Frosticus

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Like I said "never intended" is getting pretty old, there is only so many times "the dog ate my homework" is believable and we all know it whether we admit it or not.

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Well, at this point I am not sure if I believe your lack of trust is genuine, or simply spiteful. But either way, I am not going to make fun of it. There is not really anything that can be argued in the face of a total lack of belief in someone's honesty.

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I know, I've watched it happening over the last week since this was announced. It has been a conscious progression into madness, which I wonder if that is better or worse I've rapidly transformed from a dev sycophant into a tinfoil hatter

Mind you I have been on the proverbial fence for a while now since Castle bent all the pvp'ers over the table and George Lucas'd them. I guess for me the camel finally got overloaded and its poor back broke and I'm left with two possibilities.

1/ they aren't telling us the whole story (A lie of omission is often not frowned upon as much as an outright lie by some)
2/ they aren't very smart

But I think they are smart people, I just don't think they work nearly as hard as they'd have us believe, but really very few people do, so no biggy. I've gone back and reread all the threads about this topic (lot of reading heh) and gone through the patch notes now and either I'm missing something essential to understanding, or something isn't adding up.

So I'm going to step back, nothing will be changed now and it likely won't be revisited for years. Continuing to be frustrated over something I have zero ability to affect is not prudent.

I appreciate you not taking the opportunity to antagonize me further it is noble of you.

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Hopefully before it reaches that point, the devs will separate out the critter versions of Fire Imps and Jack Frost and make them debuffable.

[/ QUOTE ] This I doubt, because if they wont allow exemptions for the range only pets or pets with one attack, I dont think they are going to make a second set of pet powers just for this. Too much work for them. It is good that you bring up this point because I will ensure that no missions I create will have pets if I can help it because it wont be fair to the players.

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The reason they didn't make an exception for pets with one attack was not that it was too much work (making them affected actually required *more* work), it was because they didn't *want* them to not be affected.

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Exactly, the story now is that it was never intended for you to be able to buff a fire imp with AM, nor was it ever intended for you to buff stoney with speedboost.

"never intended", "oversight" these are becoming swear words in my house lol.

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I don't see how what you're saying is even relevant to what you're quoting.

We're talking about the devs' willingness to make an exception for certain powers, not what the changes were.

Ryu implies that they won't allow for an exception for pets with one attack (such as Lightning Storm) because it would be too much work, but the reason they don't want to make an exception for it is actually that they *want* it to be affected (and they actually had to do some work to make it affected in the first place).

Thus the fact that they are not making an exception for powers like Lightning Storm is not any reason to believe that they won't make a second set of pet powers "because it's too much work".

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Actually I'm pretty sure Ryu was talking about singe attack pets like imps because that is what he was responding too. I think we are all passed asking for LS to be exempted since Castle said it is specifically targeted for the nerf and cause gun drone wtfpwns things...

My comment was pure sacrasm to your response to him where you said "they didn't want them to not be affected" Confusing double negative aside, me saying "they never intended you to buff imps" was just a joking attempt to point out that what you were saying made no sense and in fact was not relevant to what you were quoting .

Unless the devs really never intended for us to buff imps

I apologize for not clearly communicating my sarcasm.

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No, this would be more accurate:
"we never intended for pets to benefit from recharge, but we made the RIP sets [color= yellow]not realizing[/color] they would affect recharge. We then attempted to correct the RIP sets despite never being able to counter the issue of multi-factor enhancements boosting aspects not necessarily intended and subsequently completely broke them"

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I think what Castle was trying to say was:

"we never intended for pets to benefit from recharge [of the power], but we made the RIP sets knowing they would affect recharge [of the power]."

The assumption being made here is that when a dev refers to recharge, he always is talking about recharge on the pet. This is an assumption, as the dev could be talking about recharge on the pet, or recharge on the power. Unless the dev is clear on which is meant, it could be either.

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I think we can all agree that a lot of headache could have been solved with even a tiny bit of dev clarity, but that has been the case time and time again, so why we get our hopes up is beyond me.

I mean jeez the issue still isn't clear. it really feels like we are only getting (optimistically) half the story. The second half of the story is probably being saved for some other unpopular change he is going to jam through in the future

Like I said "never intended" is getting pretty old, there is only so many times "the dog ate my homework" is believable and we all know it whether we admit it or not.

