[power change suggestion] Ebon ruin's "pet"

lightsauce

Hello everyone, for this thread i'm gonna speak my mind for what i feel right, for everyone who use it.
which is the pet from Ebon ruin.

Alright! as you guys probably would know if you run cosmic, that the pet's is LITERALLY bane of all cosmic team(and maybe TA but idk)
and that is include the one from Ebon ruin, which the problem is, it attack that is not suppose to, hogging the buff so certain heroes and
it has it own entity/collision that melee hero having hard time hitting that 10ft range or even worse.....it will force move the cosmic....

So that's my experience with it and using it, and i guess everyone else too.

NOW! what i'm gonna suggestions for this "pet" in particular that the problem it have would not matter no more!

1. The ebon ruin that summon should now be an object type rather being a pet type and for that it would probably be a "small floating black orb"
   
   
2. For statistic, it should be the same hp, dmg and healing, but being as an object, it cant move nor use Lunge, but for it should have one attack that heals at the range of 100ft or less.
   
   
3. Make it non-Collision, this is important the one since it wouldn't make the cosmic's move unintended and melee have slightly more room to hit their mark!
   
   
4. The orb should not get buff in [Team-up!]? thats it i guess.
   
   
5. And last one the at most Important! the Orb should have a reinforced it AI so it target the same one that the user targeted on!!
   

and well that is it for my suggestions for that one pesky pet that is Shadowling...if that its name, heh.
let me know if you like this idea and if you want it change for the better, for all darkness or non-darkness build user!

spinnytop

could just make it a 1 pt advantage, that way people can keep it at the top of their retcon list and remove it when they go to do cosmics.

lightsauce

spinnytop said:

could just make it a 1 pt advantage, that way people can keep it at the top of their retcon list and remove it when they go to do cosmics.

that is quite good suggestion you made, but my suggestion still stand and i don't want to see things that is in the description
of certain power got move to a advantage unless it is justify, "if" it happen, then it will lose the mechanic to summon to attack and heal the user, a nerf for say.

it's either the hard route or the easy route, im fine with either one.

pantagruel01

It could be made into a pseudo-pet like ball lightning and fire snake -- no collision, invalid target (so doesn't consume buffs and heals). Also usefully normalizes the damage because it doesn't get killed by boss AoEs.

spinnytop

pantagruel01 said:

It could be made into a pseudo-pet like ball lightning and fire snake -- no collision, invalid target (so doesn't consume buffs and heals). Also usefully normalizes the damage because it doesn't get killed by boss AoEs.

I thought people have said they've seen ball lightning floating over to hearts? Is that just people going nuts and making stuff up again?

Say here's a thought:

How about instead of doing something that requires all sorts of fancy rekajiggering and assets and what not, just have Ebon Ruin instead produce an Ebon Rift or Soul Vortex effect on the target that deals the same damage and healing as the pet would and is just stationary? We don't see that Ebon Rift effect enough so I vote for that.

pantagruel01

spinnytop said:

I thought people have said they've seen ball lightning floating over to hearts? Is that just people going nuts and making stuff up again?

I don't think I've seen ball lightning go rogue except after its target dies, and who cares in that case. The bigger risk (and why I won't use it near the ape) is that it starts near you and flies over to the ape, and as it flies it fires off an AoE every second, and of course if a heart is too close to the ape you can get arcing and what not.

spinnytop said:

How about instead of doing something that requires all sorts of fancy rekajiggering and assets and what not, just have Ebon Ruin instead produce an Ebon Rift or Soul Vortex effect on the target that deals the same damage and healing as the pet would and is just stationary? We don't see that Ebon Rift effect enough so I vote for that.

The only rejiggering required is animation, and maybe not even that -- you might be able to use the existing model. The list of incorporeal mobile pseudopets I can think of is:

• Ball Lightning
  
• Fire Snake
  
• Dust Devil
  
• Orbital Cannon/Anvil of Dawn
  
• Collective Will (note that this seems to use a normal character model. It also has no default target and thus pretty much inevitably goes rogue).
  
• Soul Vortex
  

lightsauce

Yes and YES! and either Soul Vortex or Ebon rift is the perfect candidate for the Ebon ruin!

dakrushmor

l support this. No DPS power should produce uncontrollable entities by default, that's just silly.

aesica

pantagruel01 said:

It could be made into a pseudo-pet like ball lightning and fire snake -- no collision, invalid target (so doesn't consume buffs and heals). Also usefully normalizes the damage because it doesn't get killed by boss AoEs.

