Fury was actually NOT going into his attacks the moment you hit your power return when he was in pulse beam. He waited until it was finished. While Crystal would shurinken storm and instantly go into her big hits. This somewhat actually made Earth slightly more powerful because of Fury's inability to be equal to Crystal. If Sorcery's Fury had the same exact attacks as Crystal, Sorcery would win, but they don't and Earth is actually doing "slightly" better because of it.

In regards to balance between powersets and damage potential, they are both not as good as they could and there really isn't any tweaking you can do currently. I do like the power return, it helped a lot, but I gotta ask, what would be your baseline of "potential" that us testers are looking for?

The speed of attack execution will only cost you if your pet is at full power, such that useful power gets wasted. That won't happen after the first few seconds because your pets greedily (and intentionally) use all available power as soon as they can for the pew pew. Although Crystal might arguably be more bursty sometimes since she doesn't take her time channeling, her rate of power return is the same as the Fury's and that's what governs the damage over time.

In terms of what baseline means, on paper both are close enough that it comes down to x-factors, so for this it meant comparing Apples to Apples in the field. That meant obviously watching the pets attack a target for an eyebleedingly long time without missing a cooldown for the pet feeding ability and there wasn't any meaningful difference there. And in terms of comparing just the powers, it was using WM DW Explosive Shot with the most optimum rotation of Pet Feed, Field, Field2 (Totem/Soulwell), weapon buff and PI applicator instant AOE (Shard of Life/Rumblecrush). It should be noted, I suspended the WM crits when looking at just the powers, which you won't be able to do on your own.

Well the AM is doing average in damage but there is an apparent issue that I want to follow up that I hope goes in line with your views and the team's, Tunso. When I was doing testing for Earth and Sorcery, I was actually making a mistake testing against sparring targets in the League Hall that basically gave power to the pets. Unlimited power and that skewed my results.

With that variable, I was actually doing very effective DPS with Crystal and Fury and it was on par with Quantum, Celestial, and Munitions. I will upload my graphs and combat parser number soon with rotations and stuff. Not only that but I was also able to do Aftershocks + Pet AM and I still had a viable way of DPSing that was in line with the above powers. With Sorcery, you could also go a bit might heavy and use your powers more than weapon attack and it was actually viable as well. But against the updated sparring target, my numbers dropped, Crystal/Fury used their heavy attacks less often due to power consumption. Most AMs deal their heavy damage between every 4 second-5 second mark while for us we only get that when the pets have power; so that's basically every 7.7 seconds or so according to Offering/Fortify's cool down. Due to this the effective DPS drops over time and the AM starts to perform badly when the pets have no power.

I'm leading myself to believe that we should update Fortify/Offering to give more big bursts of power to the pets because right now it only gives a little bit of power. Doing this will yield the following:

-Better competitive numbers versus higher tier AMs
-More room for options; for example using Aftershocks instead of WM due to Crystals high damage output and more variations in Sorcery builds by having the ability to use more powers and spec more might since Fury is hitting hard.
-Makes powering the pets important

Right now as it stands, the only viable way of DPSing with the Pet AM is hitting Fortify/Offering, hit a couple of powers from a particular tree, and spam WM with a full precision spec. That's kinda limiting in options. The Pet AM does average Effective DPS and is limiting in options in my opinion.

Fury/Crystal when powered, contribute 70% or so of our damage while we only provide the rest to "supplement them". Maybe make it to where our powers hit stronger while the pets get low power and so we contribute more to that DPS or implement the change in proposing in giving the pets a power boost when it comes to Offering/Fortify to where they are powered up completely to pull off enough DPS during the duration/cooldown of Fortify/Offering.

I'll post my numbers soon to show you what I mean.

Oh and to head off any who would think "lololol dev admits DW WM explosive shot is teh best", the reason I used that instead of like... say... spamming Arrow Storm or Scissor Kick (seriously) is because I know that's what everyone uses so... If I didn't use that I'd get, "Yeah but you didn't use Explosive Shot so..."

Thanks, I look forward to seeing what you have

Lol that's fine man. That's what most people use.

That is precisely what I was theorizing and it's true. We have to find a balance here where we will be able to compete with other powers and have options but we also don't want things overpowered. Again, I don't know if it's fair that I compare it against Quantum, Celestial, Gadgets, or Munitions but it does give me an idea on where the AM is at. Appreciate the responses. I'll see what I can produce that can hopefully be reproducible on your end or anyone else's that is fair.

Actually 2h into arrow storm is extremely effective for sorcery due to how weapon of destiny works. It's pretty good for earth too. And I'm sure staff into morter is similar. Just another thing to look at.

Instead of comparing earth dps to sorc dps, both powers should be getting compared against quantum.

What's the point of having 2 powers balanced with each other if they both fall short of what's considered top tier?

Agreed. All powers should be compared against each other actually. I may spend money on one or two respec tokens to keep stat differences and variables to a minimum, but that's more for what the test server is for. Unless you devs wanna throw a few free respec tokens my way

I'm a being a broken record here but any plans to make aftershocks more effective for those who'd rather use those over wm?

From whst I read upheaval and jack hammer had gotten a slight boost on tear but in live it's about the sane as before ...

Just curious .. Also I agree with rok crystal blows her big hit too fast she probably could use a larger power pool per cool down

Yeah, which I suppose you would be looking at the pets as being even then, but slight damage difference adds up in the long run.

Also, I was asking for a number for damage we are looking at for performance between powersets. There is optimal loadouts that you guys have decided to make the baseline for the damage, but some powers seem to perform up or down from there would need to get looked at. Using the in game parser, I was testing optimal loadouts for each powerset that I know of (I'm sure there are people that can put me in my place) but I was using the intended AM rotation. (With or w/o WM included.) And I'm wondering which of these are the most intended?

I will have to do more studies on other powersets (just not very good at Rage and Celestial.) but I feel that we would want to look around the average being 3800~4000 range. If that's the case, then earth and sorcery are good damage wise, but if not, then there are a lot of under achievers.

I was running various earth loadouts against my gadgets loadout with similar stats to yours yesterday and got these results.

Earth AM - 4264/s to 5056/s
Earth WM - 3898/s to 4218/s
Gadgets AM - 4794/s to 6113/s