Creature Handler Archive

Hey folks,

Since the complete revamp to our profession had a massive effect on our most problematic issues and bugs, it's time to start a completely fresh Top 5 list.

Please list any major issues/problems/bugs that you are experiencing and I'll put a new list together over the next week.

Current problems I'm seeing just with a quick glance: complaints about the amount of XP required to level pets and/or learn skills, the "you can't tame that" bug (which has already been band-aided with a 60 second timeout and is supposed to be fixed completely in a future publish), call timers (especially now that they're removing vehicle call timers), missing specials (like Pinning Attack and the L3 version of several specials), etc.

Please list your issues in order of how much you'd like to see them fixed, worst problems first. Thanks a lot!

Still some major pathing issues in building interiors.

I spent soem time last night assistinga guildie do the various parts of the secrets of the siren quests, lots of in house and in bunker combat, lots of pets refusing to enter, left behind, not responding to commands.

I like the story arc content, but its pointless if i am unable to use my skills to complete it.

I do think call timers should be removed, but leave in store timers from combat to prevent pet cycling.

Would still like to see more mount variations(flyer, cat or whatever), and the ability (even if its just at MCH) to initiate combat from a mount.

Personally I havent found the training xp too harsh, but the rate of taming failure on high level pets, even using BE clothes and food is probably a little to high.

personally i think leveling a lv 70 pet takes a little to much time, isn't it like 10 mill xp to teach 8 lv 3 skills?

Listed in order of priority, descending. Most important at top.

1) XP requirements for learning abilities are too severe. Based on experience, I estimate it requires about 3X as many XP to learn all the abilities as it does to grind a double elite mastery character from scratch. See this post for an attempt at analysis of XP requirements, based on my experience.

2) Pet grouping ( or lack thereof ) needs investigation. If pets aren't allowed to group ( or sub-group ), CHs at least need the ability to see their pets HAM bar in the GUI without targeting them so we can easily find, check status, target, and heal them if needed. This is particularly true with the added Action/Mind cost on pet specials now on TC. The current system forces us to either group our pets ( not acceptible to other group members in most cases ), constantly mouse around to try to target pets (impossible in chaotic combat or with small pets), or operate blind and hope the pet can take care of itself ( usually what I end up doing ).

3) It is believed that several of the abilities either don't work, or their effect isn't explained properly. See the Post21 thread for more details.

4) Aggro while taming doesn't work properly. I've been attacked by parents of babies during the tame ( I'm L80, they're L1-L60, and some aggro if they walk too close to me for any period of time ). Also, I've had babies mid-tame start attacking fellow group members who started thinning the herd after I began the tame. I've even had one case where I tamed the critter, and it kept attacking my fellow group member even post-tame!

5) Getting a creature to break off attacks on a lair is not 100%. It takes repeated spams of "follow me" to maybe finally get him to stop. He will attack other things on command ( no spam ), but will return to lair as soon as the other thing is dead.

6) Successfully tamed creatures continue to wander or follow post-tame, making training them to store not particularly easy. I use the datapad now to just store them and go away, since they're usually leading me into more hostiles.

1. Ammount of XP to learn abilites/grow pets is pretty steep. (I have 13 Lvl 60-70 creatures in my datapad with L2 and L3 abilities that I'm waiting to learn. With an average of 425,000 xp/maturity level, and an average of 3 rollovers/pet to learn the ability, that's a whopping 17,850,000 xp. And that's not even all the specials! Please fix this.

2. Call timers just need to be fixed (I understand all the griefing issues, but we need to think of a better method). In a good full template group they will be done with the lair before you have called your three pets. It will be even worse now that you removed the restrictions for calling bikes.

3. Ammount of effort it takes as a MCH to tame a high level pet. If you don't have taming clothes you might as well forget about taming it. If you have taming clothes, you still are going to be working at it for a while. If you have taming clothes, and taming food you stand a pretty good chance of taming it within 10 minutes.

4. Fleet footed seems to do nothing (As well as many other special abilites). I'd much rather have our pre-cu speed pets. (See above. Again makes us worth less in a good group)

5. We need to be able to see if a pet has an ability before we tame it. Especially if we are looking for 1 or 2 specific abilities.

Forgot one!
6. If you are really implementing that pets use action and mind to use their specials, then we need a better way to see where their mind/acton values are. People don't want to group with your pets, so we can't easily see what the action/mind of our pets are. We need another static "window" just for ham bars of the pets we have currently called. Maybe the HAM bars would only show up if the pets are trained with the "Group" command.

And another one!
7. I would like to see when the pet gets training xp after a kill in the combat/spatial window so I don't have to use Ctl-D and find my pet to see if it's gaining any thing/how much it's gaining.

Message Edited by Thaumaturgist on 08-16-2005 10:07 AM

vitality IMO. with this new system we will spend so much time training up our pets to customize them how we want them, and then to lose vitality with no way to prevent that? i'd like to see vitality completely go away, i can't think of any reason it's still ingame really, but if we can't get that at least let us ADK pets or something.

I formally requested pet call timers be removed this morning, now that vehicle call timers have been removed (or were supposed to have been) with Publish 22, and weapon switching delay timers were removed with the Combat Upgrade. I'll let you know if I hear anything regarding that.

L1 marring storm boosted pet damage by 9%

L2 marring storm boosted pet damage by 1% over L1. L2 is 10% total from base.. but the 1% gain is not worth it.

Maybe make the boost gain like L1-4%, L2-6%, L3-10%... butincrease the % boost not on base, but where the previous skill took it to. Make it worth the pain to find/grind a L2/L3 special out.