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Hopefully before it reaches that point, the devs will separate out the critter versions of Fire Imps and Jack Frost and make them debuffable.

[/ QUOTE ] This I doubt, because if they wont allow exemptions for the range only pets or pets with one attack, I dont think they are going to make a second set of pet powers just for this. Too much work for them. It is good that you bring up this point because I will ensure that no missions I create will have pets if I can help it because it wont be fair to the players.

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The reason they didn't make an exception for pets with one attack was not that it was too much work (making them affected actually required *more* work), it was because they didn't *want* them to not be affected.

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Exactly, the story now is that it was never intended for you to be able to buff a fire imp with AM, nor was it ever intended for you to buff stoney with speedboost.

"never intended", "oversight" these are becoming swear words in my house lol.

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re-reading Castle's OP in this thread again it still isn't entirely clear without substantial understanding of the inner workings of the game. He is all over the map in the OP, citing LS and RIP in the same paragraph, which is a bit confusing as LS does not take RIP sets, so you really have to read between the lines.

Is this statement an accurate summation?
"we never intended for pets to benefit from recharge, but we made the RIP sets knowing they would affect recharge. We then attempted to correct the RIP sets despite never being able to counter the issue of multi-factor enhancements boosting aspects not necessarily intended and subsequently completely broke them"

Something isn't adding up there. To put it in light, your assumption about how players should have viewed RIP sets is cavernous compared to the missing logic in what happened in the above statement"

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No, this would be more accurate:
"we never intended for pets to benefit from recharge, but we made the RIP sets [color= yellow]not realizing[/color] they would affect recharge. We then attempted to correct the RIP sets despite never being able to counter the issue of multi-factor enhancements boosting aspects not necessarily intended and subsequently completely broke them"

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I do not think that is possible. They have known that multi-enhancements boost things not directly slottable since HO's.

If you are saying they did not think it would be the case yet again when they designed RIP sets despite it working that way since.. can't recall what issue HO's were put in, but a long time... Then we all have a lot more to worry about within the dev team than this crappy fix heh.

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or 4/
you are again applying information that 99% of people did not have access to. I see no where in the patch notes or any live server dev discussion where it indicates one way or the other how they are intended to operate.

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Prior to information being available, people can form *beliefs* of their own. People can make their own assumptions of what the "intent" for something was.

However, once people actually *have* information, and then continue to make claims directly contrary to this information, then I believe that it is fair to say that those claims are unreasonable (assuming that the information can be trusted).

The very first post in this thread has Castle saying that it was not intended, so to continue to claim that it was intended would seem unreasonable.

(it should also be added that I am not aware of any information actually suggesting that it *was* intended - all I've seen from people with that belief is assumptions)

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So that information has been available to everyone in this particular thread for at most 4 days now? Nearly 5 months after the fact?

re-reading Castle's OP in this thread again it still isn't entirely clear without substantial understanding of the inner workings of the game. He is all over the map in the OP, citing LS and RIP in the same paragraph, which is a bit confusing as LS does not take RIP sets, so you really have to read between the lines.

Is this statement an accurate summation?
"we never intended for pets to benefit from recharge, but we made the RIP sets knowing they would affect recharge. We then attempted to correct the RIP sets despite never being able to counter the issue of multi-factor enhancements boosting aspects not necessarily intended and subsequently completely broke them"

Something isn't adding up there. To put it in light, your assumption about how players should have viewed RIP sets is cavernous compared to the missing logic in what happened in the above statement"

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To me at least, it seems blatantly obvious that the RIP set IOs were *never* *intended* to boost the Recharge of powers belonging to the summoned pets, and once it was realized that they did, that was prevented from happening (well before those sets even went Live).

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I don't find this statement to be reasonable.

Going back to VS. VS accepts the RIP sets. VS has a limit of one pet out at a time, a duration of 60 seconds, and a recharge of 60 seconds. It can't really benefit from the +rech portion of the RIP sets except for increased attack speed.

Gun Drone which has a 180 second recharge and a 90 second duration but which can have multiple copies out could benefit from the recharge in the RIP sets but can't slot them.

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As I say in <a href="/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=Dev&Number=132589 50&Searchpage=1&Main=13242168Search=true#P ost13258950" target="_blank">this</a> post, the reason that Voltaic Sentinel accepts RIP sets appears to be that it accepts Pet Damage sets and Recharge enhancements.

