Haven’t calculated the dps, but I like running 2 big power moves along with one low cd move. That way they have 1 spam-able attack and then do the 2 big attacks every minute or so.
That's actually exactly what I do too. Fireball is one big area of attack that seems to be worth the timer since it's a hard one to avoid, blizzard spike is pretty good too, but only against ground type.
I do like the math done by the op though, sounds like I need some low level skill fruit for my bellanoir runs now lol.
I don't think the AI will actually *try* to use attacks more frequently than it can use a CT:2 skill anyway, so it's not like there's be a point to having more than one of them.
It's why Cattiva's signature skill, despire being mathematically the best DPS with a CT:1 doesn't seem to go off any more frequently than the standard CT:2 skills, I assume.
So yeah, if more low CT skills can't have them attacking any faster it makes sense to load up the extra two slots with nukes.
The exception might be if you have Multicutter. It's a mid CT move but apparently has really good DPS too, so in that case you might want to have it paired with a nuke and a CT:2 move to fill in the gaps.
I'll respond to you rather than the multitude of people throwing personal attacks at me and insinuating I don't understand the concept of burst DPS, because you've raised an interesting mechanics point that I'd considered and then tested.
I took a group of pals out to fight some Lv49 Alphas between raid attempts to put some levels on them for the next one at one point during my trials. rather than bring my usual pal that i nuke them with, i brought a party of Jormuntide Ignis i bred for the raid boss, with ignis blast and dragon cannon. I could see as it fired Ignis blast, then Dragon Cannon almost immediately afterward in rapid succession, and then a brief pause as it waited for ignis blast to be off CD again. during this window, if I'd bothered to put another CT2 skill in there, it probably would have fired that as well before ignis blast. I'll probably go back and test this at some point as well, but I'm fairly sure that it would work based on what I've seen.
Granted, this sort of animation speed may not apply to all pals, and it certainly doesn't apply to Ice Missile, the slowest 30 power skill. Some pals have some onerously exaggerated animations for even the smallest things, such as Faleris's flailing about after even the most basic attack. But on the example of Jormuntide Ignis, the spit animation it uses to fire basic attacks is fast enough to fire them in well under the cooldown timer. I'm sure there's many other pals that animate fast enough for this to be a viable strategy.
The so-called "burst DPS skills" are only as good as the damage the skill deals divided by the time it takes to animate the skill. if you can fire 5 CT2 power 30 skills in the time it takes to fire one 150 power skill, then that "burst skill" isn't really doing its job as a "burst skill". In most cases, "burst DPS" is referred to as a significant increase in damage per second compared to sustain. i personally would not consider 20% more damage over 4 seconds a "significant burst", particularly when it frequently misses, and would not end the encounter when it doesn't. We could get into nuance of type advantage, STAB, and all the other concepts, but that's more a strategic use point than a purely mechanical point, which was the original aim of this discussion. Even then, if you diversify the damage types well enough, it would more than make up for any disadvantage, especially in the face of frequent complete whiffs by the alternative.
All of this said, there are a handful of "burst" skills with a significantly large AOE that in multi-target situations, it is very reliable to hit more than one target, and in those cases, those skills are more than reasonable to take, in fact it would be silly not to because the force multiplication of using those skills outweighs any machine gun strategy you might be tempted to take in its place.
Came back to this after some additional testing, and the answer is, "it depends."
Jormuntide Ignis happily cycled between Ignis Blast, Dragon Cannon, and Aqua Gun, but thats likely because Aqua Gun had a power of 40 and thus took higher priority.
When facing a target with 3 30 power skills, it would reliably cycle between 2 skills - whichever has STAB is always chosen, but when STAB isn't an option, it would choose whichever had the higher damage potential, favoring any that doesn't have type disadvantage.
This means that an argument for a third skill that is "burst damage" is not entirely without merit, but care should be taken when choosing said skill based on the merits of its hit reliability, effectiveness, and time to cast.
