PvP and PvE Feedback

First I will state that my compet name is Cail. You can find me on the Arena Leader boards. I normally stay close to top ten.


Second I will state that some of my suggestions will make the game more difficult/time consuming so if it actually happens don't hate me because this will help the longevity of the game.


Third I would like to address PvP.
As I move forward and test different builds (i.e. stat builds and spell combinations) I have noticed that there is a huge advantage to a few specific builds.

First is the turtle. You load up on spells to debuff your opponents attacks, shield yourself, and heal yourself while building your stats to focus first on mana regeneration, second, stamina, and lastly health. Putting no points into initiative. This practically makes you invincible at higher levels and the only way to defeat it is to be really lucky with critical hits which are rare due to your high stamina. Your mana regeneration will be so substantial that you won't need to worry about it when casting your spells and your stamina will keep you from sustaining the very scary return damage which results from running out. At level 15 I have not found a way of beating this build without being very very lucky.
I haven't put much thought in a way to equalize this due to most of my fights happening at lower levels because that is where the activity is.

Second is the tactician build as I have come to call it. In this build you focus mainly on mana regeneration, secondly on health and evenly on stamina and initiative. The spells consist of the most mana efficient damage spells such as bite and claw, your poison, 2 heals and body slam. I use this on my lvl 8s and 9s and the only time I am defeated is when I run into a lvl 11 turtle. Not much testing has been done with this at higher levels due to inactivity of high level arena fights.
I see nothing wrong with this build due to the fact that it does actually take a good amount of thought and calculations to use.

Third is the Assault build. Using an attuned pet for the extra mana you simply load on high damage spells alongside your heals. Your stats are allocated in mana regen and health and slightly into stamina depending on your level. Your goal is to deal as much damage as quickly as possible. Testing this against other peoples builds I have determined that it is feasible but pointless due to the effectiveness of the first two builds I listed. That being said it is a great beginner build as it doesn't take much thought.

My suggestion to make PvP more enjoyable is to list the number of players from each bracket. This would change based off of your pet's level. So if I jump on my lvl 15 I would be able to see that there are currently 8 number of people battling with pets in this level range. If I jump on my lvl 8 I would be able to see that 14 people are currently battling with this pet. This would prevent people from wasting 15 minutes in the queue because they can't tell if people are battling or not.


Fourth is, of course, addressing PvE.
PvE is messed up in more than one aspect. For example, I can auto battle as much as I want at no cost. This means that even though I just spent 69k on a huge building upgrade I can simply fight one mob 69 times and make it back. This takes maybe 5 minutes and I can do it for free. I'm not suggesting to make auto battle a premium feature but it should cost gold to do (maybe 70%-90% of the gold earnings from the fight?). This is such a big deal because gold isn't a commodity which makes the gold mines pointless. Another issue is the number of levels to fight. I completed them all within the first 24 hours of the games release and now its just a mindless grind to level especially at 15+. I want to be clear that I am not asking to make it easier/quicker to level but fighting the same mob 300-400 times to level is boring. Add new levels. Increase experience payout for actually participating in the fight (considerably to make it worth the time) Another issue is recovering health. At level 15+ I can earn 20k-30k gold before having to heal for a measly 20-40 gold. I understand that this is to make it easier for lower levels but even back then the payout for completing a fight was 10-30 times the amount needed to heal. My suggestion for this is to increase the cost of healing based off of pet level instead of the amount of health missing.

I have a number of other suggestions that would be low cost and high profit and I could do all the math to get your numbers right but the only way you could get me to do that is to pay me. I'm not going to help design your game any more than the above unless I get something out of it. I bought a number of compet deeds but honestly I got them all at the 10$ price so I could sell them all right now and still make a profit so you can't use that to entice me into helping more.

