Companions are sub par - all of them

[No_Quarter]

Companions are the only NPC's whose health does not scale. That will always be a problem and even adding player input to them won't ever make this problem go away of reviving them.

Reviving them all the time sucks, in every game maker toolkit tips and whatever it's noted that the worst kind of companion is one who does stuff without player's input, yolos, dies, and now player has to risk his mission to save them. Just so they would do it again. It's frustrating, it's not fun, and when I'm having fun I have to step away from it and not have fun saving those useless things.

Why is primed regen limited to 3 revives? Like, they die all the time, I had missions where in 2 minutes they used up all their revives. How is that alright? Why is Pack Leader melee only? Why is companion healing 6-9 HP/s - for any mission above Saturn that's far from enough.

Eximus enemies of any level just one shot companions by looking at them.

Why don't we have any means to tell them what to do? I get that game is trying to conserve resources in order to run everything locally so Ai is kinda sub par - why not have a menu to tell companions what to do? Venari has it and it's pretty cool. Could be between a gear wheel and emotes.

I really enjoy Warframe but I do not understand this system at all, like, you are punishing players for doing nothing wrong? That's basically what this is, we lose sentiniels and pets are always in a bleedout state and there's no player action to prevent that. Pack Leader works with companions, but not using melee for 3 seconds means player gets punished? I'd really like to talk to a person who thinks there's a good intention behind this, I'd really like to understand it because in my thousands of hours (actually getting close to 10k) I just can't seem to find that answer my self.

And saddest part is that reviving is our ONLY INTERACTION with pets. Our only way of interacting with them in missions is negative, very, very negative. We are 100% being set up to hate them with our guts.

Okay, so saying negative things about something without offering solutions is called whining and my intention here is to offer constructive criticism.

We need their HP to scale with enemy HP and even Steel Path modifiers, we need them ALL to revive them selves the same way as Clem does (half HP if he does it him self, full hp when player does it), we need ways to interact with them that are positive, even as simple as 3-5 orders, attack, defend, protect this and some class specific perks. Their abilities need to not be mods but be pre applied, was it close to a decade since that was done for warframes?
And what I'm suggesting is something that's already in the game, so your programmer's favorite thing is on the table CTRL+C CTRL+V

Also, companions need to have evasion just like Warframes do, a lot of it. Change Regen from 1 to 3, change primed from 3 to infinite - why is this not a thing already.

If you can't be bothered to read here's a video I've made about my pet peeves (is that a pun?) and how I see companions in Warframe could easily be improved

And to those who want to read this is pretty much the script from the video, only few bits and bobs are said differently but jist is there.

Spoiler

Game companions can make the game unforgettable, Elizabeth comes to mind with Bioshock, Ellie in the Last of Us (the real one, not
the second part), many companions in Fallout games, Mass Effect games and its countless ways mission story plays out depending on
your choice and combo of companions. What makes them good is personality, interactions, not being a burden to the player,
getting you out of bad situations and being, well, a companion - someone you relate to, someone you can trust.

But on the other hand there are companions that make the game feel like a chore. But how do you make bad companions?

Well for that we just look at Warframe and it's countless examples of just exterminating any slither of hope that companions
can be trustworthy. Or worthy of anything.

And it's really hard to write this video because there's very few things DE did right here but a whole pile of stuff that ended
up being below the enjoyable margin. Yes, I get that companions should not complete missions for us (khm, Wukong) but they should
be half useful. And to start it off with a positive note, companions give us Vacuum and Fetch which sucks loot from a certain range.
which is a nice qol for a looter shooter game....

Until you realize you need to do endurance missions to get enough loot and in endurance missions they can't endure. Especially now
that Eximus enemies are buffed and they basically one shot any of your companions at any level, does not matter.

Problem here is that companions are the only NPC whose HP, armor and shields do not scale with enemy levels. I am not sure
how one can think it's a good idea but here we are. What people are doing for the most part is bringing Warframes who have high
HP so pets would have it higher too - but, like, that's a pretty bad call as it limits our choices of frames AND requires us to
use mods we otherwise wouldn't - like using extra health on rhino for example.