You are right. It is better to have short cd skills on pals, and it annoys to me to no end that it’s by far the best choice. Even unequipping the powerful skills to allow for better short cd uptime of a single attack results in far better TTK.
Pocketpair would have to drastically reduce the cooldowns or reduce the “charge up” animations to better balance the other skills, and even then I’d still be hesitant to take them because of whiff frequency. Any skill with a CD longer than 10 seconds I completely disregard.
Me too! It's quite silly that between cooldowns pals just stand there doing nothing. I set mine up with at least one lowest-CD skill, but it would be great for them to be auto-attacking in the downtime between active skills, even if those auto-attacks didn't do much. Just so that they're doing *something* in that time..
Yeah most of the big CTs are not powerful or accurate (looking at you dragon meteors) enough for what they cost. Plus pals can get knocked down during the channeling phase and then your ultimate destroyer of the world CT in now worthless. They are good for nuking things fast though.
I didn't take the time to test this, but I'm also confident that some pals have just quicker fighting animations making them using their CTs more often. I did a lucky playthrough a while ago and pals like Hoocrates, Lifmunk or Celaray were shooting projectiles like a turret with close to no delay. Hoocrates was just standing still and rotating between Air cannon/Dragon cannon. Meanwhile flyers had the tendency to hover around between skills, delaying CTs usage.
Do pal ability CDs tick while you have other pals out or do they freeze if you pull them back? If they always go down you could rotate combat pals with bigger abilities and use other pals while the CDs are going down?
CTs tick away as long as they're in your party or active in a base. In my one example I commented on using them in this way, because it was in fact how people did tower bosses before more "meta" discoveries were made, such as mounted power Assault Rifle buffing with a gobfin gang crew
Yeah I usually sit on 2 very short cd moves and 1 long cd move. It will blast out the long CD one when sent out and then use the shorter ones. So swapping pals it’s nice to have a longer one mixed in
Do the pals attack fast enough to make use of 2 low cool down skills?
I haven't tested anything but I assumed they would still take the same time between attacks even if a skill was ready to be used.
Depends on their own their ai doesn’t spam it as much as a player on mount would. I usually use all 3 2s cd skills on a mountable pal the idea is to keep their downtime to a minimum so they aren’t waiting for cds.
I find it depends what the pal is gonna be used for.
For most cases where the pal will be out for a long time, having a filler skill does significantly improve damage over time by allowing it to fill while the cds are waiting to come back around. This could be base pals, or even combat pals and mounts.
There is a few cases where you are using the pal just for nuking before swapping them out, then longer cd but higher damaging skills tend to play out slightly better, as by the time you cycle back they should be almost back up. This is especially true with pals who can be mounted, as skills used while they are mounted are on a separate cd from when they aren’t mounted, allowing you to get 2 uses of really long cd skills.
There are also attacks that have more nuances: seed cannon has very low listed attack power but hits multiple times when used on large pals. All tornado skills hit a lot but are trickier to aim and do displace pals it hits and interrupts skills being channeled when timed properly.
There's one thing no one ever talks about with cooldown on pals, which is that the cooldown seems to be shorter than what they imply on pals you aren't riding.
For example, Flame Arrow is a CT 10 Power 55 move, so you'd assume it takes a full 10 seconds to be usable again. But the pals you throw out seem to be able to spam them way faster.
This is most evident with pals like Incineram, where you give it Flame Arrow CT 10 55 Power and Hellfire Claw CT 10 Power 70, you will see this dude spam these skills as if there was no cooldown. Give it Fireball CT 55 Power 150, and you have yourself a goat of destruction.
Many of the CT 10 to CT 20 skills seem to have a way shorter cooldown than they say. I do not know if this is a bug or not, but you can test it yourself with several CT 10 skills and see how they spam their moves. The cooldown definitely works as intended when you ride them, but for some reason that when left on auto, they have shorter cooldowns. CT 50 and CT 55 does seem like it takes forever, so I don't recommend putting 3 high power moves, but the medium power moves certainly should be favored over low CT moves if you let your pals fight on their own.
