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There has been a lot of discussion regarding this Patch Note:
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Pet Powers Change:
o Recharge times on pet attack powers will no longer be affected by any outside source. This includes buffs and debuffs. What this means is that pets can no longer have the recharge time on their powers increased by player buffs (like Speed Boost) or their recharge time decreased by player or NPC debuffs. This change was made to allow pets to correctly cycle through their attacks instead of getting locked on using the same attack over and over and neglecting to use other available powers.
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I wanted to take some time to more fully explain the change and the reasons behind it.
The CopyCreatorMods (or Pet Inheritance) code was originally written so that things like hitting "Build Up" then casting "Burn" would cause the Burn to do more damage. To my knowledge, most pet powers were set to only accept Damage, Accuracy and/or Status Effect mods. Recharge time was never specifically allowed for pet powers. This happened in Issue 7.
Meanwhile, we have a long standing 'bug' that we cannot fix: Say you have a Damage power that for whatever reason doesn't allow Endurance Reduction. If you slot an enhancement (say, a Hammi-O) which does both, both effects are applied to the power, despite the fact that the power is not supposed to accept Endurance Reduction. We pretty much have let that become "by design" since it cannot be fixed.
Now, you combine the two things...and suddenly, pet powers which were never meant to have recharge be altered (Lightning Storm is a great example here) are firing off much faster than intended. For a long time, we didn't notice, but then we introduced the Recharge Intensive Pet IO Sets and suddenly HUGE amounts of Recharge were available to certain pets.
We tried a few alternatives, which essentially ended up making RIP IO's broken for several months in a variety of ways. One day, while discussing this, another programmer who was looking at AI issues came over and began talking to me about the fact that one of the issues causing aberrant AI behavior was the powers recharging too quickly. Again, we tried some things, but ultimately, the change that is on the Training Room now ended up being the only viable fix. The alternative, as I understand it, would be to fix that long standing bug I said we couldnt fix. That would result in up to a 50% increase in server CPU time in the Powers computations, though and that simply isn't a workable solution.
So, thats the background. There is no other solution that we are currently able to implement at this time.
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I hate to say this and sound like a complete jerk, then why change it..... The player base appreantly has never seem to notice it and like it the way it is currently running. Why change it now. This seems almost as bad as the first pet nerf saying "oh we never meant for people to have multiple pets out at once" dispite the very last patch update before the nerf they made earths pets recharge more inline with the rest of the pets out there.