Alot of great feedback here - i can fully support this.
Especially the reward for manual pvp compared to autobattle needs to be severely balanced - in theory its possible to perform a hundred autobattles in the time it takes to do one manual fight - respectively the rewards should reflect that.
Maybe make it extremely expensive to purchase pet healing after a fight, in which case it would pay off to do a manual fight and try to finish the fight with as high health as possible - whereas autobattle should aim for victory but not heal up your pet towards the end.
This would also add value to having a vetinarian in your village which atm is pretty useless since buying full health is so cheap.

it was stated in other threads that the pve stuff is so easy right now because its beta testing. in full game the beats fights are limited to 10 per day so that pretty much takes away all of ur concerns regarding pve

Can anyone explain to me how people get lesser heal to heal for 20 when it only heals for 12 for me? and some people even have claw that hit for more damage then it's display.

This looks like the thread to give my PvP suggestions in.
1) There are too many different battlepacks. Having so many battlepacks distributes players among multiple queues. The level distribution will widen so let us queue with more than one pack+pet combination.
2) Tanking mmr by losing intentionally costs 25 gold, with the benefit of camping new low-mmr players for their PED. This also allows for multi-accounters to easily inflate their ranking points.
3) (Edit: Looks like this is will be balanced to 10 forest battles per day so disregard this point.) The gold-supply from auto battles is incomparably higher than the gold-supply from cash shop. Perhaps this balances-out at higher levels but as long as farming gold costs no diamonds and has no cooldowns, it will be exploited by botters. Combined with the easy method of queueing against a specific player your game could rapidly become infested with bots and multi-accounters. People will do anything for 1ped/hour. On the other hand, pay-to-win is a deterrent. Perhaps let players accumulate up to 20 'charges' of auto battles and give them a 3 minute cooldown timer.
4) Stamina builds will make people ragequit. Balance the game so that matches don't last longer than 10 minutes. So if someone has skipped most of their turns, lower the turn timers of both players. If high level players are capable of stalling a battle for half an hour (imagining level 25+ pets) then make the (skill point) cost of increasing stamina increase non-linearly.
5) Matchmaking. If someone has lost to the same person three times in a row then there are two cases: The first case is that their pet cannot beat the other pet, and that the loser will get mad and cease playing if it means matching-up against the same person a fourth time and losing. Make it harder for the same players to repeatedly fight each other IF one of them is on a losing-streak. The second case is that the loser is a multi-accounter. Giving starting players 100 PED without requiring them to have a product key (yes I'm looking at you, MindArk) is quite a big mistake. It will be RT flying broomsticks all over again! Anyone with an understanding of multiboxing and networking would be able to scam the system. Don't give away PED to players when it is so easy to 'trade' anonymously between ComPet accounts due to the matchmaking system. Seriously, don't give away PED to someone who has proof of their purchase.

Since I'm ranting, I'll include my off-topic feedback:
6) If you try to research two abilities at once it says that you can't because the library is upgrading, but if I click 'Research ability' from the 'Select Ability' menu, I can research while my library is upgrading.
7) It only costs 1 gold to heal your pet in the arena. Regardless of how low hp they are.
8) Forest pet types incorrectly labelled. Also the rarity border colors can be confused with defensive/aggressive/attuned colors. How do you tell balanced from defensive in the arena without memorizing beforehand?
9) A button to let us ungarrison pets from a building that is being upgraded. Can do this with residence but not vault & mines.
10) Punish players who repeatedly go afk with maxed-out HP. The same goes for defensive vs defensive battles, when the player with 42 stamina afk's versus the player with 47 stamina. I have not seen this happen, but at higher levels it would become obnoxious. Replace us with an auto battle if we disconnect during a PED match.
11) Lol @ block. The bubble is hilarious on rabbits, not centred, has graphical clipping, and blocks more damage than it should. Claw sometimes hits for zero damage. Body slam doesn't always remove a buff and when it does it can take a turn to display it. And mana bomb's mana regeneration buff displays as an attack animation with red text instead of blue text. Roony's bite ability description is inconsistent. Thomas Short-Tail gets - oh you fixed it
12) Bash debuff and battle cry buff should not lose a counter on the same turn that you cast it. I.e. If bash or battle cry was cast this turn, don't remove a counter. Not sure if casting block at end of round is intended to be weaker or if it was only supposed to tick down at end of enemy's turn.
13) Calculate crit damage before block reduction so that venomous bite doesn't crit for 11dmg while bite and claw hit for 0 (this was in arena so there was no hibernate granting perma-block).
14) Add a tooltip (or library description) to show an ability's total average damage/healing dealt per mana point (e.g. level 1 bite = 1.25dmg/mp).
15) Update the mana tooltip to show mana regen:
1mana/turn @ 30 mojo
2mana/turn @ 34 mojo
3mana/turn @ 50 mojo
4mana/turn @ 68 mojo
5mana/turn @ 84 mojo
6mana/turn @ 100 mojo
etc.
16) Why is leaderboard jackpot only increasing by 2 ped in three days?
17) http://www.entropiauniverse.com/bulletin/buzz/ wrote "Endurance: How long your pet can fight with full vigor. Ferocity increases your chance to avoid critical hits from physical attacks. It goes down one point every round." That's called stamina (not ferocity). Give players a way of knowing that running low on stamina gives their opponent higher crit-chance. It seems none of the players are saving their mana until they are as low stamina as possible before unleashing their full burst. I suppose it is boring to wait 12-40 turns before damaging someone, so that you can have a slightly better crit-chance.

