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Help with a Mastermind (Pet) build (new player)
gabrion2
Posts: 18 Arc User
Have looked at Champions Online a few times over the years, but just recently decided to give the game a fair try. The biggest attraction for me is that character builds are very customization, which I find to be all to rare in MMOs.
Of course this means I like theorycrafting and playing with builds, so I was glad when the community here pointed out that I could test level 40 builds on the Test Server. I've been playing with them for a few days and I "think" I have settled on trying to play a Pet focused build. I have a lot of questions that I will save for now, but first this main question I keep coming back to:
How do pets scale in this game (if at all)?
I've done several searches and the only relatively recent discussion I see is someone claiming that the stat that basically transfers from the main character to pets is critical hit. This leads me to several sub questions:
1) Is this true? If not, please explain (either refuting that crit affects pets and/or explaining what else might affect them)
2) If yes, does this apply both in regards to critical hit chance and critical damage (if I understand correctly, called severity in this game)?
3) What is the actual math? Is it as simple as each pet having the same crit chance/severity as the main character, or is it some sort of conversion?
4) Does this work for Stat Specializations (for instance Ego's Six Sense and Follow Through) or only crit rating from Dexterity?
Note: I am aware that certain powers and effects can impact Pets, for instance Aura of Ebon Destruction, but for now I am just asking about base scaling of the pets based on passive attributes of the main character (though if someone knows of a list of useful powers for buffing pets, that is welcome).
Thanks in advance for any help!
Of course this means I like theorycrafting and playing with builds, so I was glad when the community here pointed out that I could test level 40 builds on the Test Server. I've been playing with them for a few days and I "think" I have settled on trying to play a Pet focused build. I have a lot of questions that I will save for now, but first this main question I keep coming back to:
How do pets scale in this game (if at all)?
I've done several searches and the only relatively recent discussion I see is someone claiming that the stat that basically transfers from the main character to pets is critical hit. This leads me to several sub questions:
1) Is this true? If not, please explain (either refuting that crit affects pets and/or explaining what else might affect them)
2) If yes, does this apply both in regards to critical hit chance and critical damage (if I understand correctly, called severity in this game)?
3) What is the actual math? Is it as simple as each pet having the same crit chance/severity as the main character, or is it some sort of conversion?
4) Does this work for Stat Specializations (for instance Ego's Six Sense and Follow Through) or only crit rating from Dexterity?
Note: I am aware that certain powers and effects can impact Pets, for instance Aura of Ebon Destruction, but for now I am just asking about base scaling of the pets based on passive attributes of the main character (though if someone knows of a list of useful powers for buffing pets, that is welcome).
Thanks in advance for any help!
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https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/championsonline/#/discussion/250755/petco-a-pet-summon-math-reference
If you want a build, I gave some samples near the end of the guide (though they're a bit old), otherwise you can give more specifics here if you want a build made for you.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
I have done some of my own testing and was very uncertain about the crit/severity scaling since I had gotten my character crit up to about 40% but was not seeing 40% crit chance from pets. The part where you explain that they only scale by HALF the listed crit/severity makes a lot more sense based on what I was seeing.
One question still on the crit topic though. You say "Spec- or power-specific crit bonuses (like Slaughter for combos or Vindicator's single-target_AoE crit% options) do not affect pets directly," but I'm not 100% clear what this means. The specific examples make sense, but are you also saying that any crit bonus from specs don't apply? Examples:
-Sixth Sense and Follow Through from Ego. These are obviously passive benefits from spec, but they do affect the listed crit/severity for the character (unlike situational ones like the Slaughter example you gave)
-What about Twist Fate from Sentry? This is situational as it builds stacks from using energy builders, but the result is a listed flat crit bonus on the character sheet.
____
Unrelated to crit scaling, I have another question based on your comment that pets aren't good in high level content, specifically the bit about them dying too easily. Is this because there are not enough ways to mitigate damage done to them? From my limited reading so far it seems like blocking is a big part of this game and has a huge impact on incoming damage. I take it this is one reason pets can't survive so well - because they don't have a block mechanic? I also read a bit about various laying of damage mitigation that can take huge chunks of enemy damage (like 70k-100k spikes) and reduce them down to the point where 10-20k hp champions can survive. Again, is the issue here that no layering of damage mitigation for pets exists that can achieve this?
