07-07-2012, 06:16 PM
I hope that pets scaling with Vitality is only one among several fixes they'll implement, because by itself it'll do very little to fix the actual problem.
The way I see it, two things need to happen. One: pet stats simply need a pretty considerable buff in general. Not just hit points and defences, but life regeneration as well. Playing a pet WD should not mean having to pick pretty much all of your skills and equipment with the explicit intent of making your pets more survivable, only for them to melt anyway the instant you run into an elite pack with at least one AoE-type affix. Pets deal negligible damage already; when I'm also forced to select items and skills solely for their defensive properties to ensure something approaching reasonable pet uptime, thereby reducing my damage potential even further – well, that doesn't make for fun gameplay.
More importantly, though: minions (I'm including followers and other summons as well here because they suffer from the same issue) need to be highly resistant to any kind of attack or damage source a player character would be expected to actively avoid. This obviously includes plague puddles, mortar shots, Fire Chains and the like, as well as things like Blazing Construct fire pools and Accursed poison clouds; it also includes the charge-up/telegraphed attacks of Dark Berserkers and Mallet Lords for instance, as well as other sources of extreme burst damage. Complete immunity would probably be a bit too much, but I'd seriously like to see a 75% damage reduction on top of regular resistances at the very least.
There's some success to be had currently assembling plenty of "chance to cast" affixes on your items, coupled with as many sources of DoT as you can. It is hilarious because, as long as your pets can pile on a single monster or two, said monsters spend 90%+ of the battle being frozen, or stunned, or feared, or knocked back, conditions generally characterised by a lack of their sufferers' ability to do anything else. Unfortunately, this approach falls entirely flat as soon as any kind of fire-and-forget AoE damage comes into play, and guess what elites (and even some regular monsters) just love to use? Yeah. Again it means not dealing good damage as well, but if that was the only issue I could certainly live with it; no one expects summoning classes to clear an entire screen in the blink of an eye.
Blizzard want to avoid turning the WD into the Necromancer v2, and that is perhaps understandable (although I don't really agree with their being so opposed to the idea of "slow and steady wins the race"). If they want the various summoning skills to be legitimately useful, though, especially without the WD having to bend over backwards to get her pets not to die to any old mob that comes along, they've got a bit of work to do first.
(Of course, the WD arguably ranks #1 among all current classes in the "way too much gimmicky crap" department, anyway, with summons being just another example, so maybe that's to be expected.)
The way I see it, two things need to happen. One: pet stats simply need a pretty considerable buff in general. Not just hit points and defences, but life regeneration as well. Playing a pet WD should not mean having to pick pretty much all of your skills and equipment with the explicit intent of making your pets more survivable, only for them to melt anyway the instant you run into an elite pack with at least one AoE-type affix. Pets deal negligible damage already; when I'm also forced to select items and skills solely for their defensive properties to ensure something approaching reasonable pet uptime, thereby reducing my damage potential even further – well, that doesn't make for fun gameplay.
More importantly, though: minions (I'm including followers and other summons as well here because they suffer from the same issue) need to be highly resistant to any kind of attack or damage source a player character would be expected to actively avoid. This obviously includes plague puddles, mortar shots, Fire Chains and the like, as well as things like Blazing Construct fire pools and Accursed poison clouds; it also includes the charge-up/telegraphed attacks of Dark Berserkers and Mallet Lords for instance, as well as other sources of extreme burst damage. Complete immunity would probably be a bit too much, but I'd seriously like to see a 75% damage reduction on top of regular resistances at the very least.
There's some success to be had currently assembling plenty of "chance to cast" affixes on your items, coupled with as many sources of DoT as you can. It is hilarious because, as long as your pets can pile on a single monster or two, said monsters spend 90%+ of the battle being frozen, or stunned, or feared, or knocked back, conditions generally characterised by a lack of their sufferers' ability to do anything else. Unfortunately, this approach falls entirely flat as soon as any kind of fire-and-forget AoE damage comes into play, and guess what elites (and even some regular monsters) just love to use? Yeah. Again it means not dealing good damage as well, but if that was the only issue I could certainly live with it; no one expects summoning classes to clear an entire screen in the blink of an eye.
Blizzard want to avoid turning the WD into the Necromancer v2, and that is perhaps understandable (although I don't really agree with their being so opposed to the idea of "slow and steady wins the race"). If they want the various summoning skills to be legitimately useful, though, especially without the WD having to bend over backwards to get her pets not to die to any old mob that comes along, they've got a bit of work to do first.
(Of course, the WD arguably ranks #1 among all current classes in the "way too much gimmicky crap" department, anyway, with summons being just another example, so maybe that's to be expected.)
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
____________.Not shaking the grass.
-- Ezra Pound, "And the days are not full enough"
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
____________.Not shaking the grass.
-- Ezra Pound, "And the days are not full enough"