Which starts to feel like a burden because the alternative is to spend half of your mission reviving your pet. Because I kid you not,
they get rekt all the damn time.

There's traces that DE acknowledges this issue, tek mod is there to give us a slot machine roll whether our pet survives or we spend
next 10 seconds or so cursing in our language of choice. Vulpahallas revive them selves after 30 seconds, Clem will also revive him
self if you don't pick him up which is a pretty cool thing because if you do help him he gets up with full HP but if you are a
monster and you let him revive himself then he will start off with half of his HP. Like, that's a really good solution -
Why don't other pets have that?

Also a trace of DE seeing the problem is Railjack crewmates as their healing is based off of percentage of their health.

Obvious solution to this is to make their base HP scale off of enemy levels, they don't need to die as much, or, at all and if they
do I feel like the Clem solution would be the best as a default one.
Pets need to have high evasion, the moment enemies agro on them they flatline in a blink of an eye.

sentinels have it even worse, the only way to keep them alive is to add shield recharge and pray shield gate would do. Which it won't
but someone thinks it's fun to lose something without your fault or rather any way you can effect it really.

Nier Automata has a similar drone flying around you and it felt like such a joy to play with since it didn't get rekt ever, as
opposed to your Helios kicking a bucket whenever a gentle breeze blows in it's general direction. Regen and Primed Regen are weird, why are we
limited to 3 sentiniel deaths?

I cannot think of a good type of action DE anticipates out of players when your sentiniel is just gone and it's not your fault and
you can't do anything to bring it back. Except that dispensary augment which is extremely situational.

Metal Gear Solid V has great solutions to this, when your companion is downed and carried out you call an air drop and in no time -
it's back with you.

This game also has a great companion system where each has its own personality and their gear and depending on the gear we put on them
they can perform different actions at player's request.

Where's any trace of that in Warframe? Oh yes, there's a helminth ability that will instantly move your pet to your side and heal
it for 50 energy. That's it. Venari is an ability of Khora and she can change modes, be defensive, agro, heal you - like, that's
good - why don't other pets have actions that player chooses? With Q menu we could switch to the pet orders menu with RMB, just like
we switch to emotes and weird dances and stuff.
Just this would be more useful so I'd put a pet menu in front of dancing, sorry octavia mains.

Another problem is mod space, DE keeps adding more mods but we still have companion abilities as mods despite it being close to a
decade since Warframes got their abilities moved from mods to just be abilities you have by default. Venari shows us that without
those pets have formidable output even vs high level enemies. She still flops hard as soon as she gets shot, but the damage number
is alright if we could build for it. But we can't since we need our entire build so pet does not go into bleedout every 20 seconds.

Solution to this obviously removing ability mods and making abilities as class specifinc pre-applied features.
That's an easy job as you've done that with frames, just copy paste it like you did with copy pasting how sentiniel slots work
to how pet slots used to work. Which was the only change done to pets since 3 or 4 years when it was mentioned on quite a few
devstreams that huge pet rework is coming.

Hounds show a trace of trying to solve this since they have their weapons modded separately.

Entire companion system is in bad shape and there's nothing really memorable about it. Good games make it so that companions
focus on enemies who try to deal with the player, giving you a feel of cooperation. In warframe pet Ai is basically a random
decision generator. They'll do something every few seconds but even with thousands of hours that I have in this game I still
see no chain of decisions, it's just a random roll.

Also, why does Pack Leader heal ONLY from melee damage? Weird call, but the result is that if you play endurance and you make a crucial
mistake of not using your melee for 3 seconds - you have to spend the next 10 seconds reviving your companion.

It's the worst kind of companion that gets downed without the player's mistake and requires the player to step away from potentially having
any sort of fun and spend time not having fun and reviving it just so it would do the same bloody thing again.

I just don't get it because fixing glaring issues with companions would take almost no time as technology to do so is already in
the game. I don't have expectations that DE should make 50+ companions that are as awesome as Elizabeth but they could at least
make them so that they are not dead weight and vacuum and fetch are basically why we have them in most of our builds.

