Ghostcrawler on Expensive Pet Skills – Updated!
Ghostcrawler posted more about expensive pet abilities late last night on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum. And rather than tossing this one into a quote round-up, I think it’s important enough to pull out all by itself.
But there is a lot more goodness in this thread than just the blue response. You should really read the entire thread if you have a chance, but I’ll try to sum up.
The basic problem: pet abilities that cost more than 50 focus are hard to cast you have to save up focus to get them out — and right now that means manually turning off other cheaper skills.
Cauthon came in about halfway down the first page with some solid analysis of pet abilities. A partial quote:
It seems like there are a few classes of abilities:
- Things you want to use NOW and won’t be useful in 1-2 seconds (taunt, roar of sacrifice, pin, web, nether shock, etc)
- Things you want to be used in preference over focus dump abilities (dash, growl, acid spit, monstrous bite, etc)
- Everything else (bite, most abilities that are just damage)
The idea of the focus system is to keep your pet from constantly spamming some abilities while still letting some pets perform abilities more often (that is, by increasing focus regen, you increase ability use; otherwise it would just be cooldowns and no focus).
I suggest that focus really only makes sense for the second class of abilities; the first class, focus is just a pure detriment. Either you lack the focus when you need it, or you turn off all of your pets useful abilities so you have it, thereby nerfing the pet significantly.
Smeet! added to the analysis, comparing pet focus to rogue energy and warlock pet mana. A partial quote:
If the reactive hunter pet abilities are meant to be truly reactive, without sacrificing all other abilities of the pet for extended periods or excessive hunter micromanaging, they should be on negligible focus costs (under 10, preferably 0). Otherwise, 80 focus abilities on long cooldowns will see next to no use just because of how much pet micromanagement is required to effectively stop autocasts, save up focus, use the ability, then start up autocasts again.
(By the way, I am not meaning to leave out the other great posts in this thread — you really should read the entire thing! I am just trying to give enough context for Ghostcrawler’s response.)
Then Ghostcrawler responded:
I like the idea of removing more pet abilities from Focus. It’s kind of a weird energy source since it fills so quickly in most cases. Growl and Cower might be trickier, but perhaps they could just be really cheap. Making the Focus dump abilities (Bite etc.) relatively expensive could do unpredictable things to threat or dps, especially very early in a fight. It’s worth considering though since then they would typically only get used if the other autocast stuff was on cooldown. Letting some specials be free would help balance utility specials with pure dps specials (which could still have a Focus cost).
This is exactly the sort of intelligent back-and-forth with developers that makes beta so much fun. I’m not going to try to analyze the possible effects of these possible changes here — I’ll leave that for you guys to tackle in the comments — but I like the way this is shaping up!
[Update]
Ghostcrawler, who only seems to post at odd hours, has updated the thread on expensive pet abilities with this post:
The next build will look something like this:
15 Focus
Growl20 Focus
Anything you want to prioritize, like Demoralizing Screech
Any family ability with a short cooldown, like Fire Breath25 Focus
Claw, Bite, Smack
Family abilities with a decent damage component and no cooldown, like Gore
Family abilities that represent a decent dps increase, like Savage RendFree
Most abilities with cooldowns of 30 sec or more
Cower
Most pet talents
I have to say that I’m impressed with the speed of implementing this change. Even if we don’t see the next build until the end of the week or the beginning of next week, it’s great to know that some good ideas, at least, can be put into practice so efficiently.
18 Comments
Sounds like someone’s thinkin’ out there. Always good to see, rare as it is!
or like Intimidation.
@ Daz
Intimidation uses OUR mana, not the pet’s focus so it doesn’t have the same problem. That said, I guess you mean that it is pretty much equivalent to a pet’s taunt or other similar abilities and it would make sense to treat them the same way. While I agree with that logic I’d rather not have them mess with it at this stage :-)
A read a suggestion on pet focus in a forum that I thought was good (sorry could find the forum again)
Basically it suggest you placed the skills in the bar in a order of preference.
e.g. 1. Furious Howl 2. Bite 3.Growl
The idea being if Furious Howl is NOT on cooldown then the pet waits till it has enough focus to cast that and doesnt cast bite or growl save its focus for furious howl.
if furious howl is on cooldown but bite is not then the pet casts bite. If both Furious howl and bite are both on cooldown then the pet is free to cast growl and so on.
They mat be bad examples but i thought the idea itself was a good one
Stuff You Should Read - August 11th, 2008 @ 6:21 pm UTC
[...] No, I’m not here to post even more WotLK info. Lots better people than I are doing that, including, of course, Mania (through the guise of her WotLK Beta alt, Ghostcrawler). Tons of info to be had at her Arcania, as well as some insightful analysis as well, such as her article on expensive (to use) pet talents. [...]
