Test Discussion Episode 43: Artifact M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix

New Artifact

M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix - Pet DPS Artifact

M.E.R.C.Y. Restorative Module

• When you are healed your pets will be healed for (25/25/33/50)% of the heal amount.

M.E.R.C.Y. Reactive Field

• Summoning a Trinket Pet damages all nearby enemies. M.E.R.C.Y. Reactive Field damage increased by (0/25/50/100)%.

M.E.R.C.Y. Attack Protocol

• Cooldown: 6s
• Power Cost: 200
• Command Crystal, Fury, or Robot Sidekick to scan for nearby targets before releasing a devastating attack.
• Activating M.E.R.C.Y Attack Protocol reduces the cooldown of your Trinket Pet by (0/4/5/6) seconds.
• This ability either replaces the Fortify Golem or Offering power, or grants a new power.

M.E.R.C.Y. Defensive Module

• Summoning an Accomplice, Henchmen, Sidekick, or Trinket Pet applies a shield to your Pets, with a 60 second cooldown.
• Receiving healing while above 95% Health sends applies a weak shield to your Pets, with a 10 second cooldown.
• M.E.R.C.Y. Defensive Module shield strength increased by (0/0/0%/50%).

Developer notes
Howdy Everyone, Ranmaru here again with a new artifact. The M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix helps expand the pet playstyle to all powersets, so here are my general thoughts on the artifact.

Artifact Design
As someone who plays pet builds often on live I really wanted to be able to experience this playstyle, but not have to be Earth or Sorc to truly get the full value out of my load out. So we went ahead and designed an artifact about opening up the pet potential for other powers

High-level goals

• Make Robot sidekick a reasonable contender versus Fury & Crystal
• Keep Crystal and Fury Relevant
• Add even more value to pet load out setups
• Bring the 'pet' playstyle to have more active pets

Going in with those high level goals, I feel like we have met those. But please let me know if you disagree!

Recommended Loadout
Artifact Suggestions

1. MAM (Obviously)
2. Godwave - No way you'll run a pet build without this. I would consider this almost an auto include.
3. FLEX SPOT - My personal recommendation would be to run Quizlet since his overall dps is quite good, but you will have to run a SC, RSK & MAP, so you're pretty low on load out spots. It may be quite challenging to get a full rotation around missing these abilities.

The other option is the Grim. This will allow you to have a more greedy load out for your power consumption, but grim is a bit weaker of a DPS pet vs. quiz. But, you can free up a load out spot to not need a SC.


As always I am looking forward to your feedback on this new artifact and your general thoughts on the design of it.

This artifact seems really cool but is it necessary that pets have to continue to take up a loadout spot? It would be great if Robot Sidekick/etc. had their own key bind like allies (for console, I know left on the D-pad currently seems free for something).

Another option would be that, instead of granting a new tray ability to activate the special pet attack, this artifact just triggers the special pet attack (after a 6 second internal cooldown) whenever a superpower is used - kind of like how Quizlet's mega blast currently works.

Perhaps the damage or something else may need to be adjusted down if the specific tray ability is not needed, but I think keeping the designated tray ability will greatly limit build options with this artifact (and to a degree, combat pets in general).

As electric, my robot sidekick inflicts electrified PI every time I use this power, the tooltip does not mention about apply PI.

Spent my time testing the new ally. I’ll do the base damage numbers either later today or tomorrow.

They will apply PI based on your power when using their special attacks.

What!? Uh-oh, that's bad news for Grim, lol.

Not really. You have to hit MAP on your tray for it to apply the PI. Grim does it automatically, freeing up a slot on your powerbar.

Out of curiosity, does this interact with the OG bat drone?

How come the suppressor turret "pet" is not affected by MAP?

I cannot see how this adds much more value or diversity to pet loadouts, I mean Source Shard's Godwave already takes up a loadout spot, then the pet takes up a spot, then AMA takes one - there goes half the loadout. Plus not using a supercharge as a DPS would be a major damage loss.

Back when Source Shard was tested, there were many calls to have it just periodically activate rather than reset the cooldown of a designated tray ability. Here we go again it seems, given the loadout constraints, I fear most all the same players that passed on Source Shard may pass on this new artifact.

Almost every powerset can make it work with a super, tho you are right that some can’t. But every single powerset can use the mercy/quislet/grim combo and go that route for a pet build. But ice for example can easily fit the 3 pet slots and still have a variety of moves (different combos of 2 moves) and a supercharge which is exactly how sorcery pet builds are done. Gadgets might can do finisher/taser pull and pet build for a ST build. Lots of possibilities really. Electric users will be loving it also now that it applies the right pi. So far, I’m loving ice as a source shard build and powers like munitions and water can substitute Strat with it and drop their pi application for a bit more damage.

Prec, not me so not sure but has great prec stats so someone will make it work.

That's true, precision builds could definitely make it work, with or without a supercharge.

Is there any reason why gadget's Suppressor Turret was left out of this artifact? Or even nature's Swarm and ice's Frost Devil?

Because this is an artifact designed around rsk in mind. Turret already does more base damage than rsk and crystal/fury without the buffed attack. Adding this to turret would make it be overpowered for a power set that is already performing a over average.