My tentative plan for keeping pets alive involved the following:
-Sigils of Ebon Weakness: From my brief testing, showed about 30% reduced damage done by enemies
-Redirect Force+Circle of Arcane Power: I list them together because so far I didn't find anything else that kept my energy up enough to be able to hold Redirect Force. Synergizes with the concept well though as standing in one spot and maintaining a defensive buff is fine if pets are meant to be doing the work.
-Inertial Dampening Field: Not sure I'm sold, but it does seem to fit. About 130 flat reduction from my short tests. Seems very low but a) hopefully this is after other reductions and b) It might not do much against huge spike damage, but maybe has an impact for frequent smaller attacks.
-Grasping Shadows (with consumption advantage): This is a weird one that I only came across by randomly testing. Not happy with the magnitude of heal auras and not wanting to have to do targeted healing, I was looking for options to simply heal allies. I read consumption's description and decided to give it a try. In did several things I didn't expect. 1) It seemed to apply a HoT that lasted the same duration as the power when I was expecting just a burst heal on initial cast. 2) The heal was substantially more powerful than I expected - doing about 1k per enemy hit per tick. 3) Because it seems to be a group HoT, it would fit with the strategy above of just refreshing sigils and this spell, then holding redirect force.
At the end of the day though, all my pets will still just evaporate in burst damage no matter what I do?
Anything that affects the char sheet crit can boost pets, though in the case of Twist Fate- because its applied mid-fight your pet's stats may not update to suit it (unless maybe you re-summoned them).
IDF scales pretty poorly. Its more for protecting allies/pets from trash dmg when solo or in Alerts, but over a normal toggle I normally wouldn't take it (even if a toggle's dmg_heal bonus doesn't affect pets, ur own performance and energy gains get boosted).
Redirect Force is more of a general support thing to conditionally protect allies preemptively. In most content ur prob better off doing other things w/ your time. If making a dps pet build, then your own dmg can/should still be a very significant factor.
CoEW and Grasping Shadows are okay. I don't consider charged holds to be great (weak-to-no dps, and holds can break to inc dmg easily), but GS does have some pretty nice special adv healing, and holds can proc spec-specific debuffs like Wither, Vulnerability, Sentinel Mastery, and/or Trapped.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
Taking this a step further, when combining the scaling factors listed in your Petco thread and the snapshotting feature, it seems like a summoner could get creative in terms of power choices and gear for the moment of summoning, then adjusting for actual play. For instance AoPM might be worth it to have on when actually summoning the pet, even if AoED will actually be used for combat.
For gear, this could manifest itself by having a totally different gear set for the act of summoning vs what is actually worn in combat. I don't pretend to understand gear at this point, but I assume prioritizing SS, crit, and severity at the exclusion of anything else would normally be a trade off (especially when giving up relevant things like healing power if you want to be healing your pets). In this case though, the summoner could actually have gear that only focuses on SS, crit, and severity since that's what scales (all damage power, crit/severity, and HP from SS), then switch to a more "balanced" gear set for active play.
Temporary buffs also take on a new dimension when considering they could be used just to buff up for the act of snapshotting summons.
This makes things like Ego Surge with Nimble Mind advantage pretty attractive.Imbue from Celestial is the best option I've seen so far here. I thought initially that Master of the Mind would be the best for this purpose, but looks like however it goes about granting crit chance, it doesn't actually show up on the character sheet.Of course all of this said, using a snapshotting method actually doubles down on one of the problems you identified - pets dying. I figured it was more for mitigating trash damage than anything. Considering the snapshotting discussion above may require picking up a few powers I hadn't initially thought would be worthwhile, this will probably be the first to go. I will have to consider this. The "better off doing other things with your time" argument is compelling. On the other hand, if I put a lot of effort into snapshotting it becomes even more important to keep pets alive. I will probably play around with it and see if I feel like it deserves a slot. I should have said that in my (very basic) testing, I never considered the CC component of the power. Just the fact that the advantage seemed to offer a very good team wide HoT. Unless I'm mistaken, the HoT lasted for the full duration of the power, whether or not the CC was broken (or even applied). I have to test more to really understand the mechanic, but if true, it seems like a good healing option.
