Bonedancers - Die Laughing?

[Roo Stercogburn]

Observations and thoughts...


The Commander (I call Bond) is fairly solid. Does what its told, smacks away at things dilligently. Will occasionally actually produce a cool looking move. Remembers to hit mobs that are attacking you. Not really many problems here by itself. Shpeeks like thish, but in an acshent that lady shkeletonsh find very shexshy. Most agree that this original pet is the best.

Archer Pet. This one is flakey as hell. I think its a bitch and its in heat. Likes to run off for no apparent reason and can come back with a slavering pack of mobs after it which its obviously been flaunting itself in front of because DAMN those beasties want someone's leg to hump. Have to set to passive as soon as pull finished to make sure it doesn't go off. Of course, being female and in heat all the other pets run away after it. I'm POSITIVE they have a wider rictus when they come back. I'm daren't ask what they've been doing.

Tank Pet. I think this is the little brother of the Commander. When it appears on the scene they can start fighting each other when you're not looking. Half expecting them to say "Are we there yet" when I'm wandering out to Vanern or somewhere. Brings out the worst in the normally placid Commander. I think its jealous of its big brother since big bro gets the cool looking headgear. I think it has weapon-envy.

Healer Pet. My healer pet is called Osbourne because its possibly the most flaky character I've ever encountered in game. Nervously skitters around a fight trying to find somewhere safe, and then decides the safest place is in the middle of that bunch of agro mobs you are trying to keep away from. This is the kind of logic you get in most horror films of the its-safe-out-here-so-I'm-going-into-the-dark-scary-house-by-myself kind of way. If the healer pet had large breasts and blonde hair the scene would be complete.
I think it would like to own its own pet budgie since it keeps trying to attract every fecking quasit in Darkness Falls. Why take the nice safe route around the wall when you can lag behind, and cross the middle of the room attracting anything that feels hungry. On the plus side it is the only healer you will meet that doesn't have a macro "Peel!! PEEL! FFS GET THIS BEASTIE ORF ME! ARE YOU AWAKE!!!" etc. This is refreshing, however it takes this to extremes since when its getting gnawed on it forgets to mention it to its skeletal buddies who happily ignore for example as a Fell Cat is munching on its butt.

Spells:

Shroud of Pointlessnes (focus area effect speed decrease). Is this the most useless spell ever invented or what. Tiny area (unless very highly specced), average range and you have to stand still. Fantastic. I can think of an amazing number of uses for this if I wanted to race fix, but not much else. (Ok slightly off. In game you could have someone area nuking and slow the targets from reaching them but unfortunately, every ae spell in game I'm aware has a larger radius of effect than this spell so your unlikely to be completely effective).

----

And now my friends, the rant...

I hit 40 with my bonedancer last night. I was seriously going to respec to darkness and be a full on nuker with it having tried out both the other lines, and also done a mixture. The various atrocious bugs with the AI have convinced me that the only way to control this class to any reasonable degree, is to have the pets sidelined and the focus of the action on the caster.
Also, I have little hope for the AI issues being sorted in any timely fashion. There are some ludicrous flaws in the control for this class. For example, having pets with ranged attacks, but only being able to get them to attack something by sending in a melee pet. This is ridiculous and obviously hasn't been thought through.

This means I've had to go mainly suppression, which I absolutely didn't want to do and in fact, my choice of race and stats were based on the fact that I had no intention of going suppression.
This means probably a variation on the cookie cutter specs that are floating around, rather than something that I can tailor to my own preferred style of play which is after all, the idea of having different spec lines.

Lazy programming means 2 out of 3 spec lines being a liability to people that would group with this class, and hence not really something you want to do unless your only taking the char as far as battlegrounds.
The reason I say they are a liability is because the only thing you can do in a group is set pets to passive except in emergencies because of the collection of bugs with these npc chars and the extremely dodgy control method in place which is obviously just a kludge to fit them into the existing interface. What is the use in speccing in lines that increase the effectiveness of your pets when you are going to have to set them to passive most of the time to stop them from getting hunting groups killed? The only pets of any use when in passive mode are healers. Guess what. They are on suppression.

Good grief, pets that attack rooted mobs which aren't even attacking the caster? I know this affects all pet classes but this is a fairly fundamental flaw and made worse by the fact you have multiple pets going completely bananas. Healer pets that simply stand there and die when attacked rather than the other pets attacking the mob. Doh!