Gun Drone does *not* accept Pet Damage sets, and was thus not considered for RIP sets. Instead, it can get Recharge from the Ranged Damage sets that it *does* accept.


I'm not really sure what that has to do with my statement being reasonable or not though.


However, claiming that RIP sets improving the Recharge of pets' powers was *intended* would seem to require that:
1) The devs are lying.
2) The devs accidentally made changes directly contrary to this goal during i13, without any apparent reason.
3) The devs did not bother undoing this change before i13 went live (or even up until now), even though it would have also had the significant bonus of also making the *other* aspects of the IOs (Damage, Acc...) work.

Now *that* would seem unreasonable.

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or 4/
you are again applying information that 99% of people did not have access to. I see no where in the patch notes or any live server dev discussion where it indicates one way or the other how they are intended to operate.

People were free to make up their own mind. Now factor in that pet delivery is inconsistent at best in terms of which ones operate which way and what they accept and you end up where we are at. People confused because they were unwilling or unable to add 1 line of text to the patch information, the IO's themselves (ideally), or comment on it after the fact.

Once again you are adding x and y together, but without having been in closed beta and specifically reading those RIP related threads no one knows what those variables even represent, let alone how the relate to one another because the devs (just like you) assumed everyone would know that they never intended pets to be improved even though numerous examples of just that were in game already.

good ole assumption.

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Then why does Sparky accept these sets since they do absolutely nothing for this pet?

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The criteria for making a power accept RIP sets appears to basically be:

A) The power already accepts Pet Damage IO sets.
B) The power accepts regular Recharge enhancements.

So, the reason Voltaic Sentinel accepts RIP sets is simply that it fulfills both condition A) and condition B).

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Of course, there is the question of why Sparky takes Recharge in the first place. But it's the same question, just displaced from RIP sets to Recharge in general.

I'm guessing it's an oversight, either that or it's meant to cover the few seconds of cast time it takes to make him not perma. Unless he can get inadventantly killed somehow. (Perhaps by an AoE, or an auto hit attack)

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I think it is a case of another half complete job being done. Sparky used to have a shorter duration and you did need rech to get it perma. They upped its duration, but due to an oversight (such a friendly word for "not doing your job") it was not addressed and remains in that state once again an "oversight" even on test while all the pet powers are being manipulated.

lol, "sorry I missed our anniversary baby, it was an oversight"
"ya, I know I left the kid waiting 4 hrs in the cold while I drank beers, it was an oversight".

hmm wonder if this "oversight" thing has any potential to work in RL like it does for the devs.

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In the case of my fire/storm most of my spawn to spawn killing power is fire at work...

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Yep, that was kind of my point. You can't look at a nerf to one power in isolation -- it has to be considered in light of the performance of the other 22 powers at your disposal.

Fire control is admittedly a high-damage control set; it might be a fairer test to look at, say ice/storm, any storm defender, earth/kin, etc.

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What I've found is that LS is NOT worth casting unless I'm going to be fighting in one location for longer than half a min.

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That was my observation of non-twinked LS as well. I'd bring it out for AV fights, sometimes for boss fights, or if I was just fooling around. It is pretty crucial to success in playing King of the Hill with the warriors on the hill by the tram in Talos.

In any case, I think a very good case could be made for either reducing the endurance cost or adding mobility. But I'm not sure that the current tone of the discussion is likely to render the devs particularly receptive to making those types of changes.

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I agree with everything you are saying, but I'd like to add that just because fire is awesome does not equate to storm being awesome. We can't look at how storm does w/ fire, you have to look at how storm does period. If storm is supposed to be the "damage" set then it is failing. If it is supposed to be something else then I'd like to know so it can be evaluated on that metric.

One could argue that storm used to be "the positioning" set, but the hurricane nerf made it shift away from that. Objectively with two pure damage late game, very high end cost psuedopets, it seems pretty clear that storm is supposed to do good damage. LS doing less damage than a MM's tier 1 is not "good" damage, but rather "pathetic" damage any way you measure it. I'm taling the lowest damage AT using its lowest damage attack... sad.

Your observations of a non-twinked (ie you don't have hasten, and you don't use even the cheapest IO's), or test version LS are apt. Castle has also stated that he does not like powers that are "only used for boss fights/ end of mission" which LS undeniably is. I just honestly hope it doesn't take him 2 years to back up his claims.

