The Bond Mods really highlight how bad companion stats/weapons are

[Kaiga]

When we were told companions were getting a rework, i think a lot of people assumed that their weapons/damage stats would also be getting changed to not be dogwater (no pun intended)

But they didn't. This means that:

-Only 2 sentinel weapons are useful for tenacious bond without a large riven buff, both are terrible stats wise (vulcax, utterly useless, and vulklok)
-Slow, single target attacks mean Vicious bond is largely useless on ground-based companions without some kind of duplication gimmick, (duplex bond/diversified denial precept)
-Manifold bond doesn't apply to many companion abilities, despite inflicting status effects or damage
-Reinforced bond requires either wyrm prime or a specific modular build to be useful outside link redirection on shield-using frames

And, notably:
-Duplex bond, tandem bond, manifold bond, momentous bond, and contagious bond all have very limited use potential, due to the fact that most companion weapons or overall damage is too low for any of the kill/damage conditions to be reasonably met or have any use outside the low level star chart.

Obviously we dont need companions dealing incaron damage by themselves, but the stat diversity of companions and their weapons is... just bad. Very few crit weapons, only a handful of useful status spreaders, with the rest being just genuinely bad/outdated (yes, i'm looking at you tazicor/vulcax)

[Voltage]

The companion rework isn't done yet though. Part 2, coming later, is planned to address precepts and companion damage. Grant mentioned this on the last devstream.

[Tiltskillet]

Just to add to what Voltage said, they said in last week's devstream that they're looking at overall pet balance in part 2, and specifically called out sentinel weapons as an example of a category where they want to see more diversity in usage.

I don't think anybody mentioned beast damage, although it could be inferred they're looking at that too from the focus on overall pet balance.

[trst]

While the upcoming changes might increase the pool of usable weapons for some of these I don't see the issue in some mods needing specific setups. They're pretty much just augments at that point and make the setups/companions that they work with more unique.

[Wyrmius_Prime]

50 minutes ago, Kaiga said:

And, notably:
-Duplex bond, tandem bond, manifold bond, momentous bond, and contagious bond all have very limited use potential, due to the fact that most companion weapons or overall damage is too low for any of the kill/damage conditions to be reasonably met or have any use outside the low level star chart.

I think the kill condition on companion mods is poor design in general. In high to mid level content the companion damage will fall off no matter what, and in low level content the effects are insignificant, because the player will be able to one-hit kill enemies at much higher levels than the companions will.

I'm looking forward to whatever they will cook up for the part 2.

Edited October 31, 2023 by Wyrmius_Prime

[sunderthefirmament]

38 minutes ago, Voltage said:

The companion rework isn't done yet though. Part 2, coming later, is planned to address precepts and companion damage. Grant mentioned this on the last devstream.

Have we heard anything about beast AI and attack animations though?  No amount of damage boosts will make them relevant without better AI and coverage on their attacks.  And I worry that such changes would be unrealistic to hope for.

 

6 minutes ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

I think the kill condition on companion mods is poor design in general. In high to mid level content the companion damage will fall off no matter what, and in low level content the effects are insignificant, because the player will be able to one-hit kill enemies at much higher levels than the companions will.

Agreed.  I didn't even finish reading those mods.  Once I got to the part about requiring companion kills to trigger certain effects, I moved on.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

12 minutes ago, sunderthefirmament said:

Have we heard anything about beast AI and attack animations though?  No amount of damage boosts will make them relevant without better AI and coverage on their attacks.  And I worry that such changes would be unrealistic to hope for.

I agree. AI is probably one of, if not the most difficult thing to develop, and rarely in ANY game have I ever seen AI that actually impresses me in how it functions, and usually it's the enemy AI, never the AI controlling your allies. in terms of animations, the companion just need to be able to attack quickly, and preferably have abilities that can affect groups, since this is a horde shooter after all. I don't think a whole lot can be done with regards to making companions smarter, but at least when they DO know where and what to attack, they'll make a real difference. 

prove us wrong DE, make our beasts smart!