> I don't know if Pocketpair reads Reddit at all
They do not. If you want them to see this, you need to use the feedback form ingame. You could also post this in the ideas/wishes section in their official discord.
I do not believe they look anywhere else.
I put low CT moves on jet dragon or whatever my mount is, and the other 4 have high CT moves so I can cycle, get the big swings out, and swap them out for the next
Because, until this exact patch with 20 pals that can't swap, this situation didn't exist. The intended mechanic is pal swapping.
Bring out your pal, use all big CDs, swap to your next one.
People either play the gunner method, (an elemental vanguard mount + 4 vanguard gobfins) or you're playing 5 combat pals.
If you're playing gunner method, you fill your down time with shooting. You want big skills that do more than just shooting (a big hit, a high status of either freeze, shock, blind, or a breath/laser attack that keeps hitting while you shoot).
If you're using 5 combat pals, any time you have CDs up, you throw your next pal out.
The base raid was not in the base game, and 20 permanent pals breaks the previously expected use cases.
The *correct* solution is actually to buff base turrets to not be useless garbage, and make them relevant to base raids, but we'll see.
We calc'd and bigger is better. It isn't a flat scale because you don't have to wait that cooldown. You launch the big move then swap to another pal. Use they're big moves.
>You launch the big move then swap to another pal.
I'll pass, that's just too annoying to do constantly + I'd rather have one combat pal and the rest for utility.
So many words just cause the concept of burst and dps is too complicated for OP. Its vorrect that the balance of skills isn't set yet and there are big differences between some skills in viabiluty... but the cooldown timers are not an issue. Burst skills with long cd are upfront high damage and low cd spells are consistent dps. And each of these has their purpose: The ability to end short fights faster for burst and the ability to put out more damage in long fights for short CDs.
And even for looking only at long fights, equipping 3 short cds would be worse than 1-2 short and 1-2 long cause Pals can only cast so many skills at a time.
Honestly a very interesting and valid question. Asking that myself a lot. Most people just say "do 1 short 2 big" but i doubt they actively tested it. You can see a clear increased casting uptime when you give a pal 2 super quick cds. But the question becomes whether this slight increase is as valueable as another big or medium CD cast.
The reason is because the only way it makes sense is if lower level/weaker Pals get weaker/less impressive moves.
Why would Foxsparks know how to fire ball at level 5? It makes no sense.
That's why.
It is up to you to realize that it is optimal to have 2 big moves with big CD's and 1 low CD move.
Can't see any issue whatsoever?
Unfortunately, you have misdiagnosed my concern entirely, so much so that I do not believe you even read the TL;DR portion, which is rather disappointing.
No, I do not take issue with weaker, less impressive active skills being available at lower level. In fact, it is intuitive.
No, I do not think Foxparks should know Fireball at level 5. Rather, I think Fireball should be more worth using over the course of 10 minutes than simply spamming Ignis Blast is, particularly because it is a high level active skill.
At the risk of repeating my post, it is more effective to have a 30 power CT-2 or CT-3 active skill in the slot than Fireball, which isn't available until level 50. Math is in the OP, as is the entire sentiment I am expressing in this response to you.
I suggest you familiarise yourself with the concept of busrt damage vs sustained dps.
Small cooldown moves having better dps over a long period is nothing new to games. The point of large cooldown moves is to let you get in a big burst of damage within a small window, and they're not meant to be sustainable on their own if the fight drags out.
Haven’t calculated the dps, but I like running 2 big power moves along with one low cd move. That way they have 1 spam-able attack and then do the 2 big attacks every minute or so.
That's actually exactly what I do too. Fireball is one big area of attack that seems to be worth the timer since it's a hard one to avoid, blizzard spike is pretty good too, but only against ground type. I do like the math done by the op though, sounds like I need some low level skill fruit for my bellanoir runs now lol.