I get that Ai takes a lot of resources and it's hard to dedicate that much when people are hosting sessions on Core 2 duo's and
this game has no dedicated servers in 2023 but at least we got a host transfer simulat... a cross platofm test. Because that's
good PR, pets and dedicated servers are not making headlines.

But cool companions get to people's hearts, what warframe is doing with it's companion system is nothing short of a disappointment.
While this video is overly negative, it's really hard for me to find positive things to say about this companion system, like,
I enjoy warframe as a game, just this is a huge part that drags this game down.
And I don't see any reasonable excuses not to improve it when it takes so little work to make their HP scale with enemy levels,
that's copy paste, make their revive method work the same as with clem - that's another copy paste and lastly - copy paste what
you've done with Warframes when ability mods got removed.
Added bonus, change value on Regen from 1 to 3 and change primed regen from 3 to infinite.

Is anyone scared that would make companions more game breaking than Wukong's Twin?

[2ndPersonPlural]

"Companions are the only NPC's whose health does not scale"

This is what the link mods are for, and they work fine up to the highest level content.

"does stuff without player's input, yolos, dies"

IME most people who have this complaint load up their companions with attack precepts.  Take them off and replace them with utility or survivability; you're wearing a mech already, your dog doesn't need to kill anyone.

"Why don't we have any means to tell them what to do?"

This would be very cool.  Maybe borrow the command UI from veilbreaker.  While we're at it, let us do that with railjack crew and on-call crew in regular missions.  Maybe tie it into the command intrinsics tree to make it less useless.  At the very least give them a "hold position" prompt like syndicate allies and specters have.

"there's no player action to prevent that"

The player action to prevent sentinels from dying is not getting hit by AoEs over and over.  The player action to prevent pets from dying is building them right.

"We need their HP to scale with enemy HP and even Steel Path modifiers"

I think the only new HP scaling we need is for link mods to work on sentinels.

"If you can't be bothered to read here's a video I've made"

This isn't really related, but if you think watching a ten minute video is more effort than reading less than one page of text...

Edit:  It is weird that pack leader only works with melee damage, you're right

[No_Quarter]

29 minutes ago, 2ndPersonPlural said:

This is what the link mods are for, and they work fine up to the highest level content.

that's a very weird thing to hear considering that Eximus enemies one shot pets despite my Link mods being maxed, and that's even on Steel Path without much endurance or at all. Only time they endure somewhat is on survival when I ONLY use melee, but that's one type of loadout and I don't think it's a good design to have it like that.

And then again, if you don't melee for one second after one hour of SP survival - you need to revive your pet.

And I am talking full survivability builds, like I mentioned in my post I have nearly 10k hours in this game - you really think I haven't tried everything?

32 minutes ago, 2ndPersonPlural said:

The player action to prevent sentinels from dying is not getting hit by AoEs over and over.  The player action to prevent pets from dying is building them right.

Still direct damage enemies can agro on your pets and sentiniels and flat line them in less then a second. You can't do anything about it. 800 hp on Helios is not enough. Not even 5k is because the moment you switch to operator (like you can see in the video because it's totally unrelated) they die instantly. And it's intended to switch to operator, for buffs and stuff.

That's player action of playing the game as intended and it's a certain death for every sentiniel and pet alike. As they have no evasion whatsoever, full enemy agro on them is just wipe.

Also the unrelated video and text underneath it explains how Link mods have a flaw, messing with our builds and locking players in certain choice just because of punishment of reviving a pet. Nothing else, you don't build for advantage - you build to avoid punishment of playing the game.

I do not think anyone ever said it's a good design to punish players like that. We are supposed to build to get rewarded.

Pets can live long only with EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE survival (aka melee spam only and without breaks for more than 3 seconds). That's it. Even with tankiest frames to link off of they still get wiped in a second.

That's essentially one build that couple of frames can do but it falls down to the same thing and that's it. That's the only one. I don't see that being relevant for all 50 frames and like 500 firearms we have in the game. Not for sentiniels, only pets. And you are telling me pets don't go around and agro random enemies 30 meters away from the player? I just get a message that my cat is dead and I look around and see an eximus running.... there's one to blame....