I will say that if ANY dev is unwilling to make a game change because of "spite" they should not have a job. Players are allowed to be emotional, the devs do NOT have that right. No ifs, ands, or buts. Ever.

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Recharge intensive pet sets. I understood that these were created to increase the firing rate of the pets that they were accepted into. What exactly is their purpose now?

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That was never my understanding of what these sets were created to do. They are to increase the recharge rate of the summon power for the pet.

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A lot of people have varying understandings of these sets and the soulbound allegiance set and how they were intended to affect pets.

Does anyone have the dev info when these were implemented. And if that info does indicate that ONLY the summon recharge time was supposed to benefit and never the pet was there any dev followup done to stem the tide of posts indicating the belief that RIP and SA did improve pet performance?

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Well, if we look at what actually happened...

In early i13 closed beta, the RIP set IOs actually *did* improve the Recharge of powers belonging to the summoned pets.
During the beta a change was made so that Recharge no longer carried over to pets. Unfortunately this also blocked all *other* aspects of those IOs to carry over to the pet powers.

Now, consider what Castle said in the first post of this thread:
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For a long time, we didn't notice, but then we introduced the Recharge Intensive Pet IO Sets and suddenly HUGE amounts of Recharge were available to certain pets.

We tried a few alternatives, which essentially ended up making RIP IO's broken for several months in a variety of ways.

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If we try to add 2 and 2 together, it seems pretty obvious that the RIP set IOs were *not* intended to boost the Recharge of pets' powers, and that when the devs noticed that they *did* they made a change to prevent this. This fix unfortunately had the side effect of blocking other aspects of the RIP set IOs, something that they were not able to find a simple fix for, thus leaving the RIP set IOs essentially non-working until this fix was made.

To me at least, it seems blatantly obvious that the RIP set IOs were *never* *intended* to boost the Recharge of powers belonging to the summoned pets, and once it was realized that they did, that was prevented from happening (well before those sets even went Live).


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Finally if RIP sets weren't intended to make pets attack faster how was adding them to the game exasperating the problem?
"but then we introduced the Recharge Intensive Pet IO Sets and suddenly HUGE amounts of Recharge were available to certain pets." Castle

something is not adding up here.

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It was exasperating the problem because they were not *intended* to boost the Recharge of pets' powers, but they *did* - contrary to the devs' intent.

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Very interesting stuff, thank you for the information. This is literally the first time that I'm sure the majority of people have heard this.

I'm frustrated because this isn't even the first time in this thread that someone has said "oh well in the beta this was cleared up by the devs"

I guess we can blame insider closed beta information again allowing a select group to understand the inner thoughts of the devs when they refuse to tell the rest of the game population.

If like 99.5% of the population you weren't in that closed beta how would you suggest they "know" the dev intent behind the RIP sets? I actually had access to those closed forums through a friend, but never saw what you are talking about. Though I'll admit the steaming pile that was i13 pvp had all my attention lol. Can't say I've seen many people from that beta actively trying to distill the misinformation posted on the forums about how the RIP sets work, and one can't expect them to do the jobs of the NCsoft team.

So where does that leave us? You (and others) are talking like this is stuff everyone should know, but how would they? Would they know based on the patch notes that said nothing? Would they know based on the closed beta they weren't part of? I'm honestly curious how people are supposed to just "know" this stuff and put 2 and 2 together, when they have no idea that 2 was even supposed to be added to 2.

I'm very frustrated, there are a lot of people either not doing their job, or doing a piss-poor job in NCsoft right now. I'm not sure it is really acceptable after years of the same thing happening again and again. I understand that the majority of people will be as lazy as they can possibly be if there is no accountability, it is just frustrating (in all services, not just this game).

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to sum it up. Perma hasten stormy able to contribute less in tough fights (offense + survivability) than the other debuffing sets for about 7x as much endurance.

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I don't think there's any argument that this change makes LS less effective -- or rather, less enhanceable over its base performance.

The relevant question, though, is what effect it has on the performance of the powerset as a whole. Just as an example, if you were getting 50 dps from LS on live, but only 20 dps on Test, that's a much bigger deal if the rest of your powers only contribute 50 dps than if you can crank out 150. The claim has been made that these changes are detrimental to entire powersets.