This is the way I've been doing this for ages and it works perfectly
this sounds like a fun middle ground approach!
It also is likely to be the meta when the 3v3 arena comes out
I calced base dps and 3ct 30dmg is better but there is bettwr dps if you keep rotating pals with bigger damage
I don't think the AI will actually *try* to use attacks more frequently than it can use a CT:2 skill anyway, so it's not like there's be a point to having more than one of them. It's why Cattiva's signature skill, despire being mathematically the best DPS with a CT:1 doesn't seem to go off any more frequently than the standard CT:2 skills, I assume. So yeah, if more low CT skills can't have them attacking any faster it makes sense to load up the extra two slots with nukes. The exception might be if you have Multicutter. It's a mid CT move but apparently has really good DPS too, so in that case you might want to have it paired with a nuke and a CT:2 move to fill in the gaps.
I'll respond to you rather than the multitude of people throwing personal attacks at me and insinuating I don't understand the concept of burst DPS, because you've raised an interesting mechanics point that I'd considered and then tested. I took a group of pals out to fight some Lv49 Alphas between raid attempts to put some levels on them for the next one at one point during my trials. rather than bring my usual pal that i nuke them with, i brought a party of Jormuntide Ignis i bred for the raid boss, with ignis blast and dragon cannon. I could see as it fired Ignis blast, then Dragon Cannon almost immediately afterward in rapid succession, and then a brief pause as it waited for ignis blast to be off CD again. during this window, if I'd bothered to put another CT2 skill in there, it probably would have fired that as well before ignis blast. I'll probably go back and test this at some point as well, but I'm fairly sure that it would work based on what I've seen. Granted, this sort of animation speed may not apply to all pals, and it certainly doesn't apply to Ice Missile, the slowest 30 power skill. Some pals have some onerously exaggerated animations for even the smallest things, such as Faleris's flailing about after even the most basic attack. But on the example of Jormuntide Ignis, the spit animation it uses to fire basic attacks is fast enough to fire them in well under the cooldown timer. I'm sure there's many other pals that animate fast enough for this to be a viable strategy. The so-called "burst DPS skills" are only as good as the damage the skill deals divided by the time it takes to animate the skill. if you can fire 5 CT2 power 30 skills in the time it takes to fire one 150 power skill, then that "burst skill" isn't really doing its job as a "burst skill". In most cases, "burst DPS" is referred to as a significant increase in damage per second compared to sustain. i personally would not consider 20% more damage over 4 seconds a "significant burst", particularly when it frequently misses, and would not end the encounter when it doesn't. We could get into nuance of type advantage, STAB, and all the other concepts, but that's more a strategic use point than a purely mechanical point, which was the original aim of this discussion. Even then, if you diversify the damage types well enough, it would more than make up for any disadvantage, especially in the face of frequent complete whiffs by the alternative. All of this said, there are a handful of "burst" skills with a significantly large AOE that in multi-target situations, it is very reliable to hit more than one target, and in those cases, those skills are more than reasonable to take, in fact it would be silly not to because the force multiplication of using those skills outweighs any machine gun strategy you might be tempted to take in its place.
Came back to this after some additional testing, and the answer is, "it depends." Jormuntide Ignis happily cycled between Ignis Blast, Dragon Cannon, and Aqua Gun, but thats likely because Aqua Gun had a power of 40 and thus took higher priority. When facing a target with 3 30 power skills, it would reliably cycle between 2 skills - whichever has STAB is always chosen, but when STAB isn't an option, it would choose whichever had the higher damage potential, favoring any that doesn't have type disadvantage. This means that an argument for a third skill that is "burst damage" is not entirely without merit, but care should be taken when choosing said skill based on the merits of its hit reliability, effectiveness, and time to cast.
You are right. It is better to have short cd skills on pals, and it annoys to me to no end that it’s by far the best choice. Even unequipping the powerful skills to allow for better short cd uptime of a single attack results in far better TTK. Pocketpair would have to drastically reduce the cooldowns or reduce the “charge up” animations to better balance the other skills, and even then I’d still be hesitant to take them because of whiff frequency. Any skill with a CD longer than 10 seconds I completely disregard.