Come on, we don't seem to be playing the same game, 2k hp on a cat is not enough when Blitz eximus hits for 5k PER EXPLOSION and can easily hit you with 2-4 of them. You will avoid it, braindead cat won't.

But show me "building it right" case, don't wiggle around the topic. Cause I assure you I have that build and every other since all my pets and sentiniels have 2-10 forma.

[sunderthefirmament]

2 hours ago, 2ndPersonPlural said:

This is what the link mods are for, and they work fine up to the highest level content.

Utterly untrue.  No amount of link mods will prevent my idiot kavat from crouching in the direct line of literal fire from a flame jet on Jupiter.  No amount of link mods will save my idiot kavat from the focused rage of every enemy in sight when it decides, for some inscrutable reason, not to teleport to me or follow me when I've left it three rooms behind.

 

2 hours ago, 2ndPersonPlural said:

IME most people who have this complaint load up their companions with attack precepts.  Take them off and replace them with utility or survivability; you're wearing a mech already, your dog doesn't need to kill anyone.

My idiot kavat is two things: survivability and utility.  It has more than half its build dedicated to survivability.  I'd put more on there, but the only survivability mods I don't currently use are bad for most builds.

 

2 hours ago, 2ndPersonPlural said:

The player action to prevent sentinels from dying is not getting hit by AoEs over and over.  The player action to prevent pets from dying is building them right.

Another player action to prevent sentinels from dying is to never enter operator mode.  I think DE wants us to use operator mode, which is why they keep spending developer resources on it, and keep making enemies vulnerable to our operators (or attempting to, as Overguard's amp vulnerability was largely a miss).  But having a sentinel means that going into operator mode will likely result in one of your primed regen charges being used up, if you're playing anything past the starchart.

 

As mentioned above, no amount of building right is going to save companions from being idiots and endangering themselves needlessly.

 

I completely agree with the OP.  Pets are absolutely awful in this game.  They provide vital utility and support, yet are absolutely miserable to maintain.  Pets should be invulnerable.  Existing survivability mods should be converted into something else, or exchanged for endo.  If that's going too far, then Primed Regen should have unlimited charges with a 10-15 second cooldown, followed by 30-45 seconds of full immortality for the sentinel.  And reviving a companion by hand should give that companion invulnerability for at least five minutes.

 

I am so very, very tired of standing over my pet and emitting green gas onto it.  It's not engaging.  It's not fun.  And I find myself doing it all the time.  It's not my fault that my properly built idiot kavat has crap AI and no sense of self-preservation.  Why am I being punished for something I can't control?  Safeguard Nezha is one of my absolute favorite builds to run because it gives me a greater chance of not needing to revive my idiot kavat.

 

"Use panzer/djinn."

Sure, when they can use Charm.  And even then, djinn is useless as it would spend more time dead than alive.

[No_Quarter]

18 minutes ago, sunderthefirmament said:

my properly built idiot kavat has crap AI and no sense of self-preservation

yea this one's an issue, IF kavat takes 50% of it's damage in half a second maybe there should be a line of code to tell it to move the heck away from that place.

And story wise, Kavats are cats and cats are known to be one of the fastest responding animals in the world - able to play with snakes and avoid their bites even tho snake attack takes mere miliseconds. Would it be out of the ordinary for all kavats to have 99.99% evasion? Would it hurt the game?

21 minutes ago, sunderthefirmament said:

"Use panzer/djinn."

even if they could equip Charm I think it's a bad design to limit players to such choices. There's absolutely no reason for companions to be this bad. They offer some decent utility but even if they were 100% invulnerable they would not be that useful because they still rely on Warframe Ai which..... well let's just say that if Ai takes over the world like in those doomsday movies we can be absolutely positive it ain't Digital Extremes who is responsible for it.

I do agree on the general sentiment and feeling of playing with companions in Warframe. We use them because there's nothing better in that slot.
Let people put another weapon in that slot and let's see just how many people would use a companion? That's why usage stats are not relevant here.

