Introduction: I will start this out with a small overview of the perspective from which I am approaching this from. My hypothesis will be based on the history of pet professions stemming from Games such as Final Fantasy, Diablo I&II (LoD), Fallout 1&2, MMORPG's through the ages till present day. I will be posting this also in the AoC Forums for review as well. This applies to all games but will reference it to only 3 actively and the rest passively. Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, World Of Warcraft. My main target for the implementation of this pet system in AO would be with the new engine in 18.x.x (etc) When speaking of AO and the future, please take for this one discussions sake a general roll back of the way Pet professions were Pre-AI, meaning not including all the OP'd "Fixes" we've seen as a result of the problems I will tackle in this project discussion.
I must credit the many pet users of AO in these forums and my time in the AoC Beta in helping to make this idea click.
The Hypothesis: Pet users work great with existing systems in PVE only games; but fail to perform adequately in PVP without major work arounds due to the fact that People don't attack pets on purpose in PVP without sufficient reason. Attacking the pet is in almost all cases futile.. you ignore it and kill the owner.. Since the only real logical previously suggested notion to address this is to force taunting to work in PVP to which some people have major aversions to.. even tho it should work CC is another issue and I do not want to mix it in to this discussion because it is it's own so please refrain from bringing CC into this debate/discussion.
Supporting Arguments:
To start I will break down pet users in to sub-categories to better understand the application of the revolutionary idea I am going to present and how it is both logically sound and theoretically the solution needed to advance a stagnating and dying off area sub-genre of gaming styles within class and profession systems as well as free form non-class skill games. The types of pet users are broken down in to the following categories:
- Necromancers (Exploiting corpses to control pets)
- Summoners (Calling a pet out of thin air/other worlds/dimensions)
- Charmers (Converting a living unit to fight along side the character)
- Constructors (Building pets out of parts)
Now AO sadly does not have all 4 types of pet users accounted for, neither does AoC nor WoW. In AO we have the summoner (MP/Demonologist/Warlock), the Charmer (Bureaucrat/Trader/Hunter) and the Constructor (Engineer). The main difference between a summoner and a constructor being that one requires raw materials of a particular type to produce, in the case of engineers they spend credits and get a shell.. other games may not use this type at all or approach it differently than in AO but the principal behind these four types of pet classifications I believe is pretty sound.
The failure of pets.. Is in a few parts.
- Raw AI CPU Time
- Pet Pathing
- User control over the AI.
- Modes of AI (Passive Scripted Behaviors)
- Active Pet Abilities
In regards to CPU time given to AI I fully understand how this goes.. here's to hoping you all can afford new things with the future and servers.
The pet pathing fixes in AoC are far superior to that of AO.. is there some way to address finding a similar fix (making pets always warp to the same plane as the user when changing plane surfaces for example). I believe pathing will improve a lot with the coming Engine updates as physics will likely be addressed in the engines core routines to make way for the future.
User control is equivalent in this discussion to both keyboard and GUI input. Currently I feel AO's input methods and AoC's input methods severely lacking. Requiring mouse only interaction with buttons is not a wise move. This I feel would be easily remedied by giving programmable key-bindings for each pet command to the keyboard or input button press.
The various modes a pet can be put in to such as "aggressive, defensive, passive" must be made easily controllable for the pet user along with the individual commands of direct user control in giving attack, defend, heal, etc, type commands. I believe that this is one area where modern MMORPG's are severely lacking overall. I will detail this out below in my solutions for each pet profession type and how it can be addressed and used instead of ignored as a benefit to the users of pets. This will be thought of as passive pet abilities vs the active ones below.
Active Pet abilities are quite simply the individual commands able to be given through what ever method from the pet user to the pet. literally, heal this, attack that. These abilities can be automated but are not automatic.. meaning passive. The user is required to direct Active pet abilities.
Auxiliary Observations:
Please note that making pets unable to taunt or hold aggro as a fix to make Pet classes "Viable" in PVP.. like making the Demonologist into a nuker class in AoC for example with a useless pet that is merely a decoration / passive buff.. or the MP Situation of AO's present which I need not elaborate on.. or Stun Procs for Crats.. next comes Engineers.. I believe one of the fundamental flaws is in how this concept is handled as it is still being approached from a PVE perspective first then nerfing and boosting based on PVP performance.. I believe they were trying to see if they could fix the problems never fixed in AO in AoC but feel perhaps a different approach could prove more useful. Since a person cannot be made to attack the pet, to make pet professions PVP'able the role of the pet is being downgraded.
Just like the previous example from AoC take one from WoW. In PVP Hunters max out their Marksman line not beast mastery.. same for Warlocks and their dots vs pet.. PVP uses one PVE the other.. In AO the fixes has been basically.. Ignore the pets.. boost the main class in form of stuns, AS weapons, in short.. constantly borrowing from other professions toolkits to bandaid a frustrated playerbase that keep asking for more effective pets.. and CC (note CC not this topic).