It's time to back up that assertion with some evidence.

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I'm not sure how to satisfactorily answer your question without running some missions where I only use storm powers to kill things on live and then do the same on test. In the case of my fire/storm most of my spawn to spawn killing power is fire at work, but that is a testament to fire, which can be reproduced by any set with -res or decent +dam.

What I've found is that LS is NOT worth casting unless I'm going to be fighting in one location for longer than half a min. That means bosses and higher in both team and solo.

To toss in some number from a SO build:
nado = 26 dps over 30 sec for base 21 end. A So build will never have more than 1 out.
LS = 13 dps over 60 sec for base 32 end. A SO build will never have more than 1 out.
LS on live w/ hasten and fraken IO'd = 21 shots or approx 26 dps.

Obviously nado is vastly superior to LS now and it actually was when you could improve LS too considering it is mobile, stuns, autohit, -def and has a faster cast. But from a dps stance LS was much closer on live.

So what is LS similar to now? well it is lower dps than a MM just siting there using snap shot over and over again so likely some of the lowest dps in the game. It takes about 30 sec (assuming you have LS fully damage enhanced, which a SO build may or may not due to the high rech and extreme end cost) before the dpe surpasses that same MM using his tier 1 snap shot

In my honest opinion the majority of pve builds should skip LS for some other power. If that was the goal then gj.

One of my first posts in this thread was asking Castle what he feels storm's role is now as it provides less team safety without a lot of effort (ie making cane work on team sized spawns is not very easy and many people find it to be a "me me me" type of playstyle similar to herding tanks). It provides similar offense through -res as other debuffers, but now LS isn't worth casting outside of end boss fights and only a tiny handful of builds can utilize nado in spawn to spawn engagements (aoe -kb that is spammable).

If storm isn't a spawn to spawn specialist then it must be a big game hunter right? (it is on live when built for it). Not anymore due to these changes. Again the set provides less team safety and less effective dps against hard targets.

Other than looking really pretty (gj making another /energy armor set lol) what is storm supposed to excel at now? or is it supposed to just be a highly situational set that requires more player skill/attention that is mediocre across all venues?

I find it sad that storm has to use mountains more endurance than other sets to perform worse. I hope in 2 yrs the buff it gets is sufficient.

I very much agree. I'd love to see some data representing the "problem" sets on live using +rech (ie take your mm and play with a kin) vs on test. I already posted the results of my stormy in several threads.

to sum it up. Perma hasten stormy able to contribute less in tough fights (offense + survivability) than the other debuffing sets for about 7x as much endurance.

LS becomes a dps gain (over not casting it) on the 5th strike (roughly 30 seconds) on a heavily IO'd toon. I have no idea if/when it would be advantageous on a SO toon because you can't make it very good (maybe 1 acc, 2 end, 1 dam, 2 rech SO's? i dunno).

At any rate 30 seconds in means it is a boss/end of mission only power now, so good job there when he has said he doesn't want "boss only" powers before.

If it is a nemesis plot involving a port of rad and kin to MM's in the next round I'd make the suggestion that tweaking those sets specifically for MM's would have been the "right" decision based on precedent and to avoid screwing people over.

While MM accel metab doing +regen instead of +rech might not be ideal (just as an example) I think it would serve MM's well and be pretty easy to get used to. (while also being thematic in that you heal faster when you have a faster metabolism. In fact I'm not sure why AM doesn't have some +regen in all versions heh)

edit: this change is gonna make kin of MMs very lacklustre unless you play a melee centric one. Speed boosting pets was the draw of pairing kin with your own army. I'd rather see sonic, thermal, and cold hit MM's well before kin (especially after this change).

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hmm that was my initial thoughts from what I'd heard, but he never mentioned any additional pet ai tweaks. Unless of course he is omitting something for various reasons.

Which brings up my next question:

did this change of preventing pets from being boosted by recharge improve anything? Anyone done any conclusive tests?

ie. If x pet gest stuck cycling power A with speed boost on it does it now properly cycle all attacks on test server w/ sb on it?

if it is/isn't is there a net gain compared to using power A at an increased rate compared to now using power a,b,c...n ? if yes, then by how much. If no, then by how much?

Would love to someone's data (ie boss kill speed) for some of the problem pets this was geared toward fixing.