Overall, with the disconnects and errors, the game runs MUCH more smoothly than Guild Wars 2 at launch so congrats to the programming team! (Seriously, Guild Wars 2 was - and probably still is - the most buggy competitive PvP experience I have had.)

P.S. Hope rarity does something

tuxxan said:

Can anyone explain to me how people get lesser heal to heal for 20 when it only heals for 12 for me? and some people even have claw that hit for more damage then it's display.

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go to ur library and click on the level of each skill in the top of the skill description. it shows the different levels and u can learn them there

Me Really Never said:

go to ur library and click on the level of each skill in the top of the skill description. it shows the different levels and u can learn them there

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omg.... thank you!! now i know why i lose my ass off all the time

Thanks for all the great feedback, it's much appreciated. Keep it coming

1) There are too many different battle packs. Having so many battle packs distributes players among multiple queues. The level distribution will widen so let us queue with more than one pack+pet combination.

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You can get matched with someone who has a battle pack of a different value than yours, as long as the difference isn't to big. The player with the lower value battle pack can't win the full value of the higher value battle pack. Being able to queue with several packs at once could also be a good idea though.

2) Tanking mmr by losing intentionally costs 25 gold, with the benefit of camping new low-mmr players for their PED. This also allows for multi-accounters to easily inflate their ranking points.

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The rating system is very complicated but there are some mechanics preventing various abuse that aren't currently in the beta. At the lowest rankings you wont be able to play for PED at all and you can't lose any rating. At slightly higher ranks you will start to lose rating but you wont be able to fall back down below certain thresholds once you have reached them.

3) (Edit: Looks like this is will be balanced to 10 forest battles per day so disregard this point.) The gold-supply from auto battles is incomparably higher than the gold-supply from cash shop. Perhaps this balances-out at higher levels but as long as farming gold costs no diamonds and has no cooldowns, it will be exploited by botters. Combined with the easy method of queueing against a specific player your game could rapidly become infested with bots and multi-accounters. People will do anything for 1ped/hour. On the other hand, pay-to-win is a deterrent. Perhaps let players accumulate up to 20 'charges' of auto battles and give them a 3 minute cooldown timer.

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Yes as you mentioned this will not be an issue once a limit is put on the amount of Forest battles you can do in a certain time.

4) Stamina builds will make people ragequit. Balance the game so that matches don't last longer than 10 minutes. So if someone has skipped most of their turns, lower the turn timers of both players. If high level players are capable of stalling a battle for half an hour (imagining level 25+ pets) then make the (skill point) cost of increasing stamina increase non-linearly.

