Pets with Caster Builds Need Love!

Nazghoul_Mortis

This is a generalized summary of ideas pertaining to pets with a focus in spell casting as primary offence.  We may have more ideas coming at you, so please keep your eyes open for more!

When training pets, I'd like to have the ability to have pets get a damage bonus to their spells from Intelligence, similar to how they get a damage bonus to melee from Strength.  As it is right now, the best pet build in my opinion, is Chivalry plus Armor Ignore.  Does massive damage, and I'm not complaining about that at all - it's a melee build, its fine.  It's just that magic builds are quite limited.  I want to make pet builds that can focus on Magic Damage, and not need Melee Damage and high Strength because the Melee ends up being the most prominent damage mechanism.

Magery, Necromancy, etc should get a damage bonus based on how high their Intelligence is.  Also, for melee, there is a "Base Damage" modifier that we could make an equivalent to for magics.  "Spell Damage" we could call it for the sake of argument.  Set up the same way as Base Damage, just for magics though.  It could have a cap similar to Base Damage.  Or, it could be effected by "Spell Damage Increase" in some way.

Right now Strength is capped at 700 for untrained pets.  Intelligence could have a cap too, 700 for the sake of argument.  Of course there will be pets with slightly higher Intelligence but that would modify the control slots similar to how it works for Strength.  There could be a balanced cap for having both a Strength and Intelligence limit at the same time - 550 each for example, could be max for having both at the same time.

And because melee damage doesn't have a "Mana Pool", we could add something to balance out how much mana a pet uses per spell so that the mana pool for a pet stays a bit longer.  Yeah, I know we have Mana Regeneration but we'll need something else to even out the caster class type pet.

For casters, there is a difference between how different spells do damage; some spells do more damage than others.  I don't know the ins & outs of how spell damage per circle/spell is determined, so you're on your own there.

 

Please read and consider.  Magic build pets need some love!

Bilbo

Do chars have the bonus that you are asking for for pets, if yes then pets should be the same, if no then sorry they should not get extra.

Mervyn

For every 10 int players do indeed get 1% spell damage bonus. 

Max_Blackoak

no problem with this request as long as they cap pet's spell damage in pvp. if not, we'll most likely see 1 hit kills by caster pets with 700 int

Nazghoul_Mortis

I'm speaking about PvM at the moment.  It's just that pets don't do well, in my opinion, when their combat focus is to use magic.  The magic does do damage but it doesn't scale when considering INT, and there is no Spell Damage Increase (similar to Base Damage for melee) for spells cast by pets.  Mana runs out way too fast also, even with 30 Mana Regeneration and 120 Meditation and 120 Focus.

Bilbo

OK Here goes.  I totally agree on the PvP part and as UO can't seem to tell the difference between PvM and PvP esp. with pets then please do not touch our pets, leave them as they are, sorry.

Mervyn

I agree with the OP, however, in that respect, intelligence then must cost as many pet advancements points as strength currently does. 

But then monsters should also aggress with spell damage equivalent to their intelligence. 

Max_Blackoak

Mervyn said:

But then monsters should also aggress with spell damage equivalent to their intelligence. 

oh boy the crying this would cause - people and/or pets getting one-hit killed by high int monsters

Mervyn

Well not really, it would take 1000 int for a monster to do even double spell damage. And monster spell damage is not even a lot at the moment. 

PlayerSkillFTW

Mervyn said:

Well not really, it would take 1000 int for a monster to do even double spell damage. And monster spell damage is not even a lot at the moment. 

Serpentine Dragons spawn with up to 1,030 INT. They had to cap Mind Blast damage in PvP, because Magery Mastery Serpentine Dragons were doing massive amounts of damage with Mind Blast on TC.

The Anlorvaglem also has up to 1,170 INT. Dread Horn has up to 1,275 INT. Lady Mel has 1,680 INT. Shimmering Effusion also has 1,500+ INT, as well as 150 Eval.

If they added +INT damage to wild creatures, it'd make several of them significantly overpowered.

INT already affects spell damage of pets, but to a much lesser degree than it does players.

"Pet Intelligence now affects some spell damage."

https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/publish-notes/publish-97/

The hardest hitting pet (in terms of raw spell damage) currently, is a Magery Mastery Serpentine Dragon. Even then though, pet spell damage can't compete with melee damage, especially against Chiv+AI damage.

Mervyn

I just don’t think some monsters/pets doing double the spell damage would make them “significantly overpowered” at all. Including all of the above examples. 

PlayerSkillFTW

Mervyn said:

I just don’t think some monsters/pets doing double the spell damage would make them “significantly overpowered” at all. Including all of the above examples. 

That's doubling their spell damage, which is on top of the melee damage they already do.

Shimmering Effusion doing +150% Spell Damage with his INT would damn near 1 shot most people with a FS. If he hits you with melee and FS in the same second, you're dead then. A Exp+FS combo from him would be death. Don't forget all the spawn he has around him too.

DeadlySerious

With the change to Death Ray (added slayer damage) I would like to see upon Animal Taming mastery activation your pet is given the slayer of the book you currently wear at that time.
Only thing I'm unsure of is if spellbook slayers help wrestlers with melee damage increase.