The new Pack Leader seems flawed

[Aruquae]

21 minutes ago, SneakyErvin said:

Even the normal pack leader has no real value as is, since leveling it is pointless due to how much damage we deal and how little health pets have. Like every other % based healing in the game. So it is understandable they go from % to a flat value on this. Something they should really do with all % based healing in the game, no matter if it is skills like gloom or something tied to mods.

6% out of say 100k is still 6k healed, in comparison the pet on my Lavos has uhm 4300 something health. And that is 6k healed if a single mob is hit by my melee and I only deal 100k on a hit.

6% of your pet’s TOTAL health

50 would be minuscule for pets with link health on frames like Inaros. Also the percentage was an example. You’re right, I forgot PER HIT exists. So the percentage would be smaller, but still noticeable on it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

 

[SneakyErvin]

17 minutes ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

On a melee build, it reliability keeps your pet alive as long as you are killing. This is true for at least 1-2 hr on a sp survival fissure. The new version is a straight up nerf. The mod is currently very effective but yes primed was useless because of that. Pets currently cannot keep themselves alive and this was one of the few ways to do that. This may not be the case soon.

If you play melee nothing should really change since you just hit that fast and if you use the melee only to heal you likely have an AoE option to do so. So shouldnt really be impacted either. I dont use melee alot atm even and my pet stays alive just fine through health orb. The changes to the mod might actually make me use my melee more often to top of the pet and grant it OG and use the primed version... and max the ranks. Plus we will get other mods that also passively heal pets better with the upcoming changes. Along with recharge delay reduction mods etc.

10 minutes ago, Malikili said:

6% of your pet’s TOTAL health

50 would be minuscule for pets with link health on frames like Inaros. Also the percentage was an example. You’re right, I forgot PER HIT exists. So the percentage would be smaller, but still noticeable on it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I'm talking about the current mod which is 6% of the damage we deal unranked. Which is why ranking it is utterly pointless. 

But what does it matter if it is miniscule on those pets? If you heal them as often as you'd heal a pet on any other frames it will have the same outcome. On those massive HP frames you just have more slack before you actually need to heal them. At which point you can just heal them to full. 

I mean really what is the difference in healing a pet for 2000 hp 3 times during a minute or healing one for 6000 hp 1 time during a minute if both end up requiring the same amount of attacks to achieve it?

 

 

[Aruquae]

1 hour ago, SneakyErvin said:

I'm talking about the current mod which is 6% of the damage we deal unranked. Which is why ranking it is utterly pointless. 

Yea, that’s on me for miscommunication. I understand now

1 hour ago, SneakyErvin said:

But what does it matter if it is miniscule on those pets? If you heal them as often as you'd heal a pet on any other frames it will have the same outcome. On those massive HP frames you just have more slack before you actually need to heal them. At which point you can just heal them to full. 

I mean really what is the difference in healing a pet for 2000 hp 3 times during a minute or healing one for 6000 hp 1 time during a minute if both end up requiring the same amount of attacks to achieve it?

I don’t see your reasoning. The difference would be less hits for the same percentage. 50 health (yes yes let’s forget the fact that melees can hit more than one enemy for a second) per hit isn’t as rewarding for a pet with 3,000 health as opposed to 300. To me it’s like shield gate pet edition, rewarding pets with less health because they can fill up their health faster, for more overguard. Discouraging larger health pool pets. 

[Tiltskillet]

It'll be interesting to see if I still use Pack Leader at all after some build experimentation.  With the new mechanics and mods, it'll be very tempting to go for self-revive speed rather than healing, especially with more mods competing for slots with both it and the EHP mods that make it impactful.

5 hours ago, Malikili said:

Also depends on if you modded your pets with health and armor. Even with pack leader, if you’re warframe is a glass cannon, or just low stats with DR (which won’t carry on to the pet), then your pet will still get one shot in a simple SP node. Tanky though, they can go a decent way. If you’re getting to the levels of a circulus survival though, melee to keep them alive becomes more prominent.

Yeah, I would never use Pack Leader without both an armor and a health mod, and the frames I use it with are more likely to have high health and armor for links.

Which reminds me of another reason people may have been devaluing it: frame shieldgate builds with zero slots dedicated to ehp, which is a very poor base for the links, and consequently for Pack Leader.

[Aruquae]

Aight with the update now upon us

What’s everyone’s thoughts? Not at home yet, will post thoughts later in the day. 
Hopefully my speculations were wrong

2 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

It'll be interesting to see if I still use Pack Leader at all after some build experimentation.  With the new mechanics and mods, it'll be very tempting to go for self-revive speed rather than healing, especially with more mods competing for slots with both it and the EHP mods that make it impactful.

Yeah, I would never use Pack Leader without both an armor and a health mod, and the frames I use it with are more likely to have high health and armor for links.

Which reminds me of another reason people may have been devaluing it: frame shieldgate builds with zero slots dedicated to ehp, which is a very poor base for the links, and consequently for Pack Leader.

Now with the “Smol shields bad” meta done and over with (uhhh hopefully) we’ll see tackier pets and more link mods being used.