No, this might make it useful for giant animal slayers, but as an on-demand pet, it also has uses that many of these proposed changes would totally strip away. I find it very useful during solo play against things that excessively abuse knocks and stuns, like the nightmare invasion portal packs. In particular, the poor shadow will soak up a lot of the annoying chain yanks, stuns, and other garbage. The healing is actually pretty good as well, especially if you get it rolling on several targets since you can pop out one shadow per target. To someone without big epeen gear, this can mean the difference between being able to clear tough things and getting faceplanted in the pavement.

All that really needs to be done is to make the shadow summon component an advantage. That way, giant animal killers can have their straightforward single target spam ability, but everyone else can have something with a highly useful secondary utility effect. Whether it's a 1 point or 2 point advantage really doesn't matter, just as long as it summons with what's currently Rank 3's probability: 100% chance to summon on a full charge.

lightsauce

aesica said:

All that really needs to be done is to make the shadow summon component an advantage. That way, giant animal killers can have their straightforward single target spam ability, but everyone else can have something with a highly useful secondary utility effect. Whether it's a 1 point or 2 point advantage really doesn't matter, just as long as it summons with what's currently Rank 3's probability: 100% chance to summon on a full charge.

Isn't that the same with what spinnytop suggest?
Which albeit is still a nerf, my point is that the shadow pet can do all the thing beneficial except being a "pet" so that ebon ruin can be useable in all content for the game without anyone complain, either the pet can be small orb, tiny rift or skinny looking vortex, small enough to do single target(and no collision).

bluhman

Making the pet an advantage is probably what would work best for player experience, but I don't know how many more advantages they can pile up on one power without it breaking somehow.

I'd much rather have it generate an explosion randomly that does the damage of one Shadow hit to a single target rather than summon a shady idiot that goes off and slaps a dog when it spawns right next to super ice god. Hell, just make it marginally more damaging in exchange for the pet, if I want shadows, I'll take the shadows ability.

Other acceptable and simple fixes:

• Shadow is immobile and intangible, like a hydra
  
• Change the chance of summoning to 0%-50% on charge rates.
  
• Have it only trigger if target's affected by Psychotic Break or some other darkness debuff
  

aesica

bluhman said:

Making the pet an advantage is probably what would work best for player experience, but I don't know how many more advantages they can pile up on one power without it breaking somehow.

The most I've seen is around 9 or so. Shuriken Toss is utterly loaded with random weird advantages.

lightsauce said:

Isn't that the same with what spinnytop suggest?

Which albeit is still a nerf, my point is that the shadow pet can do all the thing beneficial except being a "pet" so that ebon ruin can be useable in all content for the game without anyone complain, either the pet can be small orb, tiny rift or skinny looking vortex, small enough to do single target(and no collision).

I believe spinny's suggestion was more along the lines of making it intangible or something. I get how that'd be good for giant animal slaying, but in other content, I find it very useful to have it be attackable. Things that randomly toss out single-target stuns or knocks will sometimes pick a pet over me, and I'm quite okay with that.

As I think about it, this might actually be the best way to go about this:

1) Remove the shadow summon component from the baseline ability and replace it with a damage over time effect with damage and healing values similar to what ER's shadow pet contributes currently.

2) Add a 1 point advantage that replaces the dot mentioned above with the shadow pet as per ER's current behavior.

3) Buff the pet's stats (health, damage, damage resistance) a bit. Enough to compensate for the fact that the player will be giving up Nyctophobia's damage bonus. (R2/R3/Nyctophobia vs R2/R3/Shadow)

That's it. This is probably the best way to solve this problem in a way that isn't nerfing anybody.

lightsauce

Yeah, intangible, that's the word i am looking when i meant "non-collision"

anyways Aesica, your 3 suggestions is pretty good!

soulforger

I really like all these suggestions over all, lets hope the devs pick something up from this.

spinnytop

aesica said:

I believe spinny's suggestion was more along the lines of making it intangible or something.

My suggestion was to make it a 1 pt advantage.

spinnytop said:

could just make it a 1 pt advantage, that way people can keep it at the top of their retcon list and remove it when they go to do cosmics.