The Pet Post - a revised versionFollow

This was posted in another thread, but since the title was simply “a note to blizzard” and my post was like reply #42 after a ton of rants and arguments, I figured people probably wouldn’t notice it because IF they opened the post despite the title, they wouldn’t read through all the posts to get to mine, especially if mine is so long they may want to skip it. So, with a more related title, and a clean start, lets discuss what would be nice for pets (but still keep the respective balance blizzard has put on the game.

Purpose of this thread
The purpose of this thread is to promote new ideas to the Alla community (since I respect most of the people on here, despite what I may say against the boar crusade) that would promote a greater individuality and diversity among hunters and their pets, while still staying true to the balance the game has, and not involving probably several hours worth of thinking up new skills (like would happen if every rare/elite/named pet got its own special skill to make it “unique”). I’ve broken this up into pet attack speed, pet skills, pet attributes, and pet type. Also note that the math involved (i.e. this would cost 20 TP) is merely an example to illustrate the suggestion, not the specific “It HAS TO BE 20 TP!” Don’t get caught up in the math, focus more on the idea.
For my information, I used petopia, so that’s where I’m basing my stats from.

Pet Attack Speeds
Most hunters are really pissed that they can’t get the 1.0 base attack speeds on pets. Most casters are loving it, because they can actually get a spell off now. Well, what if a hunter had to sacrifice a bit in order to get the heavy attack speed? Maybe, lets say, now instead of just resistances, armor, and health on the passives, attack speed is as well. So you now have a new trainable skill (which you can buy from the trainer) called Natural Furor. This skill would be bought at level 20 through level 70, every ten levels, which would cost roughly the same as Natural Armor, and at each rank would reduce your pets base attack speed by 0.1 (up to a minimum attack speed of 0.6). Or maybe every 20 levels, and then again at 70, to bring it to 1.6 attack speed. This would sacrifice a lot of survivability to increase your attack speed. Even then, with each rank upping your attack speed by 5%, have it drop your damage by 4%. This way you still get the DPS bonus from spending TP, but it’s not a whopping 20-30%, it’s more like 4-6% total.
Or, instead of a set 0.1, if it had a 5% faster and 4% less damage, it would serve the same purpose. With a 1.4/1.6 attack speed, your pet really wouldn’t be as powerful as if he had a 1.0 attack speed, and if it cost 185 TP for the highest rank, it wouldn’t be OP as bad because you’ll do worse in solo, as well as against melee classes.

Pet Skills
There are just a few things about pet skills that need to be implemented, some which I think are in process and some which are not. First, all pets need some form of speed increase. If all pets had dash/dive that’d be great, but if they didn’t, they should have a unique ability to get to the enemy faster. Right now, if a pet cannot learn dash/dive, it instantly loses its popularity, even though we want to see diversity. If a family skill, such as charge for boars, is in place, dash is not necessary. For example, warp stalkers have warp, so they don’t need dash. Classes without a speed boost are bear, gorilla, crab, crocolisk, scorpid, turtle, raptor, spider, serpent, and sporebat. Of course, classes with a ranged ability (i.e. poison spit) may not need a speed boost.
Also, every pet family should have a unique skill. Currently we have bears, nether rays, tall striders, crabs, crocolisks, raptors, ravagers, bats, owls, spiders, carrion birds, hyenas, and sporebats (13 families) that have no unique ability. Granted, birds get screech, but that’s not unique to a family. I’d like to see something like a deathroll for crocolisks (100 focus, 3 second channeled, deals x damage per second and stuns target for 1 second per tick, deals triple damage in water). This would be good for single-targets, especially in water. Where for other classes you might get something different – maybe a physical DOT for raptors, etc. I know they’re putting thorns in for crabs, but the rest need some love too!

Pet Attributes
One thing that sets families apart is the attributes they have. But what if there were variations among the families. I’ve come up with 3 strategies, which any number of them could be implemented to grant a variance between cats and cats, not just cats and dogs.
#1 is to make certain types of a family, lets use cats for this example, have a bigger defensive or offensive set of attributes. As it is right now cats have 98% health, 100% armor, and 110% DPS. What if tigers got the regular bit, while lions are a defensive cat with 99% health, 102% armor, and 107% DPS (which totals to the same) and panthers/cougars get a more offensive setup with 97% health, 98% armor, and 113% DPS. This would make some pets, like certain bears, better for tanking, while others would be better for DPS. Now you can get a better tank for use with prowl, or an even better DPSer to bring to raids who will be worse for soloing.
#2 is to have elite and rare mobs have different stats. Not better stats, and not different stats for each mob (because that would take forever). However, if it was made so that elite pets were either 1% farther from “medium” (say 100% health or DPS, and 105% armor, using a wolf as a base) or 1% more in the offensive direction, or some offset which would make elites better at either tanking or DPS, while rare mobs are better at the same or the other, and regular pets fill in where the elites and rares don’t (either as an in-between or the balance, depending on how it gets setup). If this part is confusing I can elaborate, it’s sort of a there’s about 9 choices listed in 1 strategy kind of thing, which could go in any direction.
#3 is to have a trainable ability, maybe costing 100 TP or something, which would make your pet specialize. For every rank off of “medium” your pet gets an additional 3% in the direction, then maybe 1% added to everything just to make it worth the TP. For example, a cat (which currently has 98% health, 100% armor, and 110% DPS), may be given 99% health, 98% armor, but 113% DPS, or something like that. To make it a bit more specialized. To balance this there could also be a more balanced version, which would be maybe 2% in the opposite direction, so you figure 99% health, 103% armor, 109% DPS. This would add a little variation to the pets.

One last thing I suggest on the topic of pet attributes is to make a bigger gap between them. Right now, a warlock will have very different stats on a voidwalker than he would on an imp, however a cat and a bear wouldn’t be too different. For example, with a base of 5000 HP, 5000 AC, and 100 DPS (simple numbers to work with, not the set at any given level) a bear would have 5400 HP, 5250 AC, and 91 DPS. The cat would have 4900 HP, 5000 AC, and 110 DPS. While there’s a big difference between the DPS on the two, the HP/AC are pretty close. If instead of being 108% HP, 105% AC on the bear, and 98%/100% on the cat, what if it was more like 110% HP, 106% AC on bear, 94%/96% on cat? Upper or lower DPS maybe a little to balance, but right now the health and armor isn’t all that different. If our pets managed to get 10k armor and life as the base, the difference would be noticeable, but 500 HP and 250 Armor doesn’t seem like a whole lot if we’re talking these numbers.

Pet Type
I’d love it if we could get ravagers between level 10 and 60. If someone has a level 40 hunter, they can either try and level their pet 30 levels to catch up, or wait 20 levels for a ravager. Assuming they want a ravager. Same goes for some other pets, i.e. boars aren’t available past 60.
In addition, there are some pets which would be really fun to tame and use, but we can’t. Basilisks come to mind, as do hypogryphs, wyverns, and some others. Maybe some of them wouldn’t make good pets, but basilisks especially. It’d also be cool if alliance could get hypogryphs and horde could get wyverns, but not the other way around, so there’s a slight difference between the factions. I can understand not being able to tame sharks and frenzys though.
Also, it’d be nice to not have to go across 2 continents and an island just to find a pet of the first level you can learn a new skill at, then spend 12 hours waiting for a rare spawn to show up. It’d also be nice if every pet had some sort of tameable ability, it would make some of them which would only normally be trained for the skin, be trained for something different.