A (Mostly) Comprehensive Compendium of Lore Pet Performance
By
Beelzy,
Posted on: 2012-05-01 16:09 in Player Guides
Very nice. Thanks for the investment in time this had to represent.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Very cool 
I'm glad Polar Lights are at the top for AoE goodness!
I can now point people to this if they laugh at my Polar Lights' pets...(they all said, "lulz" to them before 
)
Edit:
Oh and yes, ty for the time it took to do this!
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Have you PMed Synapse and Hawk about this yet?
Kinda surprised at Drones being lower in AOE. Perma Fortitude on Seers is nice though.
Another thing I find weird, is that given how short Lore pets last, why some of them have leadership powers that they turn off every few seconds. They should be toggled on permanently IMO.
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I thought Drones do really significant -Regen as well?
-50% per attack. That's a lot to a non-AV/GM critter, but pretty modest otherwise, at least vs. 50+ critters, where ~85% resists are typical. I doubt they stack it very high given their attack rates.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
I still like Robotic Drones on my Scrapper for their burst damage. They do a great job in the breakout phase of BAF and take out 2-3 foes per mob in regular standard diff missions.
Excellent info and write up!
An important consideration that I haven't yet seen addressed is survivability. While I haven't done any hardcore testing, I have picked up quite a few different lore pets on characters based either on theme or to shore up perceived holes in my characters. For example, I might want a buffer to get me to the defense soft-cap (or beyond to account for debuffs), or I might want additional AOE, -regen, whatever. I have found that my playstyle on a certain character can make a huge difference in lore pet survival.
Warworks is a great all around set. While it may not have as much ST or AoE as others, Vicky's burst from hidden crits is just incredible. She is also incredibly sturdy. Her ACU partner does -regen and has some AoE from his spammed full auto, but he is much squishier than his sister, Vicky. But with taunt and destiny rebirth I can get a lot of mileage on him.
If you are into hover-blasting, the drones and polar lights are fantastic. The drones have the longest range of any lore pet and the polar lights are like having a pair of kheldians in Nova form as wingmen. If you can stay at range these babies can last their entire cycle and the KB on the lights helps to ensure that no one will get close. But on my traps defender, who likes to sneak up and toe-bomb mobs, the drones, while thematic, can sometimes be a hindrance as they start shooting before I get close to dropping my gifts.
The seers, while generally pretty crappy, are great for AVs that have unstoppable or a similar god mode like Reichsman, Statesman, and Marauder, as their psy based attacks aren't resisted. Honorable mention and a better all around choice to the Rikti Mesmerist.
50s: Inv/SS PB Emp/Dark Grav/FF DM/Regen TA/A Sonic/Elec MA/Regen Fire/Kin Sonic/Rad Ice/Kin Crab Fire/Cold NW Merc/Dark Emp/Sonic Rad/Psy Emp/Ice WP/DB FA/SM
Overlord of Dream Team and Nightmare Squad
Quote:
I thought about trying to address survivability, but I gave it up as a bad job, because it's going to depend *way* too much on playstyle to be meaningful. But yeah, it's something to consider. Like, I took Phantoms on my Claws/Fire originally for the AB, and it's extremely rare for either of them to survive the full duration. I need to upgrade them to Radial Superior so that I'm at least guaranteed AB more often.|
Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea
Excellent info and write up!
