So currently in the game there are 5 ways in which pets can deal damage to enemies. Those abilities are attack far, attack medium, attack close, rising fury, and electric. These abilities fall into 2 categories on their own which are defensive and offensive. The offensive ones obviously being attack far/medium/close, and the defensive ones being electric and rising fury since those only activate when an enemy approaches and the pet does not intend to directly attack (unless they also have savage which forces them into range).
To begin let me explain the “defensive” category of electric and rising fury. Currently electric outshines pretty much all other attack skills simply because it has high damage and it stuns enemies making them immobile and dealing even more damage. However, the downside to this is the limited amount of situations you can actually use to intentionally deal damage. For the most part asides from a few particular dungeons which you can plant your pet on top of the boss this ability is mostly used for safety against enemies that rush you down. Rising fury on the other hand is very close to worthless since you must stand still in a bullet hell to charge it, and the ability is released the moment you move which means you must plant your pet on top of and enemy and stand still to release the full AoE effect. That makes rising fury very impractical in a game where movement is a key component to survival and cant really be exchanged for more damage output.
Now onward to improving the defensive abilities there is only one that really needs a change. That being rising fury which is pretty bad in its current state. Compared to electric they are pretty similar with them both being very close range and both having a unique attribute which is electric’s paralyze and rising fury’s AoE. Both of these abilities have pretty reasonable damage since they both need to be in around a 1 tile radius of an enemy to deal their damage. Unlike electric though rising fury is triggered by movement of your player rather than an enemy touching him. If rising fury were to be changed to charge power while standing still and then release upon touching an enemy then it would gain a significant amount of utility and defense similar to the current electric just more crowd control oriented rather than single target.
Next is the attack abilities which their name implies. The 3 abilities of attack far, attack mid, and attack far are overshadowed by the utility of electric which most players like having for their pet. Since a pet is seen by most as a way to amplify their character’s own power rather than pets contributing a similar amount of power. Currently all 3 attack abilities have rather lackluster damage and each of them on their own are optimized based on play style. Attack far benefiting staffs/wand, attack mid benefiting bows/daggers, and attack close benefiting swords. Thats not to say attack far cant be useful on on a knight or rogue in certain situations, and attack close not being useful on a wizard or priest. But these abilites are far from amazing and have their negatives.
Currently the negatives of attack abilites are their lack of situational utility and their mediocre damage output for what should be an offensive skill. To give them some utility, all attack abilities should contribute to a player’s soulbound damage. This would allow for new characters to obtain soulbound on enemies much easier in groups when they don’t maxed damage output or high tiered weaponry yet. The next point is to supplement their lackluster damage. They’re damage scales perfectly fine right now. What they’re are missing is amplification from the player! Just as how pets increase our attack power by stunning enemies, being a decoy, and restoring our MP. We should amplify their attacks whenever we receive buffs such as damaging and berserk. So to improve attack abilities they should also receive whatever attack oriented buffs the player currently has (damaging/berserk). This would make a maxed attack far pet (level 100) deal 1500 dps and attack close deal 3000 dps. Thats quite a significant boost, but keep in mind that you can only obtain those numbers by having buffs on yourself.
The goal of these changes is to give all attack oriented pet abilities a fair playing field. Currently the meta is quite literally saturated with heal/mheal/electric type pets. The combined level 90’s of all 3 attack far/mid/close doesn’t even match the amount of level 90 electrics. Not to mention rising fury is basically non-existant with there being only 5 pets with it level 90 or higher. These changes would give all attack abilities near similar capabilities, and would instead be suited more towards your playstyle rather than just going for electric because is stupidly strong compared to the rest.
If you’ve read through this far I appreciate your perseverance through my idea thread. Please like and share if you like the ideas for improving pet attacking abilities. And if you have any questions just comment and I will explain more in depth.