Bio Engineer Archive

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Hmm, are you sure this is the case? My understanding was that the pet operated independently of the group, whether it was "grouped" or not. The reason of course is that the pets level and characteristics would be meaningless if this were not true. Give a master bh/pistoleer a non-ch pet and it suddenly fights as a level 80? That's just wrong.

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A grouped pet does get a CL adjustment just like a low CL character gets one.

It doesn't gain any health, resistances, or accuracy bonuses. Mainly it means the pet will not have damage multipliers when fighting "even" level cons. If fighting things not of the same CL, then there is a 15 level difference to reach either minimum or maximum damage.

I haven't seen any non-handlers using pets, handlers are despised enough as is, and pets certainly wouldn't be functional in the CL 70+ game otherwise. (Functional being up for debate depending on whom you speak to.)

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ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
They changed it several times while we were testing, and apparnetly several times after CU as well There was a long discussion about this at fanfest, and I thought Keldarin said then (a month and a half ago now) that pet levels weren't going to either affect or be affected by groups. Oh well, not surprise it doesn't work like he said. I honestly haven't pulled out a pet since dropping my ch skills and realizing how useless my non-ch pets were after the CU.

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Pets get a multiplier for damage given and taken just like another player. I believe this may explain why a pet takes up a player slot in a group. Even for even you will not notice a difference between what your pet normally does in damage or the damage taken. When grouped, however, there is a difference just as there would be with a lower level player.

The difference with pets is that the group level or the pet owner's level determines the multiplier. The pet's level does not play into the multiplier. Therefore, you do not want to group with a pet that is higher level than you are. You in effect reduce the abilities of the pet to deal damage as well as take damage.

There are many discussions regarding the pet's ability to hold aggro. Is there a stat that determines this ability or is it simply the highest damage dealt draws the aggro? To be honest, patch 20 made this a mute question. The second you send a pet to attack a critter, the critter's friends develop almost human intelect and know a creature handler has made the pet attack and they know exactly where to find the creature handler. They ignore their buddy and run after the creature handler. So what if the pet is holding aggro. The other animals are eating the creature handler's lunch and they don't even say thank you. By the way, the pet will not attack anything else until the original target is dead. If you pull the pet away from the original target before the target is dead you break the pet. It will not attack anything else. It just stands there and watches.

And NEVER NEVER NEVER send a pet to hit a lair. The pet WILL NOT stop attacking the lair. You can call the pet to you but the sucker just sneaks back to the lair and attacks it again. If you have no other weapon except a pet, doing missions is nigh impossible now. You must go up and hit the lair unarmed to avoid the pet's mindless "kill the target at all cost"tactics now.

Any wonder why creature handlers have dropped the profession in droves?

Not sure how it works but my pets seem to take less damge when i group...and more when not...Was the test done using the CH aggro and Embold? or just head to head..

Message Edited by Amosxe on 07-25-2005 02:11 PM

testing: mine was done just head to head.

Spazzers - /cry

for the 9K level 10 recipe - *grin* ... /sigh

Ah yes the damage formula.

I originally worked this out after the CU as per this thread

Publish 17 changed it to include level modifiers which I posted here

anyway the formula is:

   DAMAGE = ((TOHIT/1500) + ((CL-TL)/30))*(MAX-MIN) + ((MAX+MIN)/2)





    CL = creature/pet level   


    TL = target level     


    TOHIT = to hit (from datapad)


    MIN = minium damage (from datapad) rounded down to nearest multiple of 10


    MAX = maximum damage (from datapad) rounded down to nearest multiple of 10

A difference of 15 levels lower means your pet hits for its minimum damage and the critter hits for its max, beyond that it just gets worse.

Tohit has an small but noticable effect, since the best to-hit is 170 on a level 70 pet, this means a bonus of 11% extra damage. Thats about 34 extra damage on a pet with 90-400 damage.