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

Seems pretty decent, managed to spend an entire mission, steel path new mission, without touching my Vasca's health with the overguard up pretty much all the time.

Although I was using Valkyr which is basically always using melee, it probably isn't worth using if you're not using melee often.

Edited October 18, 2023 by (XBOX)C11H22O11

[Aruquae]

On 2023-10-18 at 12:50 PM, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

Seems pretty decent, managed to spend an entire mission, steel path new mission, without touching my Vasca's health with the overguard up pretty much all the time.

Although I was using Valkyr which is basically always using melee, it probably isn't worth using if you're not using melee often.

As a Garuda main, melee is like breathing

Also what kind of melee were you using? How much health? Not to mention the Vasca has self healing too

Edited October 23, 2023 by Malikili
Spelling

[Tiltskillet]

19 minutes ago, Malikili said:

Now with the “Smol shields bad” meta done and over with (uhhh hopefully) we’ll see tackier pets and more link mods being used.

I don't know.  Like I said, I'm going to be experimenting with recovery.  The downtime is temporary now, probably less prone to happen because of shieldgating and other changes, less punishing when it does happen, and can be reduced with some mods with other benefits   Pack Leader is highly dependent on multiple things including multiple slots, and the competition for those slots looks like it will be more fierce.  OTOH, Overguard looks great.

It'll be fun to play around with different options for a while.

Edited October 18, 2023 by Tiltskillet

[Aruquae]

1 minute ago, Tiltskillet said:

I don't know.  Like I said, I'm going to be experimenting with recovery.  The downtime is temporary now, probably less prone to happen because of shieldgating and other changes, less punishing when it does happen, and can be reduced with some mods with other benefits   Pack Leader is highly dependent on multiple things including multiple slots, and the competition for those slots looks like it will be more fierce.

It'll be fun to play around with different options for a while.

Recovery you say? Yea this update’s quite fun. I wonder just how low you can get the initial recovery.

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

21 minutes ago, Malikili said:

As a Voruna main, melee is like breathing

Also what kind of melee were you using? How much health? Not to mention the Vasca has self healing too

Incarnon Dual Ichor, 1,487 health 2,404 armor. I could take out the drain bite and run a mission again.

Something I noticed is that the mod seems to be buffed it's +183 health now and +2200 overguard or I guess the workshop primed version was unranked or something 

Edited October 18, 2023 by (XBOX)C11H22O11

[SneakyErvin]

2 hours ago, Malikili said:

I don’t see your reasoning. The difference would be less hits for the same percentage. 50 health (yes yes let’s forget the fact that melees can hit more than one enemy for a second) per hit isn’t as rewarding for a pet with 3,000 health as opposed to 300. To me it’s like shield gate pet edition, rewarding pets with less health because they can fill up their health faster, for more overguard. Discouraging larger health pool pets. 

But it ends up being even, no matter which frame you pick in the case since healing X amount of health takes as much time/hits for both. The benefit of the high HP frames is that it gives the pet absurdly more HP. There really is no filling up quicker vs slower, since the low hp pet runs far more risk dying without constant maintenance. If you want to utilize the OG on a high HP pet you'd heal it as frequently as you would a low HP pet. But you/us instead decide to rely on the slack in healing that a far larger pool grants.

Also, Primed Pack Leader is a good bit above the 50/hit. Not sure if Pack Leader is even 50 now that the patch went live. But Primed is 180 iirc per hit and 2200 OG instead of 90/1100 according to the devshop.

[Aruquae]

28 minutes ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

Incarnon Dual Ichor, 1,487 health 2,404 armor. I could take out the drain bite and run a mission again.

Something I noticed is that the mod seems to be buffed it's +183 health now and +2200 overguard or I guess the workshop primed version was unranked or something 

That’s one tanky kitty 

Bonus health? Never say no to that

[QueenWeedy]

omg i just popped back into the game after a long break to check out if there was anything new.

but basically people complained about the majority of pets always being dead for years leading to a stale meta of anyone who cares about pets staying alive in any non-trivial content to use vulpaphyla or the hack mod that revives pets when you mercy kill 3 times (bet most people don't know about that mod ;) haha)

and the solution was to make it slower to heal pets without % damage healing?

after years of stale vacuum sentinel meta they finally gave vacuum to everyone, why not give every pet a timed auto revive? why make it even harder to heal them lol

[(PSN)Unstar]

1 hour ago, QueenWeedy said:

after years of stale vacuum sentinel meta they finally gave vacuum to everyone, why not give every pet a timed auto revive?

From today's patch notes:

4 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

Going forward, Companions will still have Health and Shield values, and they can be knocked out, but they will not die if you fail to revive them. When they reach zero Health, Companions will instead become Incapacitated for a base duration of 60 seconds. All Companions will automatically revive at the end of their Incapacitate period, and there is no limit to the number of times this can happen.

Source:

 

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

10 hours ago, Malikili said:

Not talking about nerfs, just talking about how slower melee weapons would be at a disadvantage with keeping your pet alive. TLDR faster weapons seemed to be favorited. Of course we will have to wait and see, but posting problems that might surface can help people in making sure they never surface.