I may also be wrong about Twist Fate in that perm pets may update with it in combat, but given the smaller crit effects on them its harder to tell, and energy building isn't ideal (as you said), nor is Sentry an ideal dps spec. So even if it worked I'm not sure I'd bother with it. As for other effects, pets do dynamically check for auras when applied to them like any player unit would (so if you swap auras then so will they, after a delay), and since most of a pet's stats don't scale with yours I don't think sectioning off a set of gear will work that well (even if the snapshot premise was true, which I don't think it is for all stats or sources- but I haven't heavily tested that in particular).
Pets can survive just fine in lower content. They may die to Alert-level stuff pretty quickly if focused, but there you have to choose on your build's focus and pick you aura passive accordingly (dps = AoED, defensive = Med Nanites or AoRP, versatile = AoPM, etc). Ofc, you and other allies can heal them as well; again, just depends on the build and content. You'll prob re-focus your build as you get more experience naturally, and that's fine.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
In theory from my experiences, it's best to limit to yourself to a few regular temporary summons, maybe one perma-summon, and fire and forget device pets. Then have the rest of your build devoted to healing and buffing them.
I generally go with Aura of Radiant Protection, Lifedrain with the AoE healing advantage, iniquity, compassion, and piles and piles of zombies and other humanoid pets.
With most alerts other than whatshisface the hard one, so long as I hang back and don't let myself take the damage, oftentimes between the initial wave of pets and other characters playing the game normally with normal builds, I actually don't have enough time to summon my entire arsenal for a fight.
So yeah, ultimately, you're squishy, your pets are squishy, but you can mitigate that for 99% of everything in the game, and for everything else, grab a tanky bugalug, because you need a meatshield.
Only pet that really seems semi-tanky if you're like me and have no friends afaik is the greyish golem one, tyrannon's familiar, and he's... alright.
@vorshoth Thank you for your reply as well.
.. And a quick test in the PH shows me that it does work like that (for both the aura swap and gear de-equip; pet's HP changed/dropped when they took any action like simply moving around), so I'm afraid the snapshot strat prob won't work out.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
Though I did some messing around with gear and am beginning to realize that the limited crit scaling is really a huge drag when it comes to using that to try to increase pet dps. I'm fairly new, so I'm sure someone could do better, but I reached 72% crit rating with 98% crit severity (numbers actually shown on the character sheet). So then I did the math to see how this would actually impact pet base damage. Since each rating is cut in half for pets (this btw I did do one test, only 100 pet attacks, but was consistent with the one half figure), this means pets have a 36% chance to do 49% extra damage on an attack.
.36*1.49+.64=1.1764
So all that effort into raising crit only produces 17.64% extra damage compared to a pet with 0% crit rating.
Of course this doesnt account for AoED procs, which probably stands on its own as a reason to get pet crit rating up (though severity doesn't seem to matter in that case).
Also, its a bit more technical (cause of Cryptic Math), but the crit layer doesn't translate directly to extra dmg that simply. CO uses multiple damage layers, and Offense rating is also in the same layer as severity/crit (meaning crit dmg doesn't get multiplied into the %dmg offense gives, but is just additive with it). It prob won't end up changing the effect on final dmg by that much, but its worth clarifying. You can find out a bit more of CO's dmg algorithm here, if ur interested:
https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/championsonline#/discussion/251612/damage-bonus-layers
It gets complicated, though, so I wouldn't worry too much about it at this stage.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
____
Diverging a bit, since you've been so helpful, I have a more general question. I'm trying to get ACT up and running and am wondering how to interpret DPS numbers. Can you give a few baselines?
1) What would you consider low DPS for a 40, but high enough that they are still not struggling in fairly easy content (or a number that means "your build is gimp, but not so bad that you will find the game unplayable")?
2) DPS that wouldn't be shameful in a group, but wouldn't stand out either?
3) DPS that will often put you at the front of the pack in a group, but not necessarily by a wide margin?
4) Top tier DPS that only the best players with the best gear and ultra minmaxed builds are achieving?
Thanks again.
Top-line dps is in the range of 5-6k+ sustained, afaik, and depending on the build (even 7-9k could be broken w/ some melee specs or 3-slot PA). I'd say aiming for 2-3k sustained is fine for starters in easier content, though. Gear impacts that a bit, and there's only so much you can do w/ fresh lvl 38-40 gear and cheap mid-rank mods.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!