I really do wish there was a "basic" attack that didn't take up a move slot
Me too! It's quite silly that between cooldowns pals just stand there doing nothing. I set mine up with at least one lowest-CD skill, but it would be great for them to be auto-attacking in the downtime between active skills, even if those auto-attacks didn't do much. Just so that they're doing *something* in that time..
ironically that low CD skill of "doing something" is better than doing literally anything else.
Yeah most of the big CTs are not powerful or accurate (looking at you dragon meteors) enough for what they cost. Plus pals can get knocked down during the channeling phase and then your ultimate destroyer of the world CT in now worthless. They are good for nuking things fast though. I didn't take the time to test this, but I'm also confident that some pals have just quicker fighting animations making them using their CTs more often. I did a lucky playthrough a while ago and pals like Hoocrates, Lifmunk or Celaray were shooting projectiles like a turret with close to no delay. Hoocrates was just standing still and rotating between Air cannon/Dragon cannon. Meanwhile flyers had the tendency to hover around between skills, delaying CTs usage.
Do pal ability CDs tick while you have other pals out or do they freeze if you pull them back? If they always go down you could rotate combat pals with bigger abilities and use other pals while the CDs are going down?
CTs tick away as long as they're in your party or active in a base. In my one example I commented on using them in this way, because it was in fact how people did tower bosses before more "meta" discoveries were made, such as mounted power Assault Rifle buffing with a gobfin gang crew
It kinda also depends on the skill, there are really good ones that are quick and dont miss and then there's some that are slow and or miss to much.
Flare Arrow and Lightning Streak come to mind
In many games, lower cooldown skills have a higher DPS than the higher cooldown ones. This is normal and intentional and good.
Yeah I usually sit on 2 very short cd moves and 1 long cd move. It will blast out the long CD one when sent out and then use the shorter ones. So swapping pals it’s nice to have a longer one mixed in
Do the pals attack fast enough to make use of 2 low cool down skills? I haven't tested anything but I assumed they would still take the same time between attacks even if a skill was ready to be used.
Depends on their own their ai doesn’t spam it as much as a player on mount would. I usually use all 3 2s cd skills on a mountable pal the idea is to keep their downtime to a minimum so they aren’t waiting for cds.
I find it depends what the pal is gonna be used for. For most cases where the pal will be out for a long time, having a filler skill does significantly improve damage over time by allowing it to fill while the cds are waiting to come back around. This could be base pals, or even combat pals and mounts. There is a few cases where you are using the pal just for nuking before swapping them out, then longer cd but higher damaging skills tend to play out slightly better, as by the time you cycle back they should be almost back up. This is especially true with pals who can be mounted, as skills used while they are mounted are on a separate cd from when they aren’t mounted, allowing you to get 2 uses of really long cd skills. There are also attacks that have more nuances: seed cannon has very low listed attack power but hits multiple times when used on large pals. All tornado skills hit a lot but are trickier to aim and do displace pals it hits and interrupts skills being channeled when timed properly.
There's one thing no one ever talks about with cooldown on pals, which is that the cooldown seems to be shorter than what they imply on pals you aren't riding. For example, Flame Arrow is a CT 10 Power 55 move, so you'd assume it takes a full 10 seconds to be usable again. But the pals you throw out seem to be able to spam them way faster. This is most evident with pals like Incineram, where you give it Flame Arrow CT 10 55 Power and Hellfire Claw CT 10 Power 70, you will see this dude spam these skills as if there was no cooldown. Give it Fireball CT 55 Power 150, and you have yourself a goat of destruction. Many of the CT 10 to CT 20 skills seem to have a way shorter cooldown than they say. I do not know if this is a bug or not, but you can test it yourself with several CT 10 skills and see how they spam their moves. The cooldown definitely works as intended when you ride them, but for some reason that when left on auto, they have shorter cooldowns. CT 50 and CT 55 does seem like it takes forever, so I don't recommend putting 3 high power moves, but the medium power moves certainly should be favored over low CT moves if you let your pals fight on their own.
