The crafted companion bonus set

phaneub17_ESO

Skinny Cheeks showed a new crafted armor set that gave bonuses to companions, the one if you have a living companion they get X amount of Quickened and if they're dead you get resource cost reduction. Is it possible to change it to detect their equipped traits and give them bonuses based on what they have? It would add more benefits overall if it catered to what the companion is currently wearing such as if they have 7 Bolstered and 5 Vigorous of any quality, they would gain an additional 7% reduced damage taken and 10% increased max health.

Aggressive, Soothing, Bolstered, Quickened: Companion gains +1% per item slot, up to 12% of the same trait.

Augmented, Focused, Prolific, Vigorous: Companions gain 2% per item slot, up to 24% of the same trait.

Shattering: Companions gain 200 Penetration per item slot, up to 2400 Penetration.

Necrotech_Master

personally i would be fine with quickened as i find the majority of companion skills are just slightly too long on cooldowns (some are horrendously long on cooldowns for what they do, but thats more of a balance of their skills themselves)

its really going to depend on how much the bonus is if it would be useful

Dragonredux

Might as well boost the only trait worth a crap. Everything about Companion combat wise needs a rework but that's an topic for another day.

Dagoth_Rac

While "meta companion" is still weak because they don't want to discourage playing with real people, I believe all the meta builds use Quickened. It seems like casting more skills in the same amount of time is always preferable to anything else. Rather than rework and rebalance all the companion traits, ZOS are gonna kind of give you Quickened by default with this set, in hopes it will encourage players to try some other companion traits.

phaneub17_ESO

And that's the problem with companions that the devs know just as well. I have a love/hate relationship with Quickened that it is the most versatile trait, but also the best trait for every role be a tank, dps, healer, or support. In fact there's only two drawbacks If companions have too much quickened. First it can cause tank/melee builds to miss blocking and interrupting as they're busy with cast time and very low downtime to catch it. Second problem is it causes overlap prematurely refreshing dots and hots, losing ticks.

Aggressive only works well if you have a source of active penetration applied to their targets while having zero sources of active penetration, Shattering does more damage than Aggressive. Quickened increased frequency of casts overcomes this problem by hitting more often in a shorter time span.

Augmented is mostly useless when you have more buff duration uptime as Quickened increases the frequency of casting, it doesn't affect every ability with a duration, and many ability durations are misleading some are shorter than the listed (7.5 while saying 8).

Bolstered is only mildly better being always active, but Quickened can make certain abilities active around the clock with a brief moment of downtime like Solar Ward and On Guard while not quite full time active, it's close enough that Bolstered can be made obsolete.

Focused I don't know if player mechanics work the same but this only takes effect in increments of 5%, Ember's own 3% critical chance passive does nothing by itself without an additional minimum of 440 crit rating to activate. Critical damage on companions is locked at the base 50% damage modifier as well, I don't know any source of Major/Minor Force that affects companions to raise it.

Prolific only works with core actions like auto attacking, blocking, and roll dodge; the amount of increase isn't substantial in fact you only see a significant increase at around every 40%. You may not even notice that much of a difference unless you're eyeing them constantly.

Shattering is reliable in a sense that if you don't have any active penetration applied to the target, 7 epic pieces at 9100 penetration is enough for easy content to do maximum damage, more than aggressive while on par with Quickened for short fights, but shows its wear in longer fights.

Soothing is a hit or miss, the stat itself isn't the problem its when the heal is cast whether you need it at the time. Quickened reduces the guesswork since you can't control when a heal is used, but can increase the chance its used when needed.

Vigorous makes them a half-decent meat shield at least, but more damage reduction is far better effective health throughout a fight. The only benefit to Vigorous is that companions are reactive not preemptive so they may survive big power attacks at full health instead of one-shot dead, it doesn't make as much of an impact the rest of the fight.

Dragonredux

Ideally, I want the cooldowns to be better across the board the to eliminate the need for Quickening.

Aside from the obvious numerical increases, I feel some traits can be combined to eliminate some of the bloat like

1) Aggressive + Soothing
2) Bolstering + Quickening (Quickening part wouldn't be needed with better cooldowns)
3) Vigorous + Bolstered
4) Shattering + Focused

We are almost 3 years in for Companions and they still don't have a stat screen. I just assume they have same base 10% crit chance ,aside from Ember, like players do which makes Focused the worst trait for its poor numbers at the cost of better traits.

Also, Prolific works better without skills to spam so they just Light attack as much as possible. Problem is Mirri is probably the only one worth doing this with considering the dmg increase on her ultimate. Everything one else is just mediocre damage or whiff completely (Isobel). Perhaps if either of the next two having a healing ultimate that isn't just raw healing. It would be useful for them to.

phaneub17_ESO

Dragonredux wrote: »

I just assume they have same base 10% crit chance ,aside from Ember, like players do which makes Focused the worst trait for its poor numbers at the cost of better traits.

Base crit chance is 0%. As I said in the above post, Ember's 3% crit chance on its own does nothing until it crosses the 5% minimum threshold; she can attack for a solid minute you won't see a crit. You can toggle their crit numbers if you do it with a Sorcerer casting Dark Exchange to proc Exploitation passive for 6% critical chance; Nightblade's Hemorrhage works too.

You can test this in Stormhaven's Bonesnap Ruins, Public Dungeon event area. The skeleton sitting on the throne is an attackable target dummy to some extent, it has infinite health, normal armor defense, and doesn't attack back. All you need to do is drop an AOE damage effect on it and your companion will start attacking it nonstop. Impulse with a Frost Staff is the best choice to set it off as it applies no damage increasing effects on the target so you can see your companion's damage unmodified. I used this as my baseline when I did the comparison between Aggressive, Shattering, and Quickened.

Aggressive, without any Major/Minor Breach application, did the least amount of damage with a constant 18.2% reduced damage from the target's armor. 7 Shattering + 5 Aggressive came in second place doing the full damage listed on their abilities. Quickened + Haste did the most damage in terms of Casts Per Minute, Haste reset is literally doing 100% increased damage as the abilities are hitting twice and still coming up faster than other traits while Haste is on cooldown.