Suggestion for Pet skill combinations (old idea, new implimentation)

So, I was thinking about the rather common suggestion of combining the pet related skills Charm Animal and Comfort Animal into a single skill when it dawned on me.

Treat Charm Animal like a Signet of Capture.

Let's say you take your Charm Animal skill out into a map and charm a fuzzy creature (as I know all us Rangers love to do). When you charm the animal, the skill changes to "Comfort ____ ", where the blank would read the new pet's name. That skill acts like Comfort Animal does currently.

This gives us another lovely option: Having more than one pet.

After you charm a pet, you go back to town and purchase another Charm Animal skill. Then, you go out and charm a second one with the same results. This way, you have more than one instance of a Comfort Animal in your skills listing, each with a different name associated with it. It should be noted that you should not be able to equip more than one of these Comfort skills on your bar at once (only one pet at a time, basically).

This gives us multiple pets (if we want it), doesn't screw up current stuff, doesn't effect people that don't want more than one pet, and keeps things more or less the way they are now (with the exception that pets only take up one slot on the skill bar with us still being able to heal/res them directly).

So? What do you guys think? Also, to mods, please lock/move this if it needs it.

I think it sounds cool.

/signed

I know this would combine ideas rather nicely. Though, you should probably have a max number of pets you can get (like, 5 or 10 or something) to keep it from being too large on the servers...obviously, current version of Charm Animal would need to be updated to the Comfort version of current pet.

that's true, and I had thought about that. I guess final decision should be left to A.Net on this one (it's their servers and all).

Only thing I'm concerned about is the current pets. If they could seamlessly transfer current pets into this setup it would be perfect.

I actually rather like the first half of this idea - As a matter of fact, I was discussing Nightfall with my friend the other day and he said, "Man, I would love to capture one of those Flamingos, but I like my spider too much."

As to the single skill - I think having pets only take up one skill slot and having a heal/rez for them would be unbalanced. It would allow the benefits of both another damage dealer and a heal for him (albiet a limited-usefulness heal) fo the low, low price of one slot. Part of the reason the skills are seperated now is because they would be too good if combined.

That's a good point, Fury. But, we all know how A.Net loves to balance skills. If it's too powerful, they'd probably increase the cost on it, or it's recharge or some such. It wouldn't stay imbal for long.

As long as the skill(s) were tweaked to hold with the spirit of balance, this is the best solution to the annoying issue that I have yet seen (in my opinion, of course).

So of course, you get a /signed from me.

Well... as long as heroes stick with one crature, and the number of capturable animals had a fixed value.
Because each fo those signets would require from 2 new skills for each 'animal slot' to 2 skills for each capturable animal in the whole game, depending on how they make the skill work.

The best way I can think is:
* Making a maximum of 5 capturable animals per character (yet still one per hero)
* Making 10 new skills 5 "Charm Animal" and 5 "Call <petname>". Heroes will have only one of them.
* Use one of the charming and it turns into a "Call <petname>"
* Call skill will make the pet appear when entering battle areas and bring them back with 25% life and 0 energy when dead (like the unlinked resurrection).

To get rid of a pet, talk to a tamer and you'll lose both the pet AND the skill, you'll be paid from 0 to 1000 gold depending on pet's level AND your current skill buy price (If your current cost of buying a skill is 350, you'll get 350 gp for the pet at level 20, enough to buy a new Charm Animal skill)

There should be four pets IMO. You can have 4 weapons equipped so why not four pets owned?

Well, no not really. You take the first skill, Charm Animal, which doesn't care what animal you capture. The skill that would be made from Charm in my idea would simply have a name value in the skill text that would be dependent upon the string variable of the pet's actual name. No need for this whole complicated string that you suggest.

Well, this is just garbage. This totally scraps my idea. The first point I can deal with, I don't know how much room would be available serverside for pets and I can deal with a cap on the number of pets so long as it's more than 1. But, why limit Heroes to only having one pet? That was one of the hidden benefits of my skill idea, it allows players to change the pet the Hero is using which you currently can't do. And having the new "Charm" skill only bring them back to life defeats the purpose of combining "Charm" and "Comfort".

This I can somewhat deal with, but I'd prefer to just keep the idea simply about combining the two skills, which is badly needed. Pets just take up so much room on most bars and are so hard to deal with that they're almost not viable for either PvP or PvE, with the exception of certain VERY specific builds.