Talk:Animal companion/Archive 1

This page is pretty similar to Charm Animal as it is. I'm thinking either we link to Charm Animal from here, or move the bulk of Charm Animal's "usage notes" to this page, and link to this page from Charm Animal. Thoughts? --Midk 09:26, 3 Aug 2005 (EST)
 * I guess move the notes to here and then link from there to here. --Fyren 09:32, 3 Aug 2005 (EST)
 * Sounds good, I'll do it right now. --Midk 09:36, 3 Aug 2005 (EST)
 * Hmm, shouldn't the list of charmable creatures be moved here, too? --Eightyfour-onesevenfive 18:04, 3 Aug 2005 (EST)
 * Its no more like charm animal. but it has to be merged from charm animal

add content
add some content from the link in "See also" please


 * Looks like you removed a lot of other information too. Why? &mdash;Tanaric 20:43, 3 Aug 2005 (EST)

I just added a link to the See also as well - much of the data here is wrong, correct info is in that link. -Epinephrine

Correction?
"A pet will "never" reach a higher level than its owner."

This is not true. I tamed a Melandru's stalker when I was level 4, the pet started out with level 5. After some time I leveled up to level 5. After some more time, the pet leveled up to level 6 while I was still at level 5.

I guess that pets level up at the same speed as players, and that it just seems that pets never reach higher levels than their owners because most pets, when tamed, have a lower level than their owner. But that's really just guessing. Psyringe 23:28, 18 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * This makes sense, especially if pets don't get quest or mission XP (as stated in the article). As a result, pets would generally lage behind their owners.  But yes, it's very possible to get a level 5 Melandru's Stalker when you are still level 1.  --JoDiamonds 16:41, 24 October 2005 (EST)

I'd like to point to the Guide written by Jenosavel and Epinephrine; http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=89491 it details many aspects of Animal Companions and shows that many aspects listed here are incorrect; in particular:

- Armour values - Damage types - Pet Evolution Stats

The Pet Evolution Methods list on the wiki lists incorrect causes for evolution changes - Dire is not associated with pet attack skills, nor does Hearty have anything to do with player damage.
 * I would liek to point out that, the article's mention of pet skills are as a mean to affect overall damage done by the pet. Thus, it's completely consistent with your summary of have the pet deal more damage than you to move it towards Dire.  Your own writeup also specificallly mentioned that it's hard to judge whether the damage dealt by the master (in relation to damage dealt by pet) has effect on evolution, and is hard to immediately dismiss.  Thus your comment above seem to imply you have reached furthur conclusion that you did not reach in your original guide.
 * It does make intuitive sense though that damage "tanked" would push a pet towards Hearty. -PanSola 00:17, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Also, my testing indicates that pets gain experience at least twice as fast as players, covering the jumps between levels in many fewer kills than a player would need. This is particularly easy to test with a low level pet. - Epinephrine


 * I highly doubt this. Remember that by default, low level characters/mobs/pets gain exp faster ANYWAYS.  Your theory implies that, if a ranger, right after reaching level 5, tames a level 5 stalker, and the ranger do no missions whatsoever afterwards, the stalker will hit level 6 first.  Unfortunately I don't have the character slots to personally test this right now.
 * Finally, your armor values do make sense. Pet has essentially warrior-class armor without additional bonus to physical attacks.  So it's 20 + 3*Level. -PanSola 00:17, 8 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Also, it's ironic that, much of the "incorrect" info here seems to be derived from the " *Updated* Ultimate Pet Guide" on guildwarsguru where Epinephrine is from ^^" -PanSola 00:59, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

How is that irony? There are many uninformed people everywhere. I didn't write that guide, and in fact the errors present in it spurred Jenosavel and I to do the research. As to the statement about damage - it is clear that in fact your pet taking damage is what needs to be avoided - I have made Dire pets using NO attack skills, thus my claim that attack skills are unecessary. You can evolve a pet that way against the minotaurs outside of the Ice Tooth Caves - since they don't heal they eventually die, you can simply allow your pet to attack the whole time and use Symbiotic Bond/Otyugh's Cry/Call of Protection to keep it from suffering damage, and keep yourself alive. It will go Dire. You simply have to let them deal damage - and that is why I objected - it is damage, not pet skills that matter.

A correlation is obviously present between damage and pet skills. You _can_ however evolve a Dire pet using 0 beast mastery and 0 pet skills. In fact, I have evolved wolves in pre-searing to Dire without even taming them - I simply allowed them to kill me 800+ times. (For your information, I have tested every pet in the game - the pre-searing wolves and bears are the only animals that gain experience from killing a player (outside of PvP) - as they start as enemies they are awarded experience for the kills, no other animal does). Pre-searing is thus the only place you can level a pet by having it attack you.

So to get a Dire pet you do not ever need to have a single skill used, nor a single point of Beast Mastery invested. As for experience, I'll repeat my experiments, but they indicated that the pets gain at roughly 2-3 times the rate of a person. I did this by counting how many kills were necessary per level of what enemies and comparing it to a chart of experience /level for players. The factor is hard to determine, as the experience was quantised (on a per creature basis) but was indicating 2-3 times - if I use lower level opponents the resolution will be better, but it will take much longer.