What I’d like to see is something similar to what DAoC did for regular character abilities. Where you scheduled your next ability. You could hit what you wanted before the cooldown was up and it would cast as soon as possible (hitting it a 2nd time would cancel, or if you set a menu option would do nothing)
You could only queue one command, but that would be sufficient for high focus pet specials.
[...] Basically it suggests you placed the skills in the bar in a order of preference.
e.g. 1. Furious Howl 2. Bite 3.Growl
The idea being if Furious Howl is NOT on cool down then the pet waits till it has enough focus to cast that and doesn’t cast bite or growl save its focus for furious howl.
if furious howl is on cool down but bite is not then the pet casts bite. If both Furious howl and bite are both on cool down then the pet is free to cast growl and so on. [...]
This is exactly the same idea I was thinking of too. Easy to manage, great for customizing your pets focus direction and managing those heavy focus skills that you would like used as soon as possible. This would make swapping from a raiding/party/grinding setup a breeze… now if only I could post on the beta forums….
[...]Surprisingly, people still waiting for their Blizzcon/WWI/Dell keys were not included in yesterdays wave and Blizzard has yet to comment on the situation.[...]
= Me
Dang bliz still not sending my a key. /grumblegrumble
@ Phetsen…. Good thinking 99 :)
The simple truth of the matter is that anything with a long cooldown should NOT have a focus cost. Hell, give it a small mana cost on our end (keyword small, ie 10mana not 100+). But something with say a 30+ second cooldown needs to be off the focus system if they want them to be used more than just purely situationally.
Take a raptor for example. If you are able to get both Rabid and Call of the Wild, you now have 4 active abilities + Charge and Growl. I know the focus system is supposed to temper our pets a little in terms of their overall dps.
Phetsen – good idea
or, leave pin at 80 focus, but take away the CD, KKthxbai. kidding…
basically the failure of focus as a power system is that we can’t control it well. sure, a streak of misses might leave a warrior/bear a little rage starved, but they have abilities to get the rage right away if they need it. likewise, mana and energy are both easy to control and budget. focus is largely beyond the realm of our control.
It’s good to see that some people are leaving some useful information for Blizzard to work with. There are a lot of good points here too regarding focus and such. I’m sure there will be some more tweeking, but it’s good to know they’re considering all the options.
Btw, for those who didn’t get the beta invite, Curse Gaming is doing a contest involving the new Competitor’s Tabard Blizz had for the Olympics. The prize includes a free beta key. Lucky I was able to get my tabard, and my baby dragon, in 2 AV runs. You guys should check it out.
Regarding the change to Kill Command it seems that it’s current 3 charge form is fairly weak since you cant control which specials take the charges. Also no talent calc I’ve seen has changed the wording on Focused Fire. I think a better concept for Kill Command is just a flat +% damage for specials for a set time (if it stays at 60% maybe a 10 sec duration and if it gets reduced then a reasonable increase in duration to say 20 secs) also it should be affected by Longevity
do not understand all this…
the way pet abilities worked even in tbc was fine.. there was enough focus for all I needed on cd.
this will end up as another nerf to us…
Free of focus for long cooldown abilities is alright. But for some high tier talent abilities (such as call of the wild, roar of recovery), free focus seemed somewhat overpowered.
I would suggest that these abilities will consume ALL remaining focus, just like “Lay on hand” of Paladin does.
Sorry Stranger, but thats not how lay on hands works any more. Much to my seventy holy paladins delight, lay on hands is now a fifteen minute cooldown that no longer consumes all of the paladins mana. But yours isn’t a bad idea. Still, I’ll take free if I can get it. *laughs*
And another point:
If these “expensive skills” became free, the “owl’s focus” talent in Cunning tree will become nonsense.
@Stranger: at the very least, Owl’s Focus should work out to a free use of the pet’s focus dump. Even with Bestial Discipline, pets still don’t have enough focus to use their focus dump every GCD (BD works out to 12 focus per second, the focus dump consumes 16.7 focus per second). Having both Owl’s Focus and Go for the Throat will probably be fairly redundant though.
@Maug: focus management has become a problem in Wrath due to two things:
- the vast array of new pet family abilities and talents added, many with high focus costs
- the fact that some of those abilities are reactive ones, where you want to use then now rather than in a few seconds when the focus is available
The change GC describes gets rid of the high focus costs on some abilities (controlling their rate of use solely via cooldowns), which makes the reactive abilities usable as needed, while still allowing trade-offs between the basic focus dump and other DPS and threat related abilities that still have a focus cost.
Mania’s Arcania » WotLK Beta Build 8788 - August 14th, 2008 @ 12:07 am UTC
[...] I mis-typed it the last time I recorded LB6 damage.) In particular, it doesn’t look like the focus changes that Ghostcrawler mentioned made it into this build. But Koraa mentioned earlier today that the [...]
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