Fixes for Lore

Praetorians aside, a lot of people don't like Lore. They think it sucks. This is justified. Let's look at some things that could be done to help it out.

Reduce the recharge. The number one thing. 15 minutes, non-reduceable is ridiculous! Seriously! Drop it down hard, to around 7 minutes. This is roughly the recharge you'd have for a patron pet fully slotted for recharge plus some global recharge buffs as well. This puts it at a greater than 50% percent of uptime, which also improves the feel of the power. If it's helping you more than half the time, it seems a lot more worthwhile.

Buff the support pets. These things are weak. The extra damage you get from upgrading to a Boss pet in the Core branches far outweighs the survival benefits of grabbing a support pet from the Radial branches, plus those bosses with their high damage and Boss HP can take a hit, which allows them to also help survivability. The heals should be changed to heal a percentage of HP, instead of a flat amount; I would probably have them be equal to the strength they're at now when used on a target with 1000 max HP. That would make them equally useful on, say, Tankers as on Masterminds. Second, the buffs to defense and the heal amount should increase as the rarity of the power increases. This should be as simple to implement as giving the pets an auto-power that power boosts these effects in the summoning powers.

Reduce the damage of the boss pets. "Heresy!" I hear you say, "This was supposed to be a thread about buffing Lore!" Hear me out. The boss pets are really the only compelling reason to take Lore. In fact, they're a little too strong. The damage is nice at base, but then players start throwing damage buffs on them and they quickly get insane. What I would do is reduce the base damage of the Boss pets' attacks by half. Then, give them an auto power that gives them a 100% damage buff (150% for the boss pet in Core Superior). This makes the Boss pets' damage the same out of the box, but makes them less ridiculous when damage buffs start getting applied.

EDIT: In fact, the boss pets should probably also just have a general damage reduction. They're so ridiculously strong that if we want to have the pets up more often they'll pretty much have to get nerfed. I think it'd be worth it.

Make pets not die with you. This is a big problem on my squishies with Lore pets. I summon them, and then a boss steps on me. Oh well, that's that casting wasted. Maybe I'll have better luck in 14 minutes. No fun! I know it's technically possible for pets to stay alive when their owner dies, but there would need to be work done so they behave right without you around and attach to you properly when you come back. Still, these are special pets and the convenience would be worth it.

Make the Radial Superior support pet able to attack. Right now, your choices for Radial rares make the support pet either invincible, or able to attack. When you go up to Very Rare with Radial, your only option is an invincible support pet, no option for an attack-capable one. Why can't we have both? There's already an invincible, untargetable pet that transfers aggro to its owner in the game (good ol' Voltaic Sentinel), so why can't these pets do it too? It's not like it would step on the toes of the Core Superior variety of pets, since those pets have inherent damage buffs.

Individual pet fixes. The Clockwork Dismantler's Anti-Matter beam has a very long, 30s recharge because it's actually a tiny cone like Piercing Rounds or Head Splitter. However, as an NPC it's far too moronic to actually use it as such, so it should get a break on the recharge costs of AoEs.

The Clockwork Dismantler's Particle Burst power works really weird. It grants a power to the target and has the target attack itself and enemies around it with said power. This makes it leech XP, do much less damage than the Dismantler's other attacks, and fail to do anything at all if the target dies before the attack "hits."

The Battle Orb should have its Shield Generator on ALL THE TIME if it's going to be so appallingly weak.

The Battle Orb's Deploy Stimulant should give high amounts of mez resistance if it's only going to last 5 seconds, because it'd be much more useful in the long run that way.

My only comment is to give more time. We only had these for a relatively short period and thus not a tremendous amount of experience with this or any of the new powers.

Plus the devs might have a clue about the next bit of content all the way up to Omega. And the powers now maybe built around that future content. Once we see how all the powers fit, then we can see what doesn't work.

Lore doesn't work well now, and that's what's important.

Without even considering the limited choice of pet selection I'd have to agree the current recharge scheme of the Lore pets makes them far less desirable than just about every other Incarnate ability so far.

I understand that they would probably be too powerful if they were able to be permanent. But by the same token they seem to be almost semi-useless for anything other than fighting AVs while soloing. Their use even in the current Incarnate trials is dubious at best - when you've got 16 or 24 Incarnates hopped up with Judgement, Interface and Destiny buffs throwing a few more pets into the mix is hardly "necessary" to ensure success.

I guess the Devs are worried about giving us powerful pets that are up too much of the time. That's a legitimate concern. But at this point I'd almost rather have WEAKER Lore pets overall if it meant we could use them more often. Hopefully the Devs will get some meaningful feedback and adjust these things accordingly.

I don't agree with giving them more uptime. The pets are giving you a short burst of damage and/or survivability which is fine(though I agree their buffs/heals could be better). If you reduce the recharge you'll end up with pets being a part of your character instead of a situational thing, which will be bad for people who dislike the RP aspects of the pets.