Everyone finds the pets fighting each other hilarious until you realise that the only way to stop them is to release the commander. Bear in mind that resummoning and buffing can use nearly all your power. Hope your MCL timer doesn't have 4 mins 30 to go when the pets start fighting, you just got yourself time to make some coffee. Again. Thats actually another point: you shouldn't need to depend on an RA to get your class functioning after logging on. REDUCE the amount of power needed for summoning and buffing this class. Its appalling.

Mythic refer to these as Indirectly Controlled Pets. There is only one reason for this: they couldn't figure out the ergonomics of giving you the option to have greater control if you wanted it and fitting it into the existing interface. Even some \ commands which could be put on toolbar would be a start. Formation ones don't count. This has never proved to be of much value I'm afraid and doesn't enhance the use of pets, just their layout.

4 pets, only 1 you can control. Possibly forgivable if they worked properly. Sorry, bad job.

To finish: I still think the Bonedancer is quite fun, BUT its appalling to control and if its your first pet class your going to get frustrated very fast and expect to have very annoyed group buddies from time to time.

/rant off? For the moment

 

[rynnor]

You have to wonder how much testing they actually did with the bonedancer - its got lots of nice ideas but the realisation of them stinks.

So far I havent seen many hints of these problems being addressed in future Mythic patches either - still give it 6 months and they might fix a few whilst simultaneously introducing a dozen more

The Necro is buggy as hell too - did SI get tested at all except for some cursory testing of the new Gfx engine?

 

[Solarius]

The same issues exist with the Animist class - fantastic idea on paper, but completly opposite under implementation. There's FnF (stands for Fire off and Forget what the Animist wants) that either hit the mob you've pulled once then sit drooling at the prospect of hitting that 100 other mobs outside of range for the remaining 1m55s they last, in dungeons they don't even notice the attacking mob, and instead stare intently at the monster through the walls and floor thats they'd like to hit. All 'detatched pets' have the equivelent of 66% spec, begging the question why the hell have you spent all your spec points in one line, when it makes absolutly no difference to the performance of the class! Bombers have serious pathing issues, so bad in some places the take whats described as 'the scenic route' to hit a mob thats right in front of them, or end up unable to do anything because the same mob isnt in los (to quote the necromancers latest grief, if there's even a blade of grass in the way'. Similar to the problem bonedancers have with fighting pets, if you try casting a turret somewhere thats not in one of the 'approved' spots, you go through the whole cast animation and lose the power cost only to get the message 'your ground target isn't visible' - and you're standing on it!

There really should have been more testing done with these classes, which have become from potentially fun, though challanging, to play, to complete nightmares all but the most stubborn masochist would give up on.

 

[Tilda]

necro's are the same but totally dependant on the pet, i cba to post a big rant, but necro's are the most bugged class in the game, even worst than BD's

Tilda

hell, is your power taken from your bar befor you cast the spell, so if you have no LoS, or your target is out of range you _still_ lose the power?

 

[Solarius]

Originally posted by Tilda
necro's are the same but totally dependant on the pet, i cba to post a big rant, but necro's are the most bugged class in the game, even worst than BD's

Tilda

hell, is your power taken from your bar befor you cast the spell, so if you have no LoS, or your target is out of range you _still_ lose the power?

Yep, that happens with Animists too. Go throught the whole animation (5s for turrets) , the powers deducted, and then it says 'you can't see your ground target from here' Worse, each turret takes 20%-30% of your power (if you use the best turret at least) Tha'd be like summoning your shade and getting 'I'm sorry, but this service is not available, please try later'

With bombers, it doesn't even bother saying that. The bomber just stands there, doing nothing (eg root bomber targetting a mob thats running at you), then dies without 'going off'.

Edit: I think the powerloss no LOS bug is common to all casters, not 100% sure though

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

One of the healer pets particularly annoying habits is when it gets agro is it runs into and through a wall. The fight then takes places in this non-space. Not only can't you target the mob, you can't easily get the pet back. Using Stay, and Passive sort of work, but not always.

However, you can't easily be sure if one or more minions has been killed because sometimes they go charging halfway across the dungeon.

So you are left wondering, and to make sure you get a healer pet, you recast. You use the power up but get a message saying your commander has as many pets as it can control.

Not the same as a Necro, but similar in result.