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Of course par for the course is to offer up a sacrificial lamb, which Castle did a swell job of in this thread (and has done in the past as well) by blaming the people in charge of patch notes. That gets old, a manager can only blame an assistant so many times...

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but that's what the assistant is for though Castle hasn't been the only one to mention the Patch Notes guy messing up before and leaving things out.

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What made this so hard for me is now I will have a really hard time deciding what sets to play because of how this change effects so many different powersets. So many toons that I play will either be deleted or retired until something changes. I would say about almost 1/4 of my alts.

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do what you gotta do, though I think it's a bit dramatic to delete characters over this.

THOUGH! I still wish that AoE Hold from Spec Ops would recharge faster.

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in my case I won't delete any toons affected by this unless I end up needing the space. I will be stripping dry my $bill fire/storm troller, but plan to keep my storm/son/power in the game, though I wish it was a cold/son

the fire/storm makes me very sad as it is the toon I've spent the most time playing and tweaking since I joined. First making it a great pvp toon and then Castle killed that plan, then making it a big game hunter (AV's) in preperation for all the MA arcs loaded with them. The toon can still do that, but nowhere near as well as before. I pictured fire (highest dam primary) and storm (highest dam secondary) creating the highest damage AV toon out of trollers (also with by far the highest endurance cost), now it is outpaced by /rad, /thermal, and /cold (when it comes) and all of them have considerably higher safety. So /storm went from hero to zero for me.

So when you add together i13 pvp and now this ill conceived change, hopefully people can understand why I am no longer part of the Castle sycophant club.

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just my opinion though, which of course only matters to me lol.


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If it only matters to you, why'd you post it?

Castle can only do what the project lead lets him do. If you want to blame someone for your problems, blame Positron. At least get that part right.

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I post because I'm pissed that this ill-conceived change was even put on the drawing board, let alone now being jammed into the game.

As to whether this is Castle's doing or Posi's well Castle is the lead powers guy no? I'm under the impression that this company works like most others in that CEO doesn't micro manage the Department Heads and they are free to implement plans provided they align with the budget and the overall company plan/vision. The CEO (posi in this story) has the ability to veto, but would rarely use it as you generally put people into senior positions that you trust to not suck.

Maybe I'm mistaken about how NCsoft operates though. If posi came up with the SoW treatment and then decided to put it into affect on all pet powers then he is the one to blame. He didn't though, it was Castle according to Castle, so I'm pretty sure I'm placing accountability exactly where it should be.

thx though.

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Recharge intensive pet sets. I understood that these were created to increase the firing rate of the pets that they were accepted into. What exactly is their purpose now?

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That was never my understanding of what these sets were created to do. They are to increase the recharge rate of the summon power for the pet.

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A lot of people have varying understandings of these sets and the soulbound allegiance set and how they were intended to affect pets.

Does anyone have the dev info when these were implemented. And if that info does indicate that ONLY the summon recharge time was supposed to benefit and never the pet was there any dev followup done to stem the tide of posts indicating the belief that RIP and SA did improve pet performance?

edit: this is all I could find in the patch notes regarding RIP and I could find no dev comments what so ever
dec 2, 2008

Added new IO Sets and new IO Set Categories:

# Recharge Intensive Pets

* Call to Arms, Level 10-30
* Expedient Reinforcement, Level 30-50

So I guess we were completely left to make up our own minds about what they actually did? (anyone find anything else?)

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First thing is I, personally, never expected recharge to improve a pet's attack rate - not in enhancement slotting, anyway. This comes from me being in CoV Beta however - they removed the ability to slot recharge from Henchmen due to not wanting misunderstandings as to what was buffed (the pet power's recharge rate, not the pet's attacks recharge rate.

Second, If you looked at the title of the IO sets and noticed the only powers that take them were the pet powers with long recharges, and not henchmen, I thought it was easy to figure that it was for the summons' recharge.

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I didn't have insider beta knowlegdge from 2? years ago

you mean they DON'T go in MM henchmen? I had no idea until you just said that.

I was on a few month break from this game and when I came back the RIP sets were in, but my network of friends (and the boards) all said they were broken (+1 for adding more loot when it doesn't work, seemed like a good idea at the time I guess).

All I had to go on was the patch note and ZERO dev discussion regarding it. What about those that don't use the forums? maybe they all have insider beta information from years ago too...

tbh I just assumed they were designed to increase pet attack rate considering practically ALL pets are perma out of the box and the psuedo-pets that aren't don't even accept pet IO's or the RIP sets..