The issue of player damage/pet damage IS a tricky one - I suspect that dire evolution in truth has nothing to do with ANY ratio or difference between the damages, but is simply a measure of some TOTAL amount of damage dealt by the pet, with or without skills - possibly a total of damage dealt by the pet at that point, possibly a minimum per level, who knows - but I suspect it has nothing to do with the amount of damage your player deals, save that killing your pets enemies too fast prevents it from dealing enough damage. The fact that I can level a wolf to dire in the wild supports this belief. The reason that there is a conundrum here is that when a player deals damage it typically reduces the amount of damage that the pet deals; after all, the pet gains experience from the kill but has dealt less damage. I am proposing to test this theory shortly by raising a wolf to level 9 while allowing it to do all the damage against foes for which it gains experience, but returing and killing hordes of level 3 enemies once the pet is level 9 and no longer gains experience. In so doing my damage will far outstrip the pets damage, but I suspect that the pet will continue to develop as aggressive/Dire, even if I exceed it's damage output by a factor of 10 with every level. Of course, it could be measuring damage done per kill worth experience or something. If I hit problems I may just have to level it to dire more slowly, against foes that offer a better damage/experince ratio (lower level foes) so that I can deliver a substantialy portion of the damage against each foe, while not affecting the total amount of damage my pet has done.

Anyway, our testing is not complete, but the due date for guides had come so Jenosavel and I published. There is obviously much more to learn, and the experiments continue. For example, a method has been suggested to test the non-critical damage of pets by using arranged GvG and the balanced stance skill to cause criticals not to hit for extra damage - this should allow us to tease the true damage range of the pet out, and will allow us to see the critical hit rate as well (by comparison of the damage distributions). We are still working on various aspects that aren't fully understood, but hopefully have banished many myths about pets. I have some theories about pet experience, but they are theories, and can't be tested just yet - hopefully soon.

-Epinephrine

Dire Pet
Thanks 70.121.104.96 that is some GREAT stuff. I wanted to confirm something. You said the Aggressive pet has +1 dmg and -30 health, but then the Dire pet has +2 dmg and +60 health. A typo or a fact? --Karlos 05:54, 15 Oct 2005 (EST)

Pet DP
Somehting I have always been curious about, do pets suffer DP? --Karlos 16:36, 22 October 2005 (EST)
 * Really difficult to determine. From personal experience, I believe that they do suffer from DP.  --Rainith 16:51, 22 October 2005 (EST)

Pet Evolution
The main pet evolution research is conducted at Beastmasters: Grand Pet Survey. If you read the last dozen or so pages, you will see strange results that are not entirely explained. We should revert to a version that accurately reflects the state of the pet evolution art, rather than maintain one that is verifiably false. If you think it is well understood, try evolving an Aggressive pet using the described methods on something like Charr outside Piken Square.

--Daulnay 1:20 pm PST, October 24 2005
 * See above "Corrections" section for Epinephrine's research on evolution. I propose a simple theory: Pet damage dealt vs pet damage taken.  Which ever is greater will push evolution in that direction.  Of course this is completely untested whatsoever, but it's simple and elegant and seems to be able to stay consistent with the observations that lead to the development of other theories. -PanSola 00:30, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I am tempted to agree with you PanSola - I suspect it truly is that simple as well, and that it has nothing to do with the master's damage rate at all, only that when the master deals the damage it takes away from the pet's damage output, as the damage dealt/experience point falls. - Epinephrine (who really should bother registering at some point)

Strider / Moa
On other sites, it's been noted that Striders effectively are Moa Birds, and that they have the same damage type. I'm not actually sure which it is supposed to be, except that someone had produced a version with a typo that made them different at some point. --JoDiamonds 09:03, 25 October 2005 (EST)


 * Yeah, that always struck me as weird, how canone do piercing and the other do slashing. But, which is the correct one and which is the typo? (My guess is piercing is correct) --Karlos 16:35, 25 October 2005 (EST)
 * The "typo" comes from the Prima guild IMHO, and generally it's hard to test the difference anyways. I'm going to revise that section with Epinephrine's research. -PanSola 06:25, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Pet armor...
In the pet armor section, pets with lv 1~4 were listed. Do low level pets actually exist? -PanSola 11:55, 29 October 2005 (EST)
 * In pre-searing some (if not all, I can't remember) pets are levels 1-3. --Rainith 12:08, 29 October 2005 (EST)

Category
What can this go under? not skills because it isnt strictly charm animal 04:20, 4 November 2005 (EST)
 * We don't need to put everything in a category... --Rainith 04:31, 4 November 2005 (EST)

Pet Skills
I vote dumping them into a category and just linking to it. I do NOT want to see the current list in the article expanded into a table within this article, though wouldn't mind seeing a separate article containing that table. -PanSola 06:22, 8 December 2005 (UTC)