The Clan Lord Sentinel

For future healers especially, it'd be nice to have an NPC that will tell them things about the pet they currently have out, including things like how strong the pet is, whether the healer needs to grow stronger before the pet can grow stronger, etc.

Just basic stuff to let them know where the pet stands vs. the strength of the healer.

Hello Destian, it is good to see your pet.

Icy wrote:Hello Destian, it is good to see your pet.

I'd just like to be able to know that I can't raise my pet's level without having to go kill things with it for 2-3 hours.

And really, younger healers are going to be mystified by this as well so it'd be handy to have the NPC.

I see your point, and the “patch” for it is community info. Now I’m probably the last person that can use the “community” reason, considering that Wiki of potential if not, somewhat outright, spoilers.

If you’d like a Quick player-based fix I suggest making something to post here (or I will gladly add to CLUMP — or give you an account to add info) and then you can make announcements through Koppi & if someone has a long sign, you could even stick a sign near the pet NPCs or outside the hut.

If I was a GM, I’d use the same style of progress messages exiles get between ranks for a Pet Progress NPC: “greetings Destian, bob is making progress” or “bob is starting to learn…” etc. to fix this lack of feedback at pet rank progress.

noivad wrote:I see your point, and the “patch” for it is community info. Now I’m probably the last person that can use the “community” reason, considering that Wiki of potential if not, somewhat outright, spoilers.

If you’d like a Quick player-based fix I suggest making something to post here (or I will gladly add to CLUMP — or give you an account to add info) and then you can make announcements through Koppi & if someone has a long sign, you could even stick a sign near the pet NPCs or outside the hut.

If I was a GM, I’d use the same style of progress messages exiles get between ranks for a Pet Progress NPC: “greetings Destian, bob is making progress” or “bob is starting to learn…” etc. to fix this lack of feedback at pet rank progress.

Right, but my issue is that I'm capped at the 2nd "much stronger" message until I have enough ranks to progress to the 3rd.

The problem is that I didn't track my ranks so I have no idea how many I actually have, what with so many combo trainers being in the mix.

Ergo, the only way to know whether or not I'm eligible for the 3rd much stronger message is running around and killing things until it tells me I'm not eligible for it (which actually resets the pet's exp back to the previous regular "stronger" rank when it happens).

This results in a lot of me just trying to grind out the next rank, then flipping the game window the bird and logging out.

An NPC that told me I wasn't eligible would fix that for myself and any other healer who's wondering the same thing.

Wait, so the pet's experience counter is downsized if he would get to the next level but the healer's level isn't high enough yet? That doesn't seem right. It should just freeze until the healer is high enough level, and then the pet gets upgraded to the next level.

I don't think the pet should necessarily continue to accrue experience if this happens, but I wouldn't be against it.

Chmee wrote:Wait, so the pet's experience counter is downsized if he would get to the next level but the healer's level isn't high enough yet? That doesn't seem right.

It's how Slarti designed it and I'm guessing it basically NEEDS to do that due to the fragility of CL's code.

I'm fine with it being that way, but it would help a great deal of we could be told when we've crossed the threshold of being able to level the pet again.

Destian wrote:

Chmee wrote:Wait, so the pet's experience counter is downsized if he would get to the next level but the healer's level isn't high enough yet? That doesn't seem right.

It's how Slarti designed it and I'm guessing it basically NEEDS to do that due to the fragility of CL's code.

I'm fine with it being that way, but it would help a great deal of we could be told when we've crossed the threshold of being able to level the pet again.

If I remember correctly it's mostly out of my own laziness, it's not a requirement. It basically reduces a bunch of special casing I'd have to write to handle the special case of a pet at the cap, mostly related to whether you message the healer about the failed level up. A quick hack would be to reduce it to like, 3/4, instead of zero. Of course then you'd get nagging messages a bit more often.

Slartibartfast wrote:

Destian wrote:

Chmee wrote:Wait, so the pet's experience counter is downsized if he would get to the next level but the healer's level isn't high enough yet? That doesn't seem right.

It's how Slarti designed it and I'm guessing it basically NEEDS to do that due to the fragility of CL's code.

I'm fine with it being that way, but it would help a great deal of we could be told when we've crossed the threshold of being able to level the pet again.

If I remember correctly it's mostly out of my own laziness, it's not a requirement. It basically reduces a bunch of special casing I'd have to write to handle the special case of a pet at the cap, mostly related to whether you message the healer about the failed level up. A quick hack would be to reduce it to like, 3/4, instead of zero. Of course then you'd get nagging messages a bit more often.

IMO, nagging is an acceptable trade off for retaining 3/4 exp.

Slartibartfast wrote:

Destian wrote:

Chmee wrote:Wait, so the pet's experience counter is downsized if he would get to the next level but the healer's level isn't high enough yet? That doesn't seem right.

It's how Slarti designed it and I'm guessing it basically NEEDS to do that due to the fragility of CL's code.

I'm fine with it being that way, but it would help a great deal of we could be told when we've crossed the threshold of being able to level the pet again.

If I remember correctly it's mostly out of my own laziness, it's not a requirement. It basically reduces a bunch of special casing I'd have to write to handle the special case of a pet at the cap, mostly related to whether you message the healer about the failed level up. A quick hack would be to reduce it to like, 3/4, instead of zero. Of course then you'd get nagging messages a bit more often.

That'd be preferable. Anything to not need to reacquire the entire rank all over again would be ideal.

One last thing occurred to me: one of the guiding CL tenets is that players should never loose* a ton of exp. Pet ranks do take a good investment of time, and paramount in many players interest is not losing things that take a lot of effort to aquire. This could easily be that case: while one rank might be negligible, over the course of time, it adds up. Plus player frustration turns what was supposed to be a pleasant reward for effort into a unpleasant slight despite doing exactly what it was designed to do.

I haven’t seem the code based of the complexity of cases that need to be evaluated, aside from 3/4 (if its a quick fix), another solution (longer patch) would be to roll lost exp (even 1/4 should you go with 3/4)

Into a accumulating “fund” of exp points that translate to the percentage of your pet digging up items from common very rare.
each time the cap is hit, the exp is shifted to a randomPetFind script which rolls the dice on the current percentage ratio.
This would 180 the frustration if people knew, that exp wasn’t lost, just shifted to increase the odds of a good roll (a rare item is found).
You could also use this mechanism to introduce new crafted items to take to smiths to study so they can make them.

The idea is easy, the hard part would be coding it among the spaghetti, I assume.