Just finding out now that MM hench's don't even take the RIP sets makes me even more confused about everything Castle has said in this thread. Something smells like BS to me.

Finally if RIP sets weren't intended to make pets attack faster how was adding them to the game exasperating the problem?
"but then we introduced the Recharge Intensive Pet IO Sets and suddenly HUGE amounts of Recharge were available to certain pets." Castle

something is not adding up here.

Post deleted by Moderator 08

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What gets me is that evidently most of the people who are really upset by this change have figured out a way to play that most players never even think of or can't afford

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Yes, because Hasten is so obscure, and so very expensive.

And Speed Boost, and Accelerate Metabolism, and Adrenaline Boost ...

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we were wrong to believe that pet centric toons benefit from playing in teams.

M = massively?
M = multiplayer?

My earth/kin still is waiting to hear why this nerf is going to hit it.

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Again, this wasn't done because they were over preforming. It was done because they were broken.

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Please explain to me how casting Speed Boost on Animate Stone was "broken," and how making Speed Boost do nothing for Animate Stone but raise run speed is "fixed." Because I'm not getting it.

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It wasn't. No one said it was. It was caught in the crossfire. Castle's already said this wasn't really what they wanted. But the only other alternative to fixing what they wanted to would have resulted in a much worse situation.


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Also, insert standard rant about using "broken" as a rationale for game changes, since it's purely subjective and unverifiable, logically equivalent to "because the game bible says so."

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Er, what is and isn't broken isn't really subjective OR unverifiable.

Does it work X way: Y/N?

Is it suppose to work Y way: Y/N?

If Y to both. Is broken.

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For example, if Castle says the PvE damage levels on Flares and Blaze are going to be switched because the game bible says Flares is intended to do more damage than Blaze, would you just accept the fact that they're "broken?"

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The argument is illogical. The "Game Bible" as you describe it doesn't exist. If you mean the one I outlined above. Well, that one wouldn't encounter a situation like this. For the most part, the Devs have provided adequate explanation and reasoning behind all of the changes I've questioned. The change you've suggest above doesn't follow any logic.

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was the pain of the fix appropriate to the amount of "broken". IE, you have an ingrown toenail, do we amputate your foot? If the original broken was of minimal impact and the fix has major negative impact, do you still fix it? or do you wait for something better to come along?

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you of course wait until a better fix. EXCEPT when you are just about to launch the biggest shiny they have ever come up with and the only thing likely to keep this game doing well and this "fix" is integral to that launch.

Considering they have already delayed it an entire issue and are now dedicating a whole issue to that shiny. Don't think for a second they won't take both your legs off at the knees if they have to and if it happens to fix your ingrown toenail then great, but that wasn't even a consideration.

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Ok fine I see your point in this. Its just like how back in the day we were never meant to have more than one instance of a pet but yet it went on for more than a year before it was addressed. I understand what you are doing from the developer side but as the players how are we supposed to know what you all intended as the limits for certain powers? There is just no way for us to know this. All I can say is if this decision is final then it truely makes me sad because doing things like this with IOs was to me building a part of who my character was as a whole. But if we have to go back to plain on vanilla slotting again because the IOs dont give as much benefit then I might as well not even play that toon anymore and/or ever create toons that have those powersets. To me the buffed up lightning storm was the difference between choosing storm summoning over cold domination for my defender.

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Not trying to single you out, but simply making an observance based on this type of argument.

It seems to me that IOs have caused more problems than they are worth. I mean, everyone survived just fine for 8 issues before they existed, but now it seems people just can't live without them. Everytime a change is made that corrects some level of damage that IOs have wrought, people QQ all over the place.

Maybe, and I am half-serious here, IOs should all be removed from the game at this point. Wouldn't that free up some of the time spent on coding fixes... not to mention explaining said fixes?

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yes.

but for better or worse they are going to stay and we all have to hope that at some point the devs figure out how to implement loot into a game originally designed around the concept of no loot. It might not be so bad if they had acquired some people experienced in adding in-game rewards, but they didn't and we were stuck effectively getting the work of rookies/noobs.

Everytime a change like this goes through and everytime beta testers clearly point out things that aren't functioning correctly and they ignore it for years the player base is left feeling the pain of their inexperience, lack of knowledge, and lack of foresight.