An important consideration that I haven't yet seen addressed is survivability. While I haven't done any hardcore testing, I have picked up quite a few different lore pets on characters based either on theme or to shore up perceived holes in my characters. For example, I might want a buffer to get me to the defense soft-cap (or beyond to account for debuffs), or I might want additional AOE, -regen, whatever. I have found that my playstyle on a certain character can make a huge difference in lore pet survival. Warworks is a great all around set. While it may not have as much ST or AoE as others, Vicky's burst from hidden crits is just incredible. She is also incredibly sturdy. Her ACU partner does -regen and has some AoE from his spammed full auto, but he is much squishier than his sister, Vicky. But with taunt and destiny rebirth I can get a lot of mileage on him. If you are into hover-blasting, the drones and polar lights are fantastic. The drones have the longest range of any lore pet and the polar lights are like having a pair of kheldians in Nova form as wingmen. If you can stay at range these babies can last their entire cycle and the KB on the lights helps to ensure that no one will get close. But on my traps defender, who likes to sneak up and toe-bomb mobs, the drones, while thematic, can sometimes be a hindrance as they start shooting before I get close to dropping my gifts. The seers, while generally pretty crappy, are great for AVs that have unstoppable or a similar god mode like Reichsman, Statesman, and Marauder, as their psy based attacks aren't resisted. Honorable mention and a better all around choice to the Rikti Mesmerist. |
As far as PsiDPS for Marauder, etc, you also need to give props to Carnies, since the boss is using Psi Tornado and Mental Blast, and scored quite well on the ST chart.
Quote:
| Kinda surprised at Drones being lower in AOE. |
If you wanted to micro-manage your Lore pets, it's possible to force the Drones to use their cones intelligently, but playing as a Brute and simply dragging them around on Aggressive, they end up wasting the cones on single targets half the time, because they're using narrow cones from point blank.
As Flea sort of mentions, that changes if you're on a Blaster, since Lore pets on Aggressive will attack when you do. So if you're launching attacks from range, then so are the Drones. The further away from the spawn your pets are, the more likely they are to hit multiple targets with a cone.
Thanks for taking the time to test all of this and write it up in a very precise way.
Oh, out of intrest, what type of damage do each of them do and do they have any exotic types? Might help people choose.
A bit of thread necromancy, I know, but I thought that I should add that this information has been added to the Paragon Wiki to supplant the more outdated information that Darth Otiosus had gathered previously (due credit is given of course).
Thought folks might like to know.
For control, you forgot to mention the -end on Storm, which can be quite formidable in taking away enemies' ability to attack. Especially if you have any minor -end effect in your build.
The Preamble
This guide is intended to be a performance-based attempt to answer the popular question Which Lore pets should I take?
Before we begin, a major credit is due to Deus Otiosus for the initial Lore DPS analysis that I've been using as a reference. The intial impetus for my own testing came about when I linked that thread in answer to a question in the AT&Powers forum and Arbiter Hawk posted to say that he had done a couple of balance adjustments, and Deus' numbers might be out of date. I decided to expand the project after reviewing the thread and noting that some people had tried to do analysis of the AoE performance of the various Lore pets, but no solid conclusions had been reached.
The Method
I could make this really easy on myself and just link you the spreadsheet, but I want to talk for a minute first about the setup I used to obtain the results, since data without method is suspect.
My testing character was my Claws/Fire farming brute, since I already had him on Beta for some other testing. For the majority of the tests, the only Incarnate power he had equipped was the relevant Core Superior Lore pet and a Musculature Total Core Revamp. Judgement and Interface were left unslotted for all tests. Destiny was unslotted for almost all tests, I'll note the one exception later in the guide.
For single-target dps testing, I used the ever popular Rikti Pylons in RWZ. I engaged the pylon solo with Taunt set to auto, then dropped the pets off to the side and started the timer. If the pets were able to defeat the pylon unaided, I noted the kill time, otherwise I noted the Pylon's HP remaining at the 5 minute mark. The formula used to calculate DPS from that is ((30677-HP)/0.80)/(Time in Sec)+127. For the non-math types, that's basically the HP lost divided by 80% to account for the Pylon's 20% resistance to all types, divided by how many seconds it took. 127 is the base DPS required to beat the Pylon's regeneration.
For AoE testing I considered a few different approaches, and opted for the simplest one I could think of that promised vaguely accurate results. I set up a custom AE map, densely populated with Council Empire (they clump nicely for AoE, and they have zero resistances/defenses). I set the map to 0x5, bosses enabled, and turned the pets loose on them. I used a couple of Team/Dual Def/Res insps on each run to eliminate concerns about survivability, and I unslotted Blazing Aura and left it running to keep the mobs from simply scattering to the winds. For the actual test value, I used my Influence stash, and calculated how much Inf the pets could earn me before they died off.