[SDGDen]

honestly, until this update i actually looked at sentinels as a purely support tool, i run taxon with as many of the survivability boosts as possible (guardian for shield refreshes, molecular conversion for gaining some shields and overshields, sacrifice to revive myself, shield charger to increase my own shields and shield regeneration and of course vacuum)

with the update, my new support build now also includes duplex bond for energy gain, duplex bond is REALLY good as long as sentinels can kill things, you get two extra sentinels that do not need a precept for using their weapon, they use your modded weapon and they can float around on their own to kill things. plus: they're immortal. it's basically two floating turrets that generate energy

the issue is: "as long as sentinels can kill things", the only way i've found to do this is to use the verglas. it's the best sentinel weapon i have BY FAR, and the only sentinel i do not own is djinn. every other weapon except for sweeper prime didn't even make it through my 30 minutes of kuva fortress test (a test i use as a "pass/fail" for whether a build is good enough, if it can't get through 30 minutes of non-sp kuva survival it's a bad build/bad weapon) and sweeper prime immediately falls off once you start looking at steel path modifiers.

the only reason verglas even performs is because it's a high fire-rate beam weapon that easily reaches over 100% status chance, add viral and heat and those status procs are doing most of the work which results in those energy orbs not dropping. 

i do also use momentous bond mostly because of the eximus units lowering respawn time thing. 

 

[Tiltskillet]

9 minutes ago, SDGDen said:

the only reason verglas even performs is because it's a high fire-rate beam weapon that easily reaches over 100% status chance,

Well that, and having 4x the unmodded dps of the next closest sentinel weapon before status is even taken into account. :P

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

It's not even the fact that companion attack stats are mostly useless past somewhere around Neo fissures.  Because they are.  Even built for meta damage types and high crit, the damage output from something like a Charger or Kubrow is a joke compared to even a half-built off-meta player weapon.  But that's not the main issue.

The companion AI is utterly useless.  I actually forma'd out my Helminth Charger a while back, thinking I could meme it up and get some use out of the cosmetic skin that came with Nidus Deluxe.  I sat back and watched this thing during the forma process, and in several missions afterward.  It barely attacks, usually spins in circles trying to figure out what to do next, often straight up misses when it does attack, and frequently has major pathing issues.  You could give this thing meta-tier fully optimized melee weapon damage and then multiply it by 10, and it would still be useless because the AI is so bad that it couldn't contribute anything meaningful.

[SDGDen]

1 hour ago, (XBOX)TehChubbyDugan said:

It's not even the fact that companion attack stats are mostly useless past somewhere around Neo fissures.  Because they are.  Even built for meta damage types and high crit, the damage output from something like a Charger or Kubrow is a joke compared to even a half-built off-meta player weapon.  But that's not the main issue.

The companion AI is utterly useless.  I actually forma'd out my Helminth Charger a while back, thinking I could meme it up and get some use out of the cosmetic skin that came with Nidus Deluxe.  I sat back and watched this thing during the forma process, and in several missions afterward.  It barely attacks, usually spins in circles trying to figure out what to do next, often straight up misses when it does attack, and frequently has major pathing issues.  You could give this thing meta-tier fully optimized melee weapon damage and then multiply it by 10, and it would still be useless because the AI is so bad that it couldn't contribute anything meaningful.

this entire thing is part of why i use sentinels tbh. modable weapons + the AI of duplex sentinel clones is actually pretty competent since all it does is float around, find enemies and attack. 

on non-robotic pets, your "weapon mods" and your companion mods need to go into the same 10 slots, some of which are already taken up by precepts just to make your companion actually do things. if you include the two precepts that the helminth charger comes with, you already lose the two extra slots so you have eight slots, you lose another one to fetch and if you like your loot radar, you lose one to animal instinct which imo is still a mandatory mod. 

[Skoomaseller]

3 hours ago, SDGDen said:

the only reason verglas even performs is because it's a high fire-rate beam weapon that easily reaches over 100% status chance, add viral and heat and those status procs are doing most of the work which results in those energy orbs not dropping. 

actually because it's literally just the glaxion, but that's just me nitpicking 

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

8 hours ago, Voltage said:

The companion rework isn't done yet though. Part 2, coming later, is planned to address precepts and companion damage. Grant mentioned this on the last devstream.