 

[Belomar]

Well, from an enemy perspective, a Bonedancer has 4 pets, all of them grey and green but interrupting a caster nicely, thank-you-very-much. On top of that, if the BD is a Suppression-specced you get a 1500 range insta lifetap on a 4 second timer, and you've got a class that's near impossible to solo (as a caster).

 

[Jace]

Well seeing as the pets already in the game prior to SI still had problems after all that time . . . did anyone actually think these new pet classes weren't going to be plagued with problems?

 

[rynnor]

Not really but considering all the problems with the original pet casters for each realm I'm surprised they had another go - a new pure caster for each realm would have been a lot easier to code/less buggy.

I think the Bonedancers/Animist multiple pet AI would be the most difficult thing to code personally - a lot of the other bugs are reasonably trivial to fix unless the code is looped like spaghetti.

The problem is that they used the existing mob logic and just adapted it (rather poorly) instead of coding the pets up as something new - pretty lazy as this affects half the new classes in SI as well as the original pet classes.

 

[Kerram Darktyde]

Originally posted by Belomar
Well, from an enemy perspective, a Bonedancer has 4 pets, all of them grey and green but interrupting a caster nicely, thank-you-very-much. On top of that, if the BD is a Suppression-specced you get a 1500 range insta lifetap on a 4 second timer, and you've got a class that's near impossible to solo (as a caster).

All the new classes get insta or hard hitting lifetaps or DOTs.
you just need to change the tactics you use..
But yes a full power bar and a half awake Supp BD can kill almost anything solo, unless you use the right tactics.

 

[old.Tohtori]

Ill tell you my opinions when i get to RvR.

 

[eynar]

Originally posted by Belomar
Well, from an enemy perspective, a Bonedancer has 4 pets, all of them grey and green but interrupting a caster nicely, thank-you-very-much. On top of that, if the BD is a Suppression-specced you get a 1500 range insta lifetap on a 4 second timer, and you've got a class that's near impossible to solo (as a caster).

What's that gotta do with the initial post? Ffs, someone posts a thread about the bugs a class is suffering, and you start to to whine about how uber they are....sad

 

[Belomar]

Originally posted by Kerram Darktyde
you just need to change the tactics you use..
But yes a full power bar and a half awake Supp BD can kill almost anything solo, unless you use the right tactics.

Yeah, sure. However, with a BD, I first need to find the caster itself among all those pets, qc nearsight and root him, and then cope with 4 pets charging me. Root em all or AoE disease, stack DoTs on the bonedancer and leg it. Not exactly a walk in the park.

 

[Belomar]

Originally posted by eynar
What's that gotta do with the initial post? Ffs, someone posts a thread about the bugs a class is suffering, and you start to to whine about how uber they are....sad

Kindly shut your piehole. I offered an opinion from an enemy's viewpoint of the class. With half a brain, this could be recognized as an attempt at comforting the original poster that his class is not so bad after all.

 

[Flimgoblin]

Suppression bonedancers are cheesy as hell...

But the class is pretty hideously bugged - bit like necromancers... in keep fights (at the moment) they're evil, but they're hideously bugged... ditto animists.

It's like a cripple with a machinegun - hope you specced in 'ammo'.

 

[old.Tohtori]

I think there's a working spec for all classes...afterall, a parry/weapon specced warrior with no shield is good but it's not best you can be.

Friend has a Bonearmy specced BD and he kicks ass in rvr with the rest of them.

It's all in how you play them.

 

[inqy]

Originally posted by Flimgoblin
It's like a cripple with a machinegun - hope you specced in 'ammo'.

 

[old.Tohtori]

WARNING! LOW LEVEL BONEDANCER COMMENTING!

Ahem...

Insta lifetap.

Kept me alive against a yellow while Mr. Bones bashed it to oblivion.

I'd say this class works since i can solo two yellows at the same time, with one bone.

 

[Urgat Rip-Eye]

Actually...

Despite Roo's very acurate bug discriptions... i gotta disagree with one thing...

"Shroud of Pointlessnes (focus area effect speed decrease). Is this the most useless spell ever invented or what. Tiny area (unless very highly specced), average range and you have to stand still. Fantastic. I can think of an amazing number of uses for this if I wanted to race fix, but not much else. (Ok slightly off. In game you could have someone area nuking and slow the targets from reaching them but unfortunately, every ae spell in game I'm aware has a larger radius of effect than this spell so your unlikely to be completely effective)."

