Speed Boosted Pets

Six of our coalition and allies did a Moonfire WST last night. Our team composition was a bit unusual, not your atypical healer/tank/damage holy trinity. Kinetic defender, ice/kin troller, earth/kin troller, Dark/DP defender, Energy blaster, and a super buffed tanker.

In short we had a lot of transfusion, siphon power, fulcrum shift, speed boost and increase density. What really amazed me was the change in AI in the boosted pets even though their powers didn't recharge faster.

In my own personal experience, I know what slows do to foe NPC AI. They go to great lengths trying to escape tar patch, glue arrow, or caltrops. There is animation time in their powers and recharge time, but also, npc foes take time to get in position. Certain spawns like to run into your team's position, others are melee power users. If they are slow, even if they have a power recharged their time to setup an attack is often delayed as well.

Rocky was my pet, and he was quick to battle. Jack Frost was simply breathtaking, zipping to snipers and one shotting them with fulcrum shifted ice sword attacks. Dark Servant was literally a fuzzy blur. I realize the fact that damage was amped up that we went through spawns very fast, but the pets performance to me was unprecedented. The added speed of the pets between attacks was pronounced.

So have others found this kind of experience in trials or other support heavy teaming? In the past, certain ATs, stone tankers, are not shy about asking for kinetics on the team. Is this another paradigm where controllers, dark defenders, masterminds would be more assertive in teaming with kinetics?

Took a while to find it but got this from ParagonWiki

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Patch_Notes/2009-04-08

• Pet Powers Change:
  • 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.

I love it when Kins speed boost my zombies. Since they like to melee and switch targets, they get to where they're going quickly. This also means that after grabbing agro, they quickly run out of range forcing the mobs to run around chasing them and the mobs wind up doing a poor job keeping up with them since they're so fast.

To my knowledge, mastermind pets will still do that on occasion. Not being affected by recharge might've made it happen less often but there's still something wonky with pet AI in this game.

IIRC I think the set that was hit the hardest by the pet recharge change was storm. Lightning Storm in ultra-high recharge builds was a sight to see, especially since Hasten carries over to the pet.

Fire/kin was never really about the imps. It's fulcrum shifted hot feet + cages that does the majority of the damage, since containment effectively doubles your damage cap.

What is weird about the whole +Recharge not affecting pets thing is that they are not immune to -Recharge. If Recharge really did affect their scripts, then it probably still does.