But even from day 1 when I did the Kubrow quest I laughed hard at "every warframe has a kubrow and they bond is bla bla bla" like doood -   Warframe is a god tier creature, there ain't no way they pick those please revive me creatures.

Also, why do hounds lose damage attenuation once we convert them? They are extremely tanky when we fight them but once they are under our belt they lose all that.

But bottom line is that encouragement should be positive and I struggle to find that in current version of Companion system in Warframe. Nowhere do I see that, I see Slot Machine with Tek mod that has whatever% for pet to ignore lethal damage, I see forcing people to melee only, I see making it very risky to ever switch to your operator (weird considering latest mission introduced requires you to do just that in order to do the mission), I see terrible scaling.

Some nice utility, but cost for that utility is just so much negativity and I can't seem to wrap my head around it - it's impossible to enjoy it.

[No_Quarter]

Bonus point: Sentiniels lock onto whoever they like. Imagine if they locked onto enemies onto which you aimed at? This could be done that it only activates when you ADS at an enemy and shoot it. It would make sense for sentiniel to only focus if enemy you're shooting at takes more than one hit.

Guess there are flaws with this, especially with infested enemies and their hitboxes.

[BroDutt]

It always bother when DE gave us Vulphaphyla revivification/Djinn Awaken but refuse to give primed mod with unlimited revival. When we can have near immortal spectre. Just add +20s before automatic revival.

[No_Quarter]

21 hours ago, BroDutt said:

It always bother when DE gave us Vulphaphyla revivification/Djinn Awaken but refuse to give primed mod with unlimited revival. When we can have near immortal spectre. Just add +20s before automatic revival.

Yeah infinite self revival is a necessity in a system where DE made companions so flimsy that even regular Star Chart level eximus enemies will wipe the floor with them in one hit and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

But great feature was added, during bleedout pet keeps teleporting to player's location, I can't call it a "QoL change" because life is still miserable, we still have to stop having fun to do that all the damn time. Despite me having ALL THE MODS IN THE GAME and all the forma and all the builds - the level of reviving pets hasn't changed really.

And best mod for their survival is a Tek mod that's a Slot Machine on whether they take a fatal hit or ignore it. I can't applaud that kind of design, just shake my head in disbelief.

[Skoomaseller]

On 2023-01-07 at 4:06 AM, 2ndPersonPlural said:

This is what the link mods are for, and they work fine up to the highest level content.

lol

lmao

link mods only work if your frame itself is beefy therefore further limiting choice

even then it won't survive level 150 grineer blitz eximus going "KRATAR!!" (might as well be saying "SHINRA TENSEI!") and subsequently murdering my pet without remorse

pets are in a pitiful state rn there is no going any other way about it

[No_Quarter]

5 hours ago, Skoomaseller said:

lol

lmao

link mods only work if your frame itself is beefy therefore further limiting choice

even then it won't survive level 150 grineer blitz eximus going "KRATAR!!" (might as well be saying "SHINRA TENSEI!") and subsequently murdering my pet without remorse

pets are in a pitiful state rn there is no going any other way about it

Yeah, ven if you pick the highest EHP frame, Inaros Prime, and build him for pure HP and armor and nothing else - all the bells and whistles, even shards etc - even then your pet has about 20k HP with like 1500 armor. That's an easy bite for Blitz. Even Butcher Eximus will make a sushi out of it in two swings.

I guess this could be a part of a reason why so many high level players play Inaros - they are just sick and tired of reviving pets all the time. So they do it just less than that, but even with the highest EHP you can make they are still extremely vulnerable as they lack evasion and enemies hit every shot on them - unlike with us. So same HP number cannot work if other rules are different. 1000hp on frames works cause with player movement enemies miss a lot, 1000hp on pets is like 5x less because enemies do not miss a shot - the moment they agro on pets or sentiniels they are done.

But design is weird, think Oberon's passive is one free revive for companions. Is that supposed to lure people to play him?

One solution that could be done is some sort of damage attenuation on pets to scale down all the damage they take and make it reasonable as compared to their HP. But I don't like link mods, it limits the choice of frames, it limits our builds... I really wish that wasn't a thing.

