Can we start looking at tweaking their AI so they're actually smarter in PvE where I'm sure a bunch of the players are still taking part of? For example my summons tend to go range so they should stay RANGED and not run into a bosses AoE to attack. A few other pets who go range also suffer from this poor AI mechanic.
I think the nerf went out to all pets Hp seems to be lowered they can't take 1 hit and live in pve not sure how useful they can be if they are always dead
I won't be so bold as to state Watcher was nerfed because of PVP. There were changes to all pets across the board because they were already at a higher level than players could obtain (Tunso stated they were being placed on T5 levels even though T5 isn't available yet because of mods.) The devs have consistently shown the ability to tweak pets survivability as needed. If there is a problem you will have a better chance at presenting it with some sort of concrete information rather than just saying "they were nerfed."
I guess I can reword that as, my Watcher can't survive a boss AoE because they aren't smart enough to dodge/block/roll like a player can and because they are running into melee when they are ranging. So that in effect makes what was a viable healing tool in an Op no longer viable. I don't mind that it heals for less. I do find it annoying its getting itself killed even easier and I'm forced to re-summon it constantly.
Having control over our pets would be nice though, at least the powerset pets i can care less about the trinket ones. Like for instance brick is a great pet for tanking with earth but some attacks you just have to avoid and he is not smart enough to move out of the way and will continue to beat on the boss and this usually results in a one shot. The other thing i noticed is that orbitals in pvp will just about 1 shot our powerset pets as well. I think powerset pets need some sort of resistance. I think henchmen have more survivability now then most powerset pets and that is just sad.
I've always wondered how they do pet stats. I can't say I've noticed much difference in pvp, although my hatred for pets in pvp isn't the pets but mainly the fail that is the targetting system. They pop pets I spend half the fight trying to get them on target. In PVE pets seems to just fall over now, it's terrible. I'd imagine pets would be solid if they had stats like: 4k health, 10k defense, 0 toughness Stable in PVE as they are getting hit for minimum each time. In pvp they have 4k health to take. Just seems like they should have high defense to be able to live in pve (because we know we can't trust their AI), but in pvp they wouldn't be overpowered and unreasonable to kill. Of course maybe i'm wrong, maybe they are that way already /shrug.
As someone who runs with a Watcher pet constantly they are considerably weaker now post-update versus before and they really were not all that powerful to begin with (we've been complaining about the watcher being weak for a long long time in PvE).
They should have left the pve side alone, and found a way to see that pets had no toughness for pvp....as the man above said. Bang! Easy fix, even a caveman dev could do it.
In this case, you can by simply removing all toughness (or even adding a damage multiplier on player dmg) while allowing defense/hp to scale with owner's CR, leaving them both easy to handle in pvp and unchanged to pve players. edit: Possibly more importantly, I'd like to see my rifle wielding henchmen use strictly ranged combos or lunges and never tap melee unless they're approached by a mob.
Hmm........give them insane defense? It would keep them from being a hindrance in PvP, but make them last longer in PvE.
exactly, although seems such a simple idea it's probably already been done and it just doesn't work =/ but /shrug I can't see there stats so no clue haha.
Good point. I would love to pick the brains of some of the devs that work on the pets one day. No hate, no screaming at them. Just want to ask questions and maybe see how they make those little guys tick.