Despite all that, I believe they have done a pretty good job with IO's. Nowhere near as good as it could have been with the right staff, but pretty good still for a first attempt. C or a C+ at any rate. That is good enough for some people and probably good enough for this team. Might need to step it up 10 or so notches if they plan to prosper in the next year or so, but good enough when you are the only option available.

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Recharge intensive pet sets. I understood that these were created to increase the firing rate of the pets that they were accepted into. What exactly is their purpose now?

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That was never my understanding of what these sets were created to do. They are to increase the recharge rate of the summon power for the pet.

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A lot of people have varying understandings of these sets and the soulbound allegiance set and how they were intended to affect pets.

Does anyone have the dev info when these were implemented. And if that info does indicate that ONLY the summon recharge time was supposed to benefit and never the pet was there any dev followup done to stem the tide of posts indicating the belief that RIP and SA did improve pet performance?

edit: this is all I could find in the patch notes regarding RIP and I could find no dev comments what so ever
dec 2, 2008

Added new IO Sets and new IO Set Categories:

# Recharge Intensive Pets

* Call to Arms, Level 10-30
* Expedient Reinforcement, Level 30-50

So I guess we were completely left to make up our own minds about what they actually did? (anyone find anything else?)

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@ Frost.

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Forgive me for exploiting the game and having no idea I was doing it. You are smart enough to realize that if you put a rech SO in a fire imp the detailed power widow tells me it is attacking faster right?

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Well since it wasn't supposed to be like that I'm guessing... no... not that smart at all.... and I don't know... I'm weird I thought that when I slotted recharge into pets it was for the purpose of reducing the down time of the power.... not the down time of everything the pet does ever.... you know... the same way it works for So's, to's, do's, and other single enhancements (only effects one thing)?


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How the hell was I supposed to know they weren't and only by slotting a thunderstike dam/rech was LS actually benefiting?

I guess I should have asked the devs to send me the code to know I wasn't supposed to be benefiting...

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I don't know.... Did you think putting a rechage SO should do the same thing that a recharge IO did for pet powers? Do you assume that putting a green into a bots healing power should effect their regen too? Or that end mod enhancements in pets should increase their recovery? I'm not in your mind.... so explain it to me.



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It is pretty simple. They added this nifty feature called detailed power information.

As a really easy to understand example go to a fire imp or lightning storm and slot a recharge: to, do, so, IO, or set IO w/ recharge. Then open up the detailed info window for that power and click the drop down to expand the attack it uses.

NOTE the increased attack rate compared to not slotting it.

That is where I garnered the information to make the game breaking logic leap that slotting recharge in a pet power makes it attack faster.

If everyone is still with me at this point this is where it gets really fun.

It wasn't until I started fraps'ing gameplay footage that I learned that recharge enhancements had ZERO effect on how fast imps attacked as I only have a SA dam/rech IO in them + 2 acc/dam HO's.

Up until 3 days ago I completely believed that all types of recharge enhancements buffed the attack rate of LS (detailed power window if you recall), but only found out at that time that Set IO's were buffing it. I always knew hasten buffed it because in i7 they announced that it would be affected by caster buffs, and logic be damned here I thought hasten WAS a caster buff...

So we can blame the player for trusting what the game is telling them. Like I said send me the code so I know what is and isn't supposed to work because the delivery at this point is incredibly inconsistent and in game tools are failing.

My bad I suppose.

As to the rest of your post, ya if bots had a heal or regen power I'd expect slotting a heal SO, IO, or set IO would improve it. Wouldn't everyone?
If a bot took end mod SO, IO, sets, or if another set affected end mod (say dam/end mod for instance if it existed) then I'd expect it to improve the bot's recovery and the detailed power window would support that expectation.

What "I" or "anyone" expects really doesn't matter when the in game detailed power info is telling me exactly what is supposedly happening (though it is wrong lol).

And for clarity it is still this way on TEST server even after the patch, so we will still likely wind up with some people slotting things with recharge and believing it is benefiting them. Reminds me of when you could slot wet ice for resistance...

I fully understand "why" this is being jammed through, but that doesn't make it a thematic, logical, and well implemented. It fails on all counts lol I honestly hope the devs hang their heads in shame at how poor of a job they are doing in this case.