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Agreed, we don't want matches to last for to long and currently it's possible to get a bit to high stamina. We are also considering adding a penalty to skipping to many turns in a fight. Skipping every now and then is of course fine as that can be part of a strategy or such. Perhaps lowering the turn timer in general could be done as well. (Has anyone felt they didn't have enough time during turns?)

5) Matchmaking. If someone has lost to the same person three times in a row then there are two cases: The first case is that their pet cannot beat the other pet, and that the loser will get mad and cease playing if it means matching-up against the same person a fourth time and losing. Make it harder for the same players to repeatedly fight each other IF one of them is on a losing-streak. The second case is that the loser is a multi-accounter. Giving starting players 100 PED without requiring them to have a product key (yes I'm looking at you, MindArk) is quite a big mistake. It will be RT flying broomsticks all over again! Anyone with an understanding of multiboxing and networking would be able to scam the system. Don't give away PED to players when it is so easy to 'trade' anonymously between ComPet accounts due to the matchmaking system. Seriously, don't give away PED to someone who has proof of their purchase.

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I like the idea of not being able to face the same player to many times in a row or set amount of time through matchmaking. Hopefully this shouldn't be much of an issue when more players are playing.
In the full game accounts will not be given 100 PED for free.

How do you tell balanced from defensive in the arena without memorizing beforehand?

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The pet class icons will be changed slightly to make it more obvious what type they represent and make them visible during fights. Perhaps it could also be displayed in the window that shows critical chance, initiative, mana regeneration and resistance chance. You can open this by clicking the pet portraits during a battle. (Yes this needs to be more clear)

10) Punish players who repeatedly go afk with maxed-out HP. The same goes for defensive vs defensive battles, when the player with 42 stamina afk's versus the player with 47 stamina. I have not seen this happen, but at higher levels it would become obnoxious. Replace us with an auto battle if we disconnect during a PED match.

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A penalty to skipping to many turns in a row/during a fight should take care of this problem as well. When someone disconnects during a battle the AI will take over for them. (Might not be as smart as the player but it's better than just losing)

16) Why is leaderboard jackpot only increasing by 2 ped in three days?

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In Arena battles the majority of the portion of PED/Gold that didn't go the winner go to the Jackpot pool and a Loot Pool eyecrazy. Battling in the Arena increases these pools over time. Playing Arena can of course also give you PED and Gold from these pools.

17) http://www.entropiauniverse.com/bulletin/buzz/ wrote "Endurance: How long your pet can fight with full vigor. Ferocity increases your chance to avoid critical hits from physical attacks. It goes down one point every round." That's called stamina (not ferocity). Give players a way of knowing that running low on stamina gives their opponent higher crit-chance. It seems none of the players are saving their mana until they are as low stamina as possible before unleashing their full burst. I suppose it is boring to wait 12-40 turns before damaging someone, so that you can have a slightly better crit-chance.

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Tool-tips and descriptions for these and many other things will be updated to better describe exactly how these things work and what their effects are.

P.S. Hope rarity does something

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Rarity will indeed do something to make the pets better. Also getting the higher rarity pets will be much more difficult than it currently is.

Fourth is, of course, addressing PvE.
PvE is messed up in more than one aspect. For example, I can auto battle as much as I want at no cost. This means that even though I just spent 69k on a huge building upgrade I can simply fight one mob 69 times and make it back. This takes maybe 5 minutes and I can do it for free. I'm not suggesting to make auto battle a premium feature but it should cost gold to do (maybe 70%-90% of the gold earnings from the fight?). This is such a big deal because gold isn't a commodity which makes the gold mines pointless. Another issue is the number of levels to fight. I completed them all within the first 24 hours of the games release and now its just a mindless grind to level especially at 15+. I want to be clear that I am not asking to make it easier/quicker to level but fighting the same mob 300-400 times to level is boring. Add new levels. Increase experience payout for actually participating in the fight (considerably to make it worth the time) Another issue is recovering health. At level 15+ I can earn 20k-30k gold before having to heal for a measly 20-40 gold. I understand that this is to make it easier for lower levels but even back then the payout for completing a fight was 10-30 times the amount needed to heal. My suggestion for this is to increase the cost of healing based off of pet level instead of the amount of health missing.