This artifact is also affecting Fury and Crystal though. I'd imagine that if Turret was included, its buff would be less than the other pets, and if Swarm and Frost Devil were in their buff would be higher.

I want to use this artifact, but aesthetically, I still prefer Turret (and Battle Drone much more). Users of nature and ice could also prefer their powerset pets rather than RSK.

Snow devil and swarm work differently than rsk fury and crystal. Those are permanent pets. Swarm and snow devil are temporary pet that can be summoned alongside rsk. Allowing them to be affected by mercy would mean ice and nature dps would have 2 pets up that could be affected by this which is a significant damage increase. So they just would never work with this or similar artifacts.

Turret on the other hand does share a summoning slot with rsk. But how would they balance it? Around one PI up? Around 2? Around 3? You have to remember that this was done with rsk in particular in mind. Reason why fury and crystal are affected is because they want to make sure that earth and sorcery dps aren’t forced out of a pet that can already use the power back mechanic.


Also, I won’t be responding to many of these comments since I don’t want to derail this thread. This thread is for testing the artifact like the other threads are for specific things. There are other threads that are asking for direct questions about personal preferences which I’m sure the devs can reply to as well.

I will be testing base damage numbers for this later today.

I ran several tests.

For tests, I used earth and sorcerer.

I used 4 minute parsers (4 minutes since the artifact has a very large effect on pet trinkets, without the artifact you can use the trinket 2 times in 4 minutes, and with the artifact 4 times).

I tested the influence of pets inside the powerset, I didn’t have a goal to compare the powersets with each other, therefore I write the results as a percentage in relation to the control test where I used the standard pet build (Crystal+Grim+Quislet+Shard and Furry+Grim+Quislet+Shard) .

Control test:

Single Target.

Earth-Crystal
Artefacts-"Grimorium Verum"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
100%

Earth-Crystal
Artefacts-"Grimorium Verum"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
108.588%

Earth-Crystal
Artefacts-"Grimorium Verum"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Single target Turret Pet
104.968%



M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix test:

Earth-Crystal
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
86.84%

Earth-Crystal
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
107.799%

Earth-Crystal
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
84.85%

Earth-Crystal
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
104.86%

Earth-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
87.75%

Earth-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
110.624%

Earth-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
86.74%

Earth-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
104.112%

Control test:


Single Target.

Sorcerer-Furry
Artefacts-"Grimorium Verum"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
100%

Sorcerer-Furry
Artefacts-"Grimorium Verum"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
108.174%

Sorcerer-Furry
Artefacts-"Grimorium Verum"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Single target Turret Pet
104.26%



M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix test:

Sorcerer-Furry
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
85.38%

Sorcerer-Furry
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
105.48%

Sorcerer-Furry
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
84.47%

Sorcerer-Furry
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
103.142%

Sorcerer-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
88.254%

Sorcerer-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Quislet"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
106.74%

Sorcerer-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
85.53%

Sorcerer-Robot
Artefacts-"M.E.R.C.Y. Amazotron Matrix"+"Grimorium Verum"+"Source Shard"
Trinket-Tier 3 Combat Pet
106.054%

Like the layout of your findings. Have found pretty much the same, it’s a contender to the OG pet build but falls just shy which is probably how it needs to be to not be super OP when mixed with other powersets that are stronger than earth or sorcery. Which is like every power except water basically. I hate to say that I’m surprised that it’s this balanced right out of the gate, but considering how difficult it is to balance things like this, I will say I’m happily surprised.

I have few questions:

. Pets can apply PI based on your powerset, is this working as intended? I don't think offering/fortify golem can do that. Also when I see grim (pet and pi applicator) as a suggestion with this artifact, it makes me think the pi application is currently bugged.

. CD reduction does apply to turret pets which is also trinket pet, but when you use summon them, either ST or AOE turret, the damage bonus from M.E.R.C.Y reactive field does not proc. So again, is it a bug?

. The SC gained from M.E.R.C.Y attack protocol is way to high (same as SC generator) for a power that gives pretty much everything to pet builds, like damage, CD reduction, and PI (?). From the description, this will replace offering/fortify golem and both those powers don't give that much SC.

. Why does the artifact not affect suppressor turret? It's a permanent pet, and gadgets pet build should be considered imo.

I do think that it should at least be equal to non MAM artifact when used with Fury and Crystal. IE, when you hit MAP it should boost them to the same damage, but I can see the downside, since now both Fury and Crystal apply the PI when you hit MAP.

With all the other bells and whistles this gives, overall, this feels really balanced.

Intended
Intended
Does give a lot of super. No idea if intended. Godwave already gives a lot of super so hopefully this gets put in line with offering.
Suppressor was left alone on purpose. The only pets affected by this are fury/Crystal/rsk. While I get that players aren’t liking that turret got left out, remember that turret is already strong and sets 3 pi’s. And also remember that snow devils, watcher, brick, guardian, and even grand summoning aren’t affected by mercy. So it’s not like just gadgets was left out of this. Rsk was the main focus of the artifact, they just included fury and crystal because this artifact makes rsk an any powersets fury/crystal.