Shroud actually has a decent use in PvE.
A bonedancer maintaining a focus snare (which doesnt generate agro) on a mob (or group of mobs) can effectivly ensure that his partner, another caster, can kite said mob without any risk at all.

Said partner could be a shaman or a BA bonedancer for maximum DOT goodness.

 

[eynar]

Originally posted by Belomar
Kindly shut your piehole. I offered an opinion from an enemy's viewpoint of the class. With half a brain, this could be recognized as an attempt at comforting the original poster that his class is not so bad after all.

 

[Hargh]

Never mind tho becuase Savages own.

 

[Kerram Darktyde]

you forgot to add the Healers Tactic for avoiding aggro in places like DF which is the second he casts his first heal he falls through floor and does not return till the battle is over..

The shroud spell is badly bugged does not work very well and can bug your power bar if you use it while low on Power
if you run out of power and have it running it stops you getting Power back untill you use a potion or MCL to "unstick" it

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Hehe

I'm glad someone posted something good about the shroud but I did actually mention that this was a possibility

I respecced to full suppression and already hate it. Pets are mostly under control again, but at the expense of decent damage output, one of the reasons I really didn't want to do this. Agro handling is ok up to 2 adds yellow or lower. Orange or above can go either way. Yes, this might seem powerful to some but consider what an SM can do in PvE and its not actually that stunning. (Ask Betty/Priri what Roo can take on though it has to be said Betty completely rocks )

Dungeons like Doduns Gruva are a complete no-go area. I was actually just standing at a junction and shifted position very slightly and the pests (hmm, misspelling, but I think I'll leave it in) moved around and woke up a very nasty purple con, red I believe at lvl50. In the best tradition of great heroes I legged it. Don't know Doduns too well and took a wrong turn. Decided at the very least it was a suicide out. Theorin killed it fortunately but I manage to find other ways to get myself killed shortly afterwards and yes, it was the healer running into a wall yet again. You can't even release the bugger because you can't click on it to select it :/

I've found that simply turning around to move back the way you came can cause the pests to move back behind you... into the agro range of mobs. This isn't a bug, just something else you have to watch out for and has to be accepted by players of this class.

I believe a lot of the problems aren't instantly apparent at low levels because you only get extra pets at lvls 15, 30 and 45 so its only as you get to higher levels you begin to tear your hair out. For BG, you're not going to have a lot to worry about with only 2 pests.

 

[Treniel-]

only bonedancer i seen in RvR so far looked scary as hell i didn't have a clue what to do so i just charged at him (he was blue) and killed him in a few hits...worse thing was that when i scrolled back only 1 pet was attacking me and it was for bugger all damage.

 

[old.tuppe]

you can release any subpet if want, choose subpet and press release.
no need kill commander.
1st time to me happend in varulv yesterday, healer agro allmost every mob near him, there was 2 quixos, some dogs, copple scruffs and copple more mobs, 0 change do nothing.
scruff was running behind healer and yelling help same time
happend copple time whit pragmatic, luckily these only get ~2 friends up -> empty power bar.
reason is killing mob take alott time, so mob get bored and start call family up

using still potection formation, most time healer pet is behind me, easy to look after this way.
pulling whit LT, succesfull LT! maybe 1-2 more time in fight.
1 healer and 1 buffer pet.
so far doing fine.

 

[Flimgoblin]

Originally posted by old.tuppe
you can release any subpet if want, choose subpet and press release.

only if it's clickable ...

if it's 3 floors down doing the funky healer-aggro-dance...

 

[Brannor McThife]

I think that Mythic wasn't too concerned with the pet issues in PvE, as that is only the "path" to the "end game", which is RvR. And in RvR the pets function well, as there are very few pathing issues (except any form of stairs, etc).

In SI testing, I took a 50 Supp BD with only DF bought items, and took down Umbrood Warriors solo. No RA's, no special items. Sure, ask any pet class how much a pain pathing is in dungeons. Pets love to go through the middle of archways in DF if they're not right next to you. And the whole new "AI" where creatures / healer pets run away if attacked is, IMHO, a joke. In testing I had a healer pet run across an entire zone wile being chased (it got stuck in the zone corner).

So yes, basically, I totally agree, the pet classes as a whole, and specifically a class that has sub pets (Animist/BD) are crap in PvE because of the lack of control. However, since the end-game is RvR, and you "should" spend most of your time in RvR, Mythic somehow justified not fixing them for PvE.

-G