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As mentioned earlier there will be a limit on beast fights per day and Auto Battle will most likely be removed completely for the Forest at that point. Many more chapters will be added with much more challenging beasts.

My suggestion to make PvP more enjoyable is to list the number of players from each bracket. This would change based off of your pet's level. So if I jump on my lvl 15 I would be able to see that there are currently 8 number of people battling with pets in this level range. If I jump on my lvl 8 I would be able to see that 14 people are currently battling with this pet. This would prevent people from wasting 15 minutes in the queue because they can't tell if people are battling or not.

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Yes something to indicate average wait times and how many are playing at a certain level range/battle pack value is something being discussed. Hopefully the wait times will be much shorter with more players later on. This is also one of the reasons why we would like to shorten the average time of the Arena battles and go away a bit from the "Turtle" style pets you mentioned. Having pets stuck in super long battles against each other is rather boring and increases the wait times when looking for battles. Turtle style pets will of course still be around though, we want it to be possible to play super defensively if you want to, and many like that style of play.

Also "Quick healing" pets is currently way cheaper than it will be later on. The veterinarian will be an important building and waiting for you pets to regenerate will usually be the way you heal your pets. Costs to heal will go up with levels and probably be percentage based of your max gold or such.

Edgehog|ComPet said:

Perhaps it could also be displayed in the window that shows critical chance, initiative, mana regeneration and resistance chance. You can open this by clicking the pet portraits during a battle. (Yes this needs to be more clear)

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This is really useful!! I think some games use a magnifying glass in the corner of the icon with a '+' symbol on the lens. If the magnifying glass glows green on round 1 then someone will eventually click it (glow goes away). One way to introduce this feature is to have the first forest pet battle begin with this window opened at the start of the fight (magnifying glass symbol changes to a '-').

So ferocity DOES decrease enemy crit-chance but cannot increase crit above 9%... Then aggressive pets won't be able to defeat defensive or attuned pets unless they get a poison --> bash --> crit, or until their powerspike at level 22 with mind battle --> headbutt as finishing moves, at which point cure and recovery heal for 50+hp before lick wounds multiplier! If you max your burst with poison --> parasite --> ignite --> bash (54 mana consumption) --> mortal strike --> something that does 40dmg --> mind battle --> headbutt, then you still get outhealed. If you use deadly poison or mana regeneration then you have no skillslots for healing. Mana regen costs too many skill points or ability slots, and a tanky aggressive pet will just be stalled until it runs out of endurance. If it tries to heal then it will lose in mana-sustain and lack time to burst through enemy heals. It seems if you want raw damage then you should stack damage over time, which doesn't procure crits. Or bait your opponent to mid-hp and then pray for a crit with one of the 40 dmg abilities. Are aggressive pets supposed to be played as bite spammers? Bite and hope you get a few crits before you run out of stamina? Pray that your crit baits-out a debuff-removal and then damage over time --> stun --> stun, pray that nothing gets resisted (at this point people will have insane resist) and then pray for a crit with headbutt or mind control? To burst through someone with higher mana sustain you'd need to crit at least once and land three debuffs! To burst through a defensive pet you'd have to bait-out their heals or crit twice in a row. But defensive pets will have all defensive/utility abilities, so aggressive pets will rely on stun --> stun --> crit to win. You need to start your combo at the end of a round in order to maximize your burst, but there are no abilities that let you start damaging someone at the end of a round, or increase crit chance above 9%.
I don't see how an aggressive point can possibly output more burst-damage than an attuned pet spamming damage over time debuffs. The aggressive pet can only beat pets that have low max hp and only a few defensive abilities. And if you spam only 40dmg abilities from the start, you'll usually run out of mana before getting a crit. Mortal strike looks nice but is useless if you have lower starting hp.

Is backstab supposed to imply that bash and overpower were meant to last until your next turn? The only way to procure the stun bonus from backstab is if you bash at the end of the round, gain initiative and waste the stun to procure backstab. Since it loses a tick on the same turn you cast it.