[Skoomaseller]

5 hours ago, No_Quarter said:

Yeah, ven if you pick the highest EHP frame, Inaros Prime, and build him for pure HP and armor and nothing else - all the bells and whistles, even shards etc - even then your pet has about 20k HP with like 1500 armor. That's an easy bite for Blitz. Even Butcher Eximus will make a sushi out of it in two swings.

I guess this could be a part of a reason why so many high level players play Inaros - they are just sick and tired of reviving pets all the time. So they do it just less than that, but even with the highest EHP you can make they are still extremely vulnerable as they lack evasion and enemies hit every shot on them - unlike with us. So same HP number cannot work if other rules are different. 1000hp on frames works cause with player movement enemies miss a lot, 1000hp on pets is like 5x less because enemies do not miss a shot - the moment they agro on pets or sentiniels they are done.

But design is weird, think Oberon's passive is one free revive for companions. Is that supposed to lure people to play him?

One solution that could be done is some sort of damage attenuation on pets to scale down all the damage they take and make it reasonable as compared to their HP. But I don't like link mods, it limits the choice of frames, it limits our builds... I really wish that wasn't a thing.

link mods were a crap attempt at making pets live longer so I agree.

honestly they should all just be immortal 

[Steel_Rook]

As my icon suggests, I'm an "Inaros Main". That's about the only way I've found to make pets not die constantly. When playing almost all other Warframes (except maybe Grendel, and even then...), Bird (my Moa pet) spends more time dead than alive. It's actually become a running joke. "Damn it! Bird's dead again!" "What? Has it been 30 seconds already?" Pets don't have Shield Gating, not access to Adaptation or Arcanes. They're squishy at the best of times, if not an outright detriment when they run off to catch bullets with their teeth.

Penalising the player for the failure of AI that the player has no control over is not good design. It's on the same level as Liches killing us and costing us a down because we guessed a sequence wrong with no way to know beforehand. It puts the player in a no-win situation, where all choices are bad choices. The only way to get SOME use out of our pets is to kludge their build in the hopes of tricking the game's AI into targeting them less. Considering they're overloaded with offensive abilities, this seems like designing against type - or rather, like trying to make the best of a broken system.

DE know this. They've acknowledged this much in the past. That's why they announced the mythical Pets 2.0 update four years ago, which never actually happened and now doesn't seem like it ever will unless a new developer picks it back up. They've acknowledged this issue by proxy by introducing self-regenerating Vulpaphyla pets. Trying to defend the current iteration of pets is a fool's errand, as far as I'm concerned. Even if "it works on your machine", you would still benefit from general improvements - not in terms of power, but in terms of stability and solid design.

Personally, I feel it's high time we made our pets untargetable and invulnerable. Taking damage to and potentially permanently losing my pet is - to me - like taking damage to and losing my gun. You can argue about realism, you can argue about how it can be worked around. You can make excuses for it, sure. I just don't see an upside. I know it won't happen because it'll invalidate a large number of mods, so I have a number of counter-proposals.

• Make all pets revivable, including Sentinels. Sentinel Regen can still work like it does now - prevent the first X deaths, then it needs to be manually revived. Maybe reset the mod on revive.
• Give all pets infinite bleedout time. Never let them permanently go away from the map.
• Make all pets revivable with a single click, no holding. That alone will alleviate a LOT of the issues.
• Scrap the pet-specific version of basic mods (Vitality, Redirection, Fibre, etc.) and just let them use Warframe versions of them.
• Let pets use a variety of basic Warframe mods - Vigor, Adaptation, etc.
• Let pets equip Arcanes (1 or 2). A Pet Arcane Adapter could be a new loot item to grind the Warframe slot machine for, or purchase with whatever the latest new currency is.
• Let pets (and pet weapons) equip Focus Lenses.

This wouldn't be a FIX for pets (won't keep them from blowing Stealth or running off to sit on laser traps), but it would be a major step forward, at least.

[No_Quarter]

6 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

• Make all pets revivable, including Sentinels. Sentinel Regen can still work like it does now - prevent the first X deaths, then it needs to be manually revived. Maybe reset the mod on revive.
• Give all pets infinite bleedout time. Never let them permanently go away from the map.
• Make all pets revivable with a single click, no holding. That alone will alleviate a LOT of the issues.

