Greetings, Defenders!
Tomorrow, we're releasing an update that makes previous monthly pets available for Defender Medals, and along with that, we're making some updates to the balance of Pet Abilities! Below is an overview from Brett about these changes:
Right now, we have 47 unique pet abilities, but most players only use a very small number of them. In particular, Ghostly Wail (Dragolich) and Poisonous Tips (Earth) are two very standout Pet Abilities. These two abilities act as large damage multipliers, and generally overshadow a lot of other Pet Abilities due to their high damage output and high uptimes.
With this rebalance, we wanted all pet abilities to feel much stronger when used, bringing all pet abilities to the closer to the impact level of abilities like Poisonous Tips. To hit these targets, we've significantly increased both the damage output and the cooldown of most pet abilities. Our goal was to make pet abilities stand out more from spammable hero abilities, so pet abilities are used less frequently but have a more profound impact.
In the update, most pet abilities will see their cooldowns increased to around 30 seconds, 45 seconds, or 60 seconds (a few outliers). In conjunction with these changes, the damage output of most pet abilities will be increasing substantially as well. Common pet abilities like Gato Fireworks are changing like this:
GATO FIREWORKS
OLD VERSION
- 3 Projectiles Dealing 675% Hero Damage Total
- 7s Cooldown
NEW VERSION
- 3 Projectiles Dealing 2,745% Hero Damage Total
- 30s Cooldown
As you can see, this makes Gato Fireworks an incredibly strong attack, and something that shouldn't necessarily just be used whenever the cooldown is available. In conjunction with these balance number changes, we've made some minor tweaks to visuals to try and better emphasize pet ability power. Right now, all pet abilities scale from the Hero Damage stat, but we hope a future patch will allow us to scale from other stats, such as shield abilities scaling from Hero Health.
We've also re-written every pet ability description, trying to explain their exact functions and scaling in the description. Here's a few examples:
- Fires a trio of fireworks dealing 830% magical Hero Damage each.
- Fires a piercing vine that stuns and deals 180% earth Hero Damage per second for 5s.
- Roll an ice ball through 5 enemies, dealing 1,800% water Hero Damage.
And we've fixed more than a few bugs with pet abilities in this update as well. Dragon Protection now works properly, applying a shield on nearby defenses, hurray!
One of the most popular abilities, Poisonous Tips, is undergoing a bit of a technical change, as well as a a balance revision. Poisonous Tips, and abilities like it (Sandstorm), now only add bonus damage to attacks, and no longer increase the basic attack damage itself (that bonus didn't display properly on training dummies and had other issues). Combined with the cooldown changes noted above, Poisonous Tips now looks like this:
POISONOUS TIPS
OLD VERSION
- Basic attack damage increased by 50% and attacks deal 50% bonus earth damage for 8s.
- 15s Cooldown
NEW VERSION
- Attacks deal 130% bonus earth damage for 8s.
- 45s Cooldown
The damage bonus of Poisonous Tips is going up, but you'll notice the cooldown is also increasing substantially, which lowers it's overall uptime. The previous version of Poisonous Tips had such a high uptime and had such a large damage bonus that it was basically an always-on damage boost, which did not encourage clever usage and made it difficult to balance against other pet abilites. These changes will reduce the sustained damage-output of Poisonous Tips, but makes it a more powerful tool to help dig your way out of specific dangerous situations.
We also need to discuss Ghostly Wail, as that specific ability has proven very tricky to rebalance in the new scheme. We wanted to keep the overall power of this ability high, but both the damage output, and the uptime, of this pet ability needed significant rebalancing to bring it in line with other pet abilities. There's no easy way to frame it, but Ghostly Wail was a significant outlier it when it came to pet ability balance, and so we had to make some major updates to sync it up with our other, stronger pet abilities. As such, Ghostly Wail's damage bonus is being only slightly reduced, but, it's uptime is going to undergo a significant reduction.
GHOSTLY WAIL
OLD VERSION (Tier 3)
- Haunt enemies, increasing damage taken by 150% and dealing 19.2% hero damage for 8s.
- 12s Cooldown
- 3,000 Range
NEW VERSION (All Tiers)
- Haunt enemies, increasing damage taken by 100% for 5s.
- 60s Cooldown
- 2,000 Range
Ghostly Wail was an incredibly power pet ability under its old balance, and we hope that this new balance allows it to excel in certain power-play scenarios, but it will take some effort to fully utilize the damage bonus. Piercing Shot and other high-damage abilities still allow for considerable results from Ghostly Wail, but the ability now takes some planning and positioning to best-utilize, rather than being a blanket damage boost that could be safely used to cover every enemy in a lane.
Lastly, all tiers/versions of the same pet ability now deal the same damage, have the same cooldown, etc. This applies to every tiered pet ability, not just Ghostly Wail as noted above. A few of our premium pet abilities had different tiers with different balance, but all this really wound up doing was making the Tier 1 and Tier 2 versions of these abilities underpowered compared to other, non-tiered pet abilities. These abilities will still automatically evolve to the next tier upon pet evolution, just like before, but the gameplay will remain the same despite the fancier visuals. Additionally, we've now labelled the different tiers for these abilities, so you can reroll your pet abilities to different visual tiers intentionally.
Overall, we're extremely excited for these changes to pet abilities. We hope to see a diverse and interesting set of Pet Abilities used at all levels of play in Dungeon Defenders 2, and we'll keep an eye on how the game evolves under this new pet ability direction. We'd love to hear your feedback on both these changes before they're released, and afterwards, so let us know what you think on this new balance for Pet Abilities!