So, I was giving it some thought, and realized that the mechanical side of the operator; we have a lot of threads dedicated to the customization and aesthetics of the minions in question, but we don't focus a lot of the mechanical side of those powers, so I figured we might want to address that. From what I could figure out with some discussion with a friend, there's four overall "types" of minions, and three design strategies they'd work with. This'd make choosing your minions essentially a two step process, even before getting into appearance customization and aesthetic decoupling.
First, determine their role. There's three clear roles that Minions can cover, though the developers could possibly choose to include more:
--Melee
--Ranged
--Assault (A mix of Melee and Range)
Second, you have four options for what the minions are:
--Automatons (robots, golems, undead, that sort of thing)
--Humans (Military, thugs, ninjas, etc.)
--Animals (a pack of wolves, a pair of lions, a wyvern or chimera, etc.)
--Summons (This'd be energy constructs, demons, elementals, and the like)
The purpose of this is twofold; first, the nature of the minion determines how it behaves, such as morale effects and overall intelligence. Automatons and Summons, most likely, would be on the low end of that scale, while humans and animals might have somewhat more tactical awareness, move to flanking positions, and that sort thing. The second is that it applies as a defensive powerset; automatons would have high psychic and physical resistance, but may be weaker to elemental stuff, while animals would likely be strong against hot, cold, and physical, but weak against psychic, poison, and electricity.
This would also have the additional benefit of essentially letting you do these in a similar way to the player characters themselves; that is, Primary and secondary powersets. Not too complex, builds on what already exists in the game, and gives the player additional control over how their minions operate, which is all good.
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Someone's been on the Heroic Mastermind thread ;)
I'd advocate for minions to be more complicated than melee, ranged, and mixed: throw in some mez and support. Idk how the layout would be (hopefully not three tiered like CoH), but having at least one support minion I think could fill out a hopefully squishy Operator well.
E.g., Soldiers: 3-5 primarily ranged attackers, 1 medic, 2 melee/ranged bots, and 2 melee tank attackers.
This'll prove tricky for devs to balance.
I see both sides of minion types:
Freedom side:
Have minions totally decoupled: a melee ninja would be mechanically identical to a melee zombie. This allows the greatest freedom of aesthetic, but prevents any lore attachment to how you treat minions. This'd be easier to dev I think, since you don't have to write morality actions for minion events.
Lore-Friendly side:
Have minions pre-written into classes like above. This allows greater immersion since how you treat your minions is and would be a reflection of how your toon is as a person(?). But, this would decrease player choice and be harder to dev, since you have to write the events which affect morality.
I guess I side with FREEDOM *eagle screeches* but it'd be nice to have the lore mechanic.
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We probably need both as players want to build their originals and sometimes they want to intermesh their character into the game world and have the appearance of particulate group.
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Not sure I get the points raised in OP.
On the point:
If I am choosing melee ranged or assault as my secondary set then I would like to have the option for pets that focus more on mitigation support control or defense. Personally I feel it's too limiting to only relegate pets to offensive "power sets" since I think that pets should be able to fill any and every role/focus/specialization that a player can, though perhaps not quite to the same extent. Maybe it would be easiest to just have a system where you have the same choices as the other AT's but limited to a subset of them, and having an appropriate modifier applied.
On point two:
Not sure what morality has to do with pets unless MWM is implementing a system where the pets can like/dislike you based on your actions, which would then necessitate being able to set a personality for them.
The groupings feel way to generic to assign resistances to. As for the AI stuff, it makes me feel like some sets can become objectively better than others, besides what says that f.i demons are dumber than animals. If resistances and AI would be "choosable" then I think it's better to tie them to the pet's power set(s). Though for AI I would make that a fairly simple choice in the form of target and ability-type priority.
I would love to see minion sets that offer a variety of choices. One set is tankier and has more control (taunts, holds, whatever) while another is squishy, and a third has some support abilities like buffs, shields, or heals.
While they all do some damage and keep some heat off the player, there is as much room for variety as there is in the regular player classes. Even more, really, since you could have minion sets that pull less threat, focus on dps/support/control (minus tanking) and let the main character be the star of the show. That would be the opposite of pet classes in most games but could work quite well as a "lead from the front" style commander and allow for luring enemies into ambushes. Even the original CoX had plenty of mechanical variety in their minion sets and they lacked aesthetic choices for them. CoT can take that to a whole new level.
No.
The whole point of decoupling is so that we can choose. Designs like this take choice away from you if you're a min-max type, or when up against certain boss types and mechanics.
Unless we want to see animal summoners denied a chance to get on the team that's taking out the electricity raid boss, we really can't do pets like this.
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Also the damage types are physical, energy, and exotic.
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Check the date of the OP, it's almost 2 years old. We at least didn't have official info on the damage types then.
Good catch. Gotta wonder why it got bumped with a "great idea!" now...
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I bumped it less with a "great idea" and more "I want to babble about this because it interests me" really. The post is old, but a relevant thread. The forums don't see a ton of action, most threads on the front page of most of the subforums are pretty old. The active community is pretty small right now.
Fair enough, though in most cases I have seen people have apologized for necroing the thread. As for the specifics of your post, I don't see that having that much to do with the OP so could have been placed in a new thread.
Tannim have stated that we won't have tanking equivalents to Stalwart among pets but I'm sure there will be some sets that have more survivability than other (primarily low number summon sets I think). I don't remember any statements about getting much more support or control oriented sets but I certainly hope so, especially considering that we might get almost every specialization. Having both primary and secondary be damage oriented doesn't make for a good combo imo.
The "flavors" of the Commander sets will be in the total number of summons and I'm guessing they will be for 1, 2, 4, and 6 summons respectively.
I would be really surprised if all the pet sets had the same focus on being pure damage/tank focused, even more if they were all the same level of damage or tankiness. Even in CoX most sets had some mix of buffs, debuffs, heals, control, etc. Necro had darkness debuffs and control from pets, robots had shields and other benefits from pets, etc. I don't mean a pet set has to be totally focused on being control or support, but even having limited access to abilities on your pet(s) that provides control or healing can change the gameplay of that set dramatically. This is more how CoX did it. All the pet sets could fill the "beat up baddies and take heat off of friendlies" role but did it in a variety of ways. There really isn't any reason we couldn't have a commander that "leads from the front" for example with more backline pet roles healing and buffing while they are the main star of the show.
This could be taken to another level if we get pet sets that allow us to choose between different pets to bring out (or masteries that change them). This could be especially interesting when grouping since you could potentially fill in various roles. One thing that I loved about the mastermind in CoX was that their skills allowed them to focus around group gameplay even when solo with their pets, and those support and control powers translated well to grouping with other players too. You rarely felt redundant no matter who was on your team since you could do a bit of everything.
This might be the thread you want to look at:
https://cityoftitans.com/forum/very-long-minions-value-build-requirements-and-expendability
it also includes links and references to other threads on the topic.
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That touches on a lot of other important aspects of pets. Primarily it focuses on pet replacing vs power of the pet, and minion scaling. Both related topics, but not quite the same. Definitely important in general for pet class design.
I like the idea of a pet heavy build as previously mentioned in this thread, but you'd have to be really careful to make it balanced and still unique compared to having some non-pet powers with a pet related aesthetic slapped on. Even games with great pet classes usually go that route, with some basic abilities being "summons" that are nothing more than a damage over time effect for example.