If I am grouped with others grinding missions for experience and my pet is not... avg ch exp is around 400.

If I am grouped with others grinding missions for experience and my pet is grouped... avg ch exp is around 1800.

- Add just the creature handlers pet to show only on his screen when his pet is grouped.

- Or a group icon somewhere on the screen or by name to let the creature handler know when his pet is grouped.

1 attempt cl69 Lurking Sheer Mite

3 attempts cl65 Kamurith Snapper

1 attempt cl69 Mature Reptilian Flier

Not in combat

Not while mounted

Maybe change to 60sec timer on pvp duels and 15sec timer on pve for storing.

Shorten the damage range to make the pet hit a tad bit harder.

- A pet with 500+ damage should hit more than 180dmg.

-Increase the amount of damage on the triggered skills and have them stack.

-Beserk is aWASTEof a skillfor an extra 20 points added onto the avg of 175dmg that most pets hit for.

Pet speeds. It gets frustrating that we must routinely stop and wait for pets, particularly the cats, to catch up when they are following.

1. Pet movement speed really needs to be increased. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect your pet to be able to keep up with you while you are walking / running.

2. Sometimes my pet stops gaining training exp. for no explainable reason. Storing him and re-calling seems to fix it, but I have to check the DP everytime I kill something to see if he is gaining exp. to know whether to store him again. A fix to this little problem would be nice.

3. A little clarification on the pet training system from the devs might be nice. It doesn't have to be a full spoiler, but maybe a chart showing max training slots per pet CL would be nice. And verification of whether BE pets and Wild pets get the same training slots per CL.

4. A small pop-up pet control window might be a nice addition for those times when you are not grouped with your pets. It could at least show the health of the creature and be a means of targetting when needed. This would be very similar to what exists in other SOE games (see EQ and EQ2).

5. Since many of the new innate specials affect stats that aren't visible on a wild creatures (regen for example), it might be nice to allow CH's to see these stats on tamed wild creatures similar to what can already be seen on BE creatures.

Vuldranye

Honestly I'm just adding my comments, and hope you don't take offense at them

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Louannarchy wrote:

Been doin a lot of group/solo hunting here... just a few observations here.

- Learning pet skills not that harsh... if it was ez where would be the challenge?

I think you are the exception not the rule. We already ground out our profession once, why do we have to grind 75 pets just to learn the specials, and then another few just to keep? Then you add vitality loss to these pets and it realy stinks.

- Fix the current specials that are not working... and enhance the ones that are not. An example of enhancing one is...

L1 marring storm boosted pet damage by 9%

L2 marring storm boosted pet damage by 1% over L1. L2 is 10% total from base.. but the 1% gain is not worth it.

Maybe make the boost gain like L1-4%, L2-6%, L3-10%... but increase the % boost not on base, but where the previous skill took it to. Make it worth the pain to find/grind a L2/L3 special out.

- Have pets that are grouped not count against the group.

If I am grouped with others grinding missions for experience and my pet is not... avg ch exp is around 400.

If I am grouped with others grinding missions for experience and my pet is grouped... avg ch exp is around 1800.

- Add just the creature handlers pet to show only on his screen when his pet is grouped.

- Or a group icon somewhere on the screen or by name to let the creature handler know when his pet is grouped.

- Ive had no problems taming pets. Im at 25/25/25 for tame bonuses and I use jawa beer/bio clothing to boot.

1 attempt cl69 Lurking Sheer Mite

3 attempts cl65 Kamurith Snapper

1 attempt cl69 Mature Reptilian Flier

The problem IMHO is that as a MCH we NEED all this stuff to tame. I should at least have a chance of taming a CL 70 without it. Even if that chance is 1 out of 10. Right now you could tame until you were blue in the face, and not get a CL 70 without mods.

- No timer on the calls would be nice... but same rules should apply.

Not in combat

Again I think we need to think outside the box a little bit here. I don't see why we can't call up to our Max pet levels after we are attacked. Doesn't make sense to me. I agree that we shouldn't be able to pull one, send it in to attack and when it gets low on health, store it and pull another one, but there has to be a better way around this problem.

Not while mounted

Why?

Maybe change to 60sec timer on pvp duels and 15sec timer on pve for storing.

- Pet damage/skills needs a "Re-Do"

Shorten the damage range to make the pet hit a tad bit harder.

- A pet with 500+ damage should hit more than 180dmg.

-Increase the amount of damage on the triggered skills and have them stack.

- Beserk is a WASTE of a skill for an extra 20 points added onto the avg of 175dmg that most pets hit for.

I've only had 1 pet disappear in combat so far... and the new skill learning is pretty cool. Agree! I havent had the chance to try it yet, but I'm hoping that Precision Strike along with some state affects will help a pet land states on cl81+ easier. I'm happy with whats working... just a few things need to be ironed out.

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Message Edited by Thaumaturgist on 08-16-2005 09:45 AM

Message Edited by Thaumaturgist on 08-16-2005 09:46 AM

1. Creature speed in general, and pet speed in particular.

2. Pet pathing (to include players on autofollow)

3. Non-functioning pub 21 pet specials (tested last night with another MCH - fleet footed 2 does NOTHING to help a rep flier keep up with a mount, which is pathetic on two levels, see issue #1).

4. Continued investigation of the "I can't tame that" bug, to include it's varients: pets that freeze in the attack mode, pets that when you attempt to heal them give you the "you can't heal that its' not your pet" message. These seem to occur in specific geographical areas, probably associated with server boundaries, in my experience.

5. Modification of the calling delay system, to include storage after combat. This is a severe annoyance when you're in a group situation, other players are totally uninclined to wait for a CH to store a pet.