Also like a doof, I forgot to think about it being per HIT meaning if you hit MULTIPLE, then it counts as a HIT each for each enemy 

 

Reasonable enough. I was mostly just emphasising nerfs from my perspective. I also don't consider nerfs a negative thing, rather to me its neutral, and depends on context. 

I also understand what you mean about preemptive problem solving, but for me, DE is pretty good at updating their game. Sometimes we can't preemptively solve a problem, if we can't actually accurately identify how the problem exists. I remember for example, a lot of people were speculating that their 8 Forma MK 1 weapons were being deleted, because they talked about "getting rid of MK 1 weapons", but a lot of that anxiety and worry was unnecessary, as the guns remain, they are just being removed from the new player experience at the beginning. 

Oh and thats fair, about forgetting. See, I like gunblades a lot, so I am still a bit curious as to what exactly on hit means. Same with Glaive Heavy. or melee weapons with unusual mechanics (Corufell Heavy as well). 

Cheers! 

[(PSN)Joylesstuna]

6 hours ago, (PSN)slightconfuzzled said:

 

Reasonable enough. I was mostly just emphasising nerfs from my perspective. I also don't consider nerfs a negative thing, rather to me its neutral, and depends on context. 

I also understand what you mean about preemptive problem solving, but for me, DE is pretty good at updating their game. Sometimes we can't preemptively solve a problem, if we can't actually accurately identify how the problem exists. I remember for example, a lot of people were speculating that their 8 Forma MK 1 weapons were being deleted, because they talked about "getting rid of MK 1 weapons", but a lot of that anxiety and worry was unnecessary, as the guns remain, they are just being removed from the new player experience at the beginning. 

Oh and thats fair, about forgetting. See, I like gunblades a lot, so I am still a bit curious as to what exactly on hit means. Same with Glaive Heavy. or melee weapons with unusual mechanics (Corufell Heavy as well). 

Cheers! 

So with only a small amount of testing, when I heavy throw glaive and detonate it my pet is only receiving healing from one enemy. The healing is abysmal. Have not tried gun blades or heavy attacks with follow through.

Edit. What kind of healing are people getting with regular melee if the attack hits multiple enemies?

Edited October 19, 2023 by (PSN)Joylesstuna

[ShogunGunshow]

21 minutes ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

Edit. What kind of healing are people getting with regular melee if the attack hits multiple enemies?

Cracked. It's extremely easy to full heal and cap overguard on beasts in a few swings if the mission has any decent amount of enemy density.

[AizatXtreme123]

i think ppl r confusing pre-update pack leader with post-update pack leader.

was: a way to instantly heal ur pet to full. tho can only go so far cuz ur pet will start getting 1 shotted if u go long enough in a game.

 

now: if ure a melee main (especially now with auto melee), ur pet is now in god mode since at full health, it gets overGUARD which itself has a 0.5sec gate period

 

for most ppl, they should probably swap over to one of the new companion bond mods to reduce death timers. otherwise pack leader is a huge nerf. but also a huge buff if ure a melee main

[Aruquae]

6 hours ago, ShogunGunshow said:

Cracked. It's extremely easy to full heal and cap overguard on beasts in a few swings if the mission has any decent amount of enemy density.

Can confirm, they also buffed it from 50 hp per hit to 100
Xoris is hitting hard and healing enough for the 2k Panzer

[Aruquae]

17 hours ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

Incarnon Dual Ichor, 1,487 health 2,404 armor. I could take out the drain bite and run a mission again.

Something I noticed is that the mod seems to be buffed it's +183 health now and +2200 overguard or I guess the workshop primed version was unranked or something 

It has been buffed

Don’t have Primed, but normal is 100 health +1100 overguard 

The 100 health per hit makes it much easier

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

8 hours ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

So with only a small amount of testing, when I heavy throw glaive and detonate it my pet is only receiving healing from one enemy. The healing is abysmal. Have not tried gun blades or heavy attacks with follow through.

 

Thank you for the testing and info! 

[Aruquae]

8 hours ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

So with only a small amount of testing, when I heavy throw glaive and detonate it my pet is only receiving healing from one enemy. The healing is abysmal. Have not tried gun blades or heavy attacks with follow through.

Edit. What kind of healing are people getting with regular melee if the attack hits multiple enemies?

Going to have to test this further.

When I use the Xoris, I use it to hit an enemy and detonate, so it seemed fine.

I’ll try out the simulacrum, and see how it fairs. 

[ShogunGunshow]

Doesn't seem like a lot of projectile melees are having their attacks count.

Glaives count for the normal throw but not heavy attacks. Sigma+Octantis shield throw counts.

Fan knives from arum spinosa/quassus don't count. Stropha projectile attack doesn't. Redeemer/Sarpa projectiles don't. 

This is pretty inconsistent since traditionally, AFAIK, the expendable projectiles from projectile melees have always been counted as melee attacks. 

[0_The_F00l]

I am also curious if the stance multipliers affect it at all.

[Aruquae]

5 minutes ago, 0_The_F00l said:

I am also curious if the stance multipliers affect it at all.

Stance multipliers? Can you elaborate? 
Do you mean if a specific stance adds two hits for one click? (Example)