My best bet for highest possible burst damage at level 22 with an aggressive pet would be deadly poison --> poison --> parasite --> bash --> mocking strike (69 mana consumption) --> headbutt --> overpower --> mind battle.
Which loses to anyone with higher starting hp, or anyone who can remove or resist multiple debuffs. Being able to resist stun helps tanks immensely. Having 90 max mana and terrible mana regen means that an aggressive pet can ONLY win by bursting through their opponent's heals! Yet in the burstiest combo I can imagine, there is only one ability (headbutt) which benefits from crits, and three abilities (bash + mocking strike + finishing move of the combo) that benefit from initiative! Initiative actually hurts your burst-damage because by starting your combo at the end of a round and ending the combo at the start of a round, you can get an extra turn's damage. And offensive abilities that benefit from initiative have lower damage output than level 20 abilities that don't require initiative.

Initiative only seems useful if you are trying to make your opponent run out of mana by spamming 8-mana bites, or if you are trying to deny heals by landing a stunning while your damage over time is available. Stuns can also be used to deny enemy damage so that your heals come up, or the initiative can reduce enemy direct damage dps by 4% since they lose crit chance. So ferocity seems like a useless stat. Crit chance rises 1% when they are low stamina but there is no way for aggressive pets to survive so many turns, nor is the 1% chance worth it. Also, why does critting only increase damage by 33%? If crit were to hit for 100% bonus damage it would be pointless to have ferocity as your highest stat because damage over time debuffs have the highest burst, and high mojo gives the highest overall damage output. But to only crit for 33% bonus damage and have no way of raising crit chance..? 33% bonus damage, with a 9% chance to procure. If I have 141 initiative and the other pet has 15 initiative then compared to my default ferocity stat I gain 40% more initiative chance, which procures 5% higher crit chance. So with ferocity maxed-out, if I only use direct attacks then I gain 2% damage per turn. But wait - crits don't double damage they only seem to give 33% bonus damage so
with 141 ferocity I gain 0.66% damage per turn. That's assuming I ONLY use direct attacks and never heal or use poison. But wait! I'm forgetting something. If, say, the opponent somehow forgets to equip any abilities and I skip turns down to 0 stamina, I can gain an additional 0.33% damage (of course, the opponent gets this too)! So, assuming my guess is correct and crits deal 33% extra damage, you can gain up to 0.99% bonus damage from maxed-out ferocity! Perhaps even 1% if you have over 150 ferocity! Can there possibly any downside? Well, compared to attuned pets, aggressive pets have 25% less starting mana, and gaining mojo costs x2.33 as many skill points. Plus you sacrifice other stats to max-out ferocity.

Edgehog|ComPet said:

Agreed, we don't want matches to last for to long and currently it's possible to get a bit to high stamina. We are also considering adding a penalty to skipping to many turns in a fight. Skipping every now and then is of course fine as that can be part of a strategy or such. Perhaps lowering the turn timer in general could be done as well. (Has anyone felt they didn't have enough time during turns?)

I like the idea of not being able to face the same player to many times in a row or set amount of time through matchmaking. Hopefully this shouldn't be much of an issue when more players are playing.

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I like that there is enough time per turn that when you get a connection error that you can often reconnect and still finish your turn - however i think players should be forced to make quick decisions during combat eg. there could be a drain of endurance based on actual time played with it being a full point drained after 20 seconds used on a turn.
Keep the turn switch after 40 seconds but with 2 points of endurance lost total, but if a player ends his turn after 1 second it should only drain 5% of one endurance point (skipping a turn is such an action and should be a viable tactic).
This way pets with low endurance can still be very powerfull if controlled by a quick thinking/acting player.

Ferocity should have a larger impact as well, maybe a chance of gaining an additional attack or higher crit chance. A pet specialized in extrem ferocity at the sacrifice of security/versatility/sustainability (health/mojo/endurance) should be a whirlwind of attacks and be extremely dangerous to creatures with lowhealth.