I use the pets for those situational AV fights and they're awesome. I wouldn't want their current roles reversed to a "summon every time they're available" thing, and I would especially not want their current burst DPS role nerfed.

The individual changes for pets, I'd say yes, give them a good going over and fix what's needed on a case by case basis.

I don't agree with reducing the recharge, except potentially on the first-tier pets. Personally, I'm of the opinion that a lot of what we're seeing is a bit over the top in non-Incarnate content. My Earth/FF is decimating spawns in "normal" content - which makes me uneasy when looking at the rest of the game.

Actually, if we can have Incarnate arcs "flagged" much like the PVP zones are (no, not DR and such, just where powers can behave differently,) I'd be fine with said buff lowering recharge (etc.) inside that content while keeping them at current recharge for non-Incarnate content. The "Incarnate mission buff" would make the pets and any other powers that *should* be strong enough to deal with Incarnate things properly powerful in those instances, and still strong (but less so and less ridiculously) in non-Incarnate areas.

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Okay doing this one at a time...

Reduce the damage of the boss pets. I agree let's look at around an 8 minute recharge time. I base this on the Arachnos Blaster Pet I got with my Crab Spider as an Patron Power. That's often enough so that after summoning and being able to use it for .. (what was it 5 minutes if I recall ?) you have a relatively short wait before having access again. Similar to what you seen now on normal pets like Phantom Army, Sigularities, Etc unless they are enhanced for faster recovery.

Buff the support pets. I'm sort of 50/50 with you on this one. I understand not wanting to see the pet you just summoned die ten seconds later but this is a risk with any pet. I have MM that no sooner rez their pets and attack an AV and POW.. all three of the lower level minons are history! As for doubling the heal I am for that but wonder if the Devs will be.. They are already giving us a buff in Destiny that in some cases also heals and a debuff in Interface. Add in the buff and present heals available from Lore and they may take the stance that increasing Lore's heal would make us all TOO powerful. Personally I'll take all the power I can get but knowing a bit about their thought patterns I don't know if they will ever do that.

Reduce the damage of the boss pets. "Heresy!" LOL Sorry I want all the damage I can get.

Make pets not die with you. now bon't take this the wrong way but aside from Gang War pets that Thug MMs get I don't know of any pet off hand that doesn't die when it's master does. Seriously doubt you will ever get them to consider this.. It would sort of be like a Blaster asking to have powers that would still fire off and do damage while they were face down smelling carpet.

Make the Radial Superior support pet able to attack I don't see any problem with this it's just a matter of getting the Devs to adopt the idea. /signed

i think the buff pets do need to be buff'd the buff they give is quite small for the time we have them.

the only problem i have with the lore pets is the god awful recharge

10 min downtime makes it feel like i hardly ever get to use it and they never feel like they are around for very long

because of that awful downtime i get to use it maybe 2 times at most during a trial anyway

the points being brought up about them dying with you and the pets themselves dying in tough fights, also makes them a lot less worthwhile

i personally would like to see it perma or nearly perma or do like they did with destiny and increase the pet uptime with higher tiers (my reasoning is that as you get a higher tier you are mastering the incarnate power), so for the tier 1 can leave it 5 min uptime/15 min rech, but tier 4 pets should have like 10-15 min uptime/15 min rech

so i vote either reduce the rech across the board or scale the uptime based on the tier so you can nearly perma anyway even with 15 min rech

Personally I think the recharge is fine for the lore pets. I don't want them out all of the time so a long recharge damage bonus is fine to me.

I do agree that some of the specific pets need tweaking.

Additionally I think that the Partial Radial boost needs a major change. In theory it should offer better support than the Partial Core at the cost of damage while offering better damage than the Total Radial at the cost of support. However the way it is setup makes it a worse choice than the Partial Core.

Here's are the T3s for Lore:
Total Core: Boss and Lt.
Partial Core: Boss and Basic Support
Partial Radial: Lt. and Support with Attack
Total Radial: Lt. and Invulnerable Support

Ok, comparing the Partial Radial and the Total Radial they are reasonably balanced, your support pet trades invulnerability for an extra attack. So you risk losing them earlier but get more damage.

However comparing the Partial Core and Partial Radial we see a problem. The Partial Core has more damage than the Partial Radial (the Boss out-damages the Lt + Support Attack) but the support provided by the Partial Core is equal to the Partial Radial if not better (since the support pet isn't attacking ti's less likely to get attacked in turn) plus the Boss is tougher than the Lt.

If we went with my idea of having the increased rarity support pets get self-power boost to def buff and heal, it could be fixed by giving the Partial Radial the T4 level of boost instead of the T3 level.

If they are weak and useless buff them. No power should require another power to be effective. A power can become more effective via another power but should not rely on it. No matter what omega and the other inc slots turn out to be it still means that a lot of people are going to have to "deal" with a useless power until they get a higher tier inc slot.

I don't know any 8 year olds that buy a breathalyzer so they can use it when they turn 21 to see how drunk they are.