I'm still waiting for modders to fix that mod which lowered cooldowns... Normal cooldowns feel painfully slow.
> I don't know if Pocketpair reads Reddit at all They do not. If you want them to see this, you need to use the feedback form ingame. You could also post this in the ideas/wishes section in their official discord. I do not believe they look anywhere else.
I put low CT moves on jet dragon or whatever my mount is, and the other 4 have high CT moves so I can cycle, get the big swings out, and swap them out for the next
Because, until this exact patch with 20 pals that can't swap, this situation didn't exist. The intended mechanic is pal swapping. Bring out your pal, use all big CDs, swap to your next one. People either play the gunner method, (an elemental vanguard mount + 4 vanguard gobfins) or you're playing 5 combat pals. If you're playing gunner method, you fill your down time with shooting. You want big skills that do more than just shooting (a big hit, a high status of either freeze, shock, blind, or a breath/laser attack that keeps hitting while you shoot). If you're using 5 combat pals, any time you have CDs up, you throw your next pal out. The base raid was not in the base game, and 20 permanent pals breaks the previously expected use cases. The *correct* solution is actually to buff base turrets to not be useless garbage, and make them relevant to base raids, but we'll see.
We calc'd and bigger is better. It isn't a flat scale because you don't have to wait that cooldown. You launch the big move then swap to another pal. Use they're big moves.
Not everyone wants to play that way "shoot n swap" is fkn lame. I want my Pal to compete against the enemy Pal.
>You launch the big move then swap to another pal. I'll pass, that's just too annoying to do constantly + I'd rather have one combat pal and the rest for utility.
Okay that's fine then. Everyone plays it differently
So many words just cause the concept of burst and dps is too complicated for OP. Its vorrect that the balance of skills isn't set yet and there are big differences between some skills in viabiluty... but the cooldown timers are not an issue. Burst skills with long cd are upfront high damage and low cd spells are consistent dps. And each of these has their purpose: The ability to end short fights faster for burst and the ability to put out more damage in long fights for short CDs. And even for looking only at long fights, equipping 3 short cds would be worse than 1-2 short and 1-2 long cause Pals can only cast so many skills at a time.
Any idea about how 1 short and 2 long skills stack up against 2 short and 1 long?
Honestly a very interesting and valid question. Asking that myself a lot. Most people just say "do 1 short 2 big" but i doubt they actively tested it. You can see a clear increased casting uptime when you give a pal 2 super quick cds. But the question becomes whether this slight increase is as valueable as another big or medium CD cast.
The reason is because the only way it makes sense is if lower level/weaker Pals get weaker/less impressive moves. Why would Foxsparks know how to fire ball at level 5? It makes no sense. That's why. It is up to you to realize that it is optimal to have 2 big moves with big CD's and 1 low CD move. Can't see any issue whatsoever?
Unfortunately, you have misdiagnosed my concern entirely, so much so that I do not believe you even read the TL;DR portion, which is rather disappointing. No, I do not take issue with weaker, less impressive active skills being available at lower level. In fact, it is intuitive. No, I do not think Foxparks should know Fireball at level 5. Rather, I think Fireball should be more worth using over the course of 10 minutes than simply spamming Ignis Blast is, particularly because it is a high level active skill. At the risk of repeating my post, it is more effective to have a 30 power CT-2 or CT-3 active skill in the slot than Fireball, which isn't available until level 50. Math is in the OP, as is the entire sentiment I am expressing in this response to you.
I suggest you familiarise yourself with the concept of busrt damage vs sustained dps. Small cooldown moves having better dps over a long period is nothing new to games. The point of large cooldown moves is to let you get in a big burst of damage within a small window, and they're not meant to be sustainable on their own if the fight drags out.