I honestly think that player should not revive them, they should revive them selves the same way as Clem does. What you said would improve it but not by much.

I do not think pets should die AT ALL unless players gets them into that situation. If a player has a command to tell companion to go there and do that and companion dies doing it - that's fair game and then we can talk about balance of it and what to adjust. But braindead Ai doing stupid things 24/7 with absolutely 0 code lines for self preservation is not fun to play around and revive.

I do not think there's a good reason for companions to die at all, game designers have figured that out en masse at about 2015 and at worst you get a cooldown if PLAYER actions lead to issues. I am talking about good games tho, there are still sub par games where companions are dreadful.

But to be nearly a decade behind when technology to make pets decent is already in the game is hard to justify. I want to think it's an oversight and that DE has become corporate enough to make such minor adjustment so complicated internally because the other option is to think that someone is actually paid good money to think this is good.

And to think that copy pasting several lines of code on how other things work is not worth the hassle.

And maybe sales department finds it good because rare pet variants are still a thing and people still pay decent platinum for those.

I don't know, theorizing here because I cannot, I really cannot fathom why is companion system in such a dreadful state and DE is actively adding more companions who are as useless if not more. None of them would be bad if system was good. A lot of them are good ideas, just none can withstand just how poor the base is.

Please, for the love of God DE, stop adding new companions and fix the baseline.

I haven't been hyped for any new companions EVER. Nor I'll ever be. Just being honest here, no matter what's added.

[Steel_Rook]

14 hours ago, No_Quarter said:

I do not think there's a good reason for companions to die at all, game designers have figured that out en masse at about 2015 and at worst you get a cooldown if PLAYER actions lead to issues. I am talking about good games tho, there are still sub par games where companions are dreadful.

I agree completely. Pets dying and having to be revived is at best a nuisance. However, we live in the world of Gozer the Gozerian, where we need to choose the form of our own destructor. I'm all but positive that DE won't take away pet deaths entirely, because they have too many expensive mods tied up in that system, and they "don't like removing mods from the game". As such, it's probably most productive to come up with some system where pets can still go down, durability and revival mods still work, but the player isn't tied down with constantly reviving them.

 

14 hours ago, No_Quarter said:

I don't know, theorizing here because I cannot, I really cannot fathom why is companion system in such a dreadful state and DE is actively adding more companions who are as useless if not more. None of them would be bad if system was good. A lot of them are good ideas, just none can withstand just how poor the base is.

I don't know what the deal is, either. Like I said, they were talking about Pets 2.0 years ago, and then... kind of just stopped mentioning it. Here's hoping we get more of that at some point. We need more "Revised" updates.

[No_Quarter]

59 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

because they have too many expensive mods tied up in that system, and they "don't like removing mods from the game"

this can still work with scaling - Health and Armor mods could add on top and that could be something vs Steel Path enemies. Not early in the game, early on no player can afford to rank up those mods.

Shield mod could be turned to damage attenuation mod for pets to scale down those big one shot enemies such as Eximus units.

There's room for correction without pets being able to get rekt. Either way I am fine when it happens sometimes AND due to player error.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't know what the deal is, either. Like I said, they were talking about Pets 2.0 years ago, and then... kind of just stopped mentioning it. Here's hoping we get more of that at some point. We need more "Revised" updates.

so Sheldon throwing memes how he wrote that plan on a napkin was not a meme, hit turns out he was 100% serious with it and that napkin ended up being someone's toilet paper.

Because what was done was not actual work, I respect people who put in work but doing COPY-PASTE from how Sentiniel slots work to how Pet slots work is not actual work and while we can chose pets more easily - we are still choosing which one we want to revive 3 times per mission.

That "work" is not worth hyping up the pet rework. Maybe hyping up was a mistake, maybe that was all of what they've planned.

But that comes back to me wanting to have a talk to a person who is in charge of this system because I need a few explanations on why they think this is anywhere near acceptable, what are intended stimulations they want for their players and how do they think this plays out.