Conclusions:
Now that we have covered the problems it is time to see the solution and then how it can apply to AO and other games in this genre and how I hope my idea may actually fix pet classes once and for all. I think it would be rather ironic if FC (notoriously bad at pet classes) is the one who brings this revolution to market in it's games.
To properly explain this I will have to do it via a context so for these Hypothetical Examples I will refer to AO exclusively. The principal is that the Pet user and the pets life and energy must effectively be combined and yet remain separate.. I will elaborate below in the aforementioned examples.
Pet General Abilities
- Wait
- Way Point Add/Remove
- Patrol
- Follow
- Return
- Report
- Note: Wait denotes a location to wait at, Way point Add/Remove handles setting up for patrols by pets, Follow returns the pet to following the selected target, Return causes to pet to follow you, Report is a status report of life/energy/location/%distance between two waypoints/etc
Pet Buffing & Damage Mitigation: For each type of pet active the controller receives the passive boosts to their own stats and share hp and damage between based on type of class and type of pet. Mind you this is very preliminary and I expect that I would require the wisdom of the number crunching pet users out there to aid in finding the right balance for such a proposal knowing their own toolkits far better than I do. As such I am only putting these templates below out as archetypal suggestions from which solid based on hard numbers, eg, factual application of specifics to be hashed out in the thread's progression. I would expect there to be applications of existing nanos some exact and some with slight modifications as well as new nanos needing to be created for each pet using profession.
Meta-Physicist:
Type: Summoner, relational verbiage and/or supporting imagery, "Deity", Able to manifest their anger into a tangible entity, etc. Under this premise the pets are literally an extension of the creator.. not really separate entities such as an employee or robotic construction so I have have tried to approach it from this perspective. Having said that I back it up with the premise that many of the core abilities of survival to an MP rely directly on the pet such as healing or calming vs a doctor healing or a Crat Calming.. It is with the MP that I think of as the most pure Pet class really equal to the Engineer in Magic/Psionic vs Scientific... Summoner vs Constructor.. The summoner makes a pact binding itself to its daemon. I also believe that it's future instead of insane blockers, evades, AR weapons etc, perhaps give the MP the ability to have thier Mezz pet reanimate and control a fallen corpse or a minion from it's body making it go one step further and become the summoner/necromancer since there is no necromancer class in AO nor anything remotely similar really.. lest you think that better saved for giving traders pets a purpose.. but I have something else in mind for them..
Pet types:
- Heal pet
- Mezz Pet
- Attack Pet
Buffs: Heal Pet +Heal Delta for all pets individual HP and the casters HP, Mezz Pet -%Interrupt/+Nano Init/Nano-Resist, Attack Pet +Nano AR/-Resist Check
Damage Mitigation: Each pet would equally share all dmg as all hit points would be linked directly to their creator being that they are a physical manifestation of the creator. Each pet would give a direct HP gain to the caster as well as the linked buffs and passive healing delta shared by all.. the multiplier of having 4x+heal gen should make the scaling nice if set properly from the start to offset the gains of HP being 100% shared and HP not being the bonus it should be in AO by default.
New Pet Abilities:
- Heal Pet
- Passive Pulsing "Self+Pets" Regeneration
- Team AOE heal
- Direct Target Heal
- Cone Heal
- AOE Heal
- Note: These behaviors should be programmable to keystrokes and button presses so that they can be changed on the fly. Sending a direct heal target command before a recharge interval of a passive pulse for example could cost the pet double energy to gain a direct effect on demand. Direct heals do more per tick while AOE does the least. Cone does a middle of the road. Team being stronger than AOE but weaker than Cone. The passive pulsing regeneration would be split between the combined life of the pet user and all active pets (effectively stopping wasting unused pet healing or requiring annoying unintuitive micromanagement of each pet's dmg and would be considered the standard mode for solo'ing.
- Mezz Pet
- Reanimate
- Calm
- Snare
- Note: Reanimate would effectively give the MP class a Necromancer like ability in AO which has never before been a possibility.. whether it is an exact duplicate of what is dead with some pretty hefty cost vs reward factor or another manifestation of much lesser power like little zerglings of sorts.. I will leave the specifics of checks n balances for stats to those with heads more for numbers to discuss and propose as it is not my thing. Calms pretty self-explanatory and same with snares.. improvements really in effectiveness in burst scenerios with diminishing returns and harder to resist but shorter durations.
- Attack Pet
- Attack
- Defend
- Guard
- Scout
- Hunt
- Note: Each of these would modify the general abilities with additional behaviors. Attack gives the pet a temporary AR buff after being given and a temporary speed boost based on which buff run on it. Defend would attack those that attacked the pet users target, Guard would cause the pet to attack anything with a hatelist or side flagged for PVP that enters it's range. Scout will cause the pet to wander till it generates aggro then return without engaging the target, Hunt is Scout only instead of returning it attempts to kill the target.