Idk how well thats gonna go. On one hand im sure they dont want afk play the game for you aimbot sentinels to be a thing but on the other hand i feel like the current state of companion weapons is just sad. We got 1 or 2 viable status primers and verglas. The rest arent even worth mentioning.

[Voltage]

6 hours ago, Skoomaseller said:

actually because it's literally just the glaxion, but that's just me nitpicking 

This is valuable to bring up though. When Diriga first released, Vulklok matched stats of the Lanka. It was very viable, but deemed too viable and subsequently saw some nerfs. 

[Skoomaseller]

2 hours ago, Voltage said:

This is valuable to bring up though. When Diriga first released, Vulklok matched stats of the Lanka. It was very viable, but deemed too viable and subsequently saw some nerfs. 

Yeah I saw the post. But I doubt the same thing will be happening to the Glax- I MEAN Verglas. 

well tbh you never know lmao but it's been Glaxion 2.0 for a while now so I don't think they'll take any action, aside from maybe a buff in Part II of Companion buffs? don't think it needs one, though.

[SneakyErvin]

I've never looked at companions as something I'd bring to kill things, I've always looked at them as something to bring to make me kill things better, or use some precepts for something specific. And with the recent rework those two things improved greatly since we suddenly got more viable pet options and actually more specific choices per frame. Some of the new bonds surely are bad, but something like Manifold should not be looked at as a direct damage tool, it should be seen as what it is, a free primer when combined with the right pets and weapons.

Right now I run 5 different Panzer setups. 1 for Atlas, 1 for Khora, 1 for Hydroid, 1 for Ivara/Titania and 1 general stat stick if I ever want to use it. I also run several similar but different setups for my hound, with differences in either hound or weapon modding, or both. All designed to cover damage types not available to the frames mostly, with minor overlapping for weapons. Like on Dagath where I run a hound with corrosive+heat even though Dagath has heat on her weapon. Cold was fun, but the CC from heat is just such a nice utility added to Manifold. And on Lavos I can run a nice combo to get more unique elements up in preperation of launching his #4.

The pets currently still suffering are the pure melee beast companions, or practically any beast but the panzer. The bonds just do so very little for most of the beasts since they cannot combine the melee focused bonds with something like Manifold. If they had access to that mod and it applied their modded melee statuses, then seismic and vicious could have been intersting, and if it applied to things like swipe, pounce and sharpened claws it would be even better. But as it is the full melee beasts are just running around looking confused while doing little. And if you want them for fire rate and crit, you might aswell just make a panzer stat stick, since it goes sentinel mode when it is downed and continues to shoot quills in that form, and you can also keep spawning duplex clones during that time.

Edited November 1, 2023 by SneakyErvin

[(XBOX)Graysmog]

I guess my biggest question is, is stuff like Verglas supposed to be the new norm or not?

Since if they actually want Sentinels able to kill things as far as Railjack, they're going to need they extra oomph and some buffs across the board. Verglas and its stats are going to have to become fairly common.

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

On 2023-10-31 at 2:57 PM, Wyrmius_Prime said:

I think the kill condition on companion mods is poor design in general. In high to mid level content the companion damage will fall off no matter what, and in low level content the effects are insignificant, because the player will be able to one-hit kill enemies at much higher levels than the companions will.

I'm looking forward to whatever they will cook up for the part 2.

I think this is only valid for high endurance Steel Path play because the regular star chart and most of SP are not issues for pets now. Just like our regular weapons, enhanced armor stripping capabilities have effectively increased companion weapon output, as proven by my Dethcube, Helios and Moas confusing me because they are murdering enemies around me and depleting the red arrows on my radar. The survival stat increases and undying change has been awesome for me and, I don't know about you but, seeing a spectre Dethcube prime firing beams and killing enemies while the real one continues its killing spree is a cool experience.