Dev Discussion GU 47: Earth and Sorcery Pet Updates

I couldn't agree more with all of the pet play suggestions , as an earth player myself u would love to actually have a chance against powers like quantum and the likes that get all the love from the devs , I really hope they take on board some of the things you guys have suggested especially the heel and crit buffs , it would make pet play 100% better - great ideas all - devs , please take note!!

About Brick Tanking:

I don't need those 3 seconds on the summon, I need those when Brick dies. Best example is Lashina in Happiness Home when her Skull or the Reflect killing Brick (cause the AI is too stupid and keeps melee'ing and/or attacking her in those phases and dying 100%).

Worst case that happens is that Brick dies on the end phase of those 2 attacks and before you can summon Brick and go back in block Lashina does her Flurry attack on you and kills. If I would know I had a 3 second absoprtion Bricks death I could simply block through it and wait and see what Lashinas next move is because any other move doesnt matter if I block or not.

The only video I have up but were it happens is:



Around 1:50mins the best lucky example that it didnt happened cause a fresh Brick summon enveloped before dying followed by Lashinas Dual Wield Flurry attack, if Brick wouldnt have enveloped on the dmg right before he would have died and I would be dead cause the mitigation from Brick would be gone on the attack. A 3 seconds window would be a life-saver.

It happens on occasion but shouldnt.

Or modding or SP. When the bulk of your damage is pet based, it's really just dependent on your CR. That's the only way to buff it.

I don't think pet survivability is a issue,they already had a update for that, the main issue is are pets aren't getting supply drop buff, like timebomb does. Everything thing else is good to good

No supply or trinkets or any other stats buff affect Pets, which is a huge disadvantage.
But Im not sure if Devs can address that.

Hmm give sorcery and earth a double buff at supply drop? Well not double but a % that we r missing from the pets

Tldr; sorcery and earth are close and both are great in actual content. But earth needs a pet friendly supercharge like sorcery has grand summoning.


So I bit the bullet and tested out sorcery vs earth for myself on live. You are welcome for more of my money. What I found was really no different than what most have already posted. Using the exact same stats and cr and skill points etc........... I won't share my exact numbers because I don't believe it will help. I will share I am cr 119 at this time with 199 sp and a definitive lean toward precision, which I know skews towards earth. What I plan on sharing is more of a hands on actual observation of where each powerset is stronger or weaker. This was tested using the 60/s parser

Now that that's out of the way I used similar loadouts. Pet, power pet, RC/shard, totem/soul well,reinforce/wod, and I mixed in some supercharges which I'll get to.

Sorcery won hands down because totem is awful for dps. Even in the most controlled environment where I can position myself perfectly every time I use totem, it didn't match what soul well was able to do. It was also here I noticed wod allows you to be mobile while casting, something reinforce should be able to do as well.

Since totem is awful as is, I swapped in debris field. You can't do the same loadout with sorcery and get both dps iconics. I was able to get about 200-300 more dps with this loadout, but again I want to point out I wasn't using circle of destruction due to power points.

So, with both optimal loadouts, earth was the victor by a slight margin. I could of tested without shard and relied on wod for the pi for circle instead, but I wanted the loadouts to be as similar as possible. The big differences in these powers lie in the supercharges.

Grand summoning allowed the sorcery loadout to gain over 1k dps compared to the previous testing. It was beating earth and meteor shower and entomb by about 800 dps easily. Earthquake just isn't a worthwhile sc at this time since you have to use 100% of the sc to make it remotely effective. Some of the tests I actually lost dps in the earth rotation, but I feel that was user error. More times than not I had about the same damage out as the normal rotation with earth.

With the most similar optimal loadouts with supercharges, sorcery was the victor. My point in this testing wasn't to show numbers or anything like that. I wanted to see how grand summoning improved its damage potential and how earth's lack of a real pet beneficial supercharge doesn't really add anything to the game.

My suggestion is to add a power dump for Crystal to either meteor shower or entomb. If you want to make earthquake worthwhile for the sc cost, that would be interesting too. Enough power for one more big attack from Crystal would be enough to make either of these worthwhile. Meteor shower is much more consistent in damage but entomb is a 35%er and could be used more often.

I encourage anyone with test server access to try this out for themselves. Especially those more familiar with sorcery and modded more balanced. I feel that's the best way to mod sorcery with this pet am. this pet am is actually pretty nice now that the pet damage has been brought up to speed. I think that this supercharge difference is one of the last things that need to be addressed along with the few bugs already mentioned above.

Meteor shower and Earthquake restoring Pets power bar once as an additional effect would be good enough.

I didn't do enough testing to see if a full on power dump would be too much. It's why I suggested just enough for one more big attack from Crystal. That plus the actual supercharge damage would be enough in my book.

I don't know why you quoted me.

At the 30 second mark and 45 second mark you can see Crystal damaging objects.



Also I know this bug isn't unique to Crystal, it affects all pets, but here is the power bar bug again.

On test server Crystal is still double-nuking even at max range... Is this a bug on Test that needs to be fixed or an intended feature that needs to be pushed to Live? (Please say feature... Please. It's the only thing that gives Earth and tanks in general a viable DPS role. Everything else is crap by comparison.)

Wouldn't it be easier and not to mention better if your pet recieved an equal buff to whatever buff you use? Whether trinket or supply drop? If all other powers have it effect whatever powers they use, and the pet is in fact a power that you use, it makes sense that the buff would be shared

I haven't seen double ticks on live. Crystal is missing Epicenter, though.

I know what you mean, but the pets do pet damage. Pet damage cannot be buffed the same way we are buffed because it is a separate form of damage. We would need to have a power dedicated to buffing pet damage (not talking about pi interaction but an actual buff).

What if we leave the pet as is and get a slight buff to aftershock damage while a pet is active? The pet mechanics are really quite nice right now other than as a player I still have some power issues during extended fights without a troll. All we need is a slight damage increase to put us equal with top tier powers. Having the pet buff you is what I would like to see.

Never played any of the pet powers myself so wasn't entirely sure. Though still seems the buff should be accross the board for those powers. In this instance of course I am unfamiliar about the particular deficiencies

This developer discussion was a bust we got one day where we were talking with a dev the rest was just us... There were good points made here and things we could discuss about but apparently we weren't worth the hassle ... Sad

I WANT A QUANTUM COSMIC LOOKING PET, I WANT A ELECTRIC PET, I WANT A ICE DEMON PET. I WANT MORE PETS FOR ALL POWERS INSTEAD OF JUST THE DUMB ICONIC POWER ROBOT. I WANT THE ICONIC POWERS TO BE STRONGER SO WE CAN CREATE A SUPERMAN OR A BEING WITH MULTI POWERS FROM THE ICONIC POWERS WHICH MEANS THEY NEED TO BE STRONGER. WE WANT THEM NOW MEPPS UNDERSTAND OK THEN HAVE FUN.

What else is new? Remember my line about hope? Can't be disappointed if you don't hope. That's why I don't even care what happens with Fire, or the new Serums power or even Atomic. I'm just going to take what they give and move on cause that is the only thing you can guarantee in this game. They will give you 1 thing and not change it again for 6 months so why try?

Because the title of this sub section is mis-titled. It should be "player discussion" because there is zero discussion with the devs. We say things, they may comment on a few of them, but then they just vanish afterwards. At least that's what happens with powers.