The Data
Full Results can be viewed at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...0eE9odEE#gid=0
It's not the prettiest spreadsheet ever, but I know some of you want to see the whole of the data collected. For those of you that just want some lists and conclusions, feel free to skip that one.
The Charts
Single-Target DPS (aka Pylon DPS)
As is normal in testing of any system this complex, there were a few outliers and oddities, and I feel that I should point these out as they might be indicative of bugs or balance concerns.
Several of the Lt-class pets had substantial endurance issues on the pylon test. Carnival and Storm Elementals Bosses also had endurance issues. For the Lts it's probably a minor issue, but if I calculated DPS based on partial times, both Carnival and Storm Elementals ended up ~15 dps higher than their final posted times. Given that we can't slot them, we can't feed them blues, and mob AI is completely incapable of doing anything intelligent about end management, it's kinda a problem that a couple of pets are getting gimped by something we can't mitigate. (As a special note, I equipped my Ageless and re-ran the Storm Elementals through the AoE test. With the endurance issues removed from play, they snatched the crown on that test from the Polar Lights.)
The Longbow Cataphract never once used his Cone AoE attack against the Pylon, but was quite happy to use it against the Council Empire. This is a problem for them, because the Cone is both highest damage-per-activation and highest damage-per-animation-second of its available attacks. As it stands, 1/3-2/3rds of the Longbow's posted DPS is actually the effect of the 500% -regen available, and their true dps is shockingly bad against a single hard target. This makes their overall effectiveness highly dependent on the relative value of -Regen. All of the other pets were happy to use all of their available attacks against any available targets.
The Conclusions
Here's where I give some generic advice for people that just want easy answers, and then ramble on a bit about some non-DPS-based advantages. The vast majority of this section is going to be OPINION, refer to the charts and spreadsheets for objectivity.
Cimerorans are really good. Like, shockingly good for ST. At 41% over the number two contender, they're almost kinda too good, but we've known they were awesome since they came out, so they're probably safe from the nerf bat at this point.
Warworks are odd. They're 2nd from the top for ST, and 3rd from the bottom for AoE. Given that they don't have any AoE, that's not too surprising, but it really points up how much context matters. On the flipside, Storm Elementals go from 3rd from the bottom on ST to 3rd (or 4th/1st if they have help with End) on the AoE list.
You can't go wrong with Rularuu, they're a solid contender in both lists, plus Giant Eyeball. Similarly, Nemesis, IDF, Carnival, and Phantoms have solidly balanced performance.
Seers are horrible. They're just flat out bad, and are crying for some kinda of buff. Clockwork aren't quite as bad, but they also have nothing much to recommend in favor.
Two out of the three top contenders for AoE are spamming AoE KB powers. If you're like me and uncontrolled KB makes your teeth itch, then you're either taking Storm Elementals, or you're taking 2nd tier AoE performance. (There's a small but significant gap between #3 and #4 on the AoE list).
Honorable Mention for Control, because I've seen it asked, goes to the Rikti Mentalist. Twice during his duration, he'll cast a powerful AoE Hold, and he's spamming an ST Sleep in his primary chain. Secondary mentions go to Rularuu, for a fast recharging ST Hold (albeit damageless), Carnival for spamming AoE Knockup, and Longbow, Polar Lights, and Nemesis for spamming AoE KB.
Honorable Mentions for Buff/Debuff:
And one final note. Take all of this testing with a rather large grain of salt. I didn't do nearly enough runs at it to get real statistical validity, my methods might be flawed or biased in some way that I didn't detect. There might be bugs. The devs might do another balance pass. I'd love to have the time to do 5 or 6 runs with each pet, set up multiple variant tests for AoE performance, or something better than a simple farm for real world conditions. But at 15 minutes minimum per test run, times 16 different Lore pets (not even going to mention Radial Superior variations), there's just too much to do. So you get a rough sketch of some numbers that are probably vaguely accurate enough to maybe influence your decisions. But outside of a handful of outliers, most of them are respectably balanced, and so you should never feel bad about taking Longbow just because Giant Robots OMG!!.