Enmity System Explanation and Planned Adjustments

[RAIST]

Greetings,

The information mentioned yesterday about summoner's abilities and Blood Pacts not creating hate seems to have raised some questions, so I'd like to follow up on it.

To be precise, Blood Pacts have a non-volatile enmity value of 1. It's been arranged this way so that some enmity remains on the summoner when having a pet perform an action against a monster. If we were to make it so enmity was not placed on the summoner, once the enmity from the avatar is gone, it would cause bugs to occur (such as monsters becoming unclaimed). It's very similar to the way linked monsters don't come after the summoner once the avatar has vanished (except it would happen to the monster you perform the Blood Pact on).

In the case that the avatar's enmity has a minimum value of 1 for both non-volatile and volatile enmity, when executing a Blood Pact, the summoner will receive +1 to their non-volatile enmity, making a total of 2 non-volatile and 1 volatile enmity. When this happens, the target will go after the avatar.

As an adjustment, we are looking into the below:

• When the summoner has enmity, they will not receive +1 to non-volatile enmity when executing a Blood Pact. (The +1 to non-volatile enmity will only occur when the summoner's enmity value is 0.)

The above adjustment is not a job ability adjustment; it will be a change to the process occurring in the programming, so please give us a bit of time for this.

We had looked into taking another approach by adding an enmity+ stat to avatars like beastmaster's familiars have, and to ease up on the enmity lost when taking damage; however, this was geared more towards solo play and there are times when it would be best for avatars not to take hate during party battles, so we decided to adopt the adjustment mentioned above.

I think this may have been mt'ed---think it should read:

In the case that the avatar's enmity has a minimum value of 1 for both non-volatile and volatile enmity, when executing a Blood Pact, the summoner will receive +1 to their non-volatile enmity, making a total of 2 non-volatile and 1 volatile enmity. When this happens, the target will go after the summoner.

As that is what appears to be happening.

Not sure if this will be a proper fix though. If we are talking of increases by only 1 point each time the way it is currently, then it should no longer be an issue after the first BP: Rage that lands for decent damage. Unfortunately, as it stands right now, it can happen again when you fire your next BP: Rage. The avatar should have generated sufficient enmity by then to offset a few more points of enmity being added to the summoner from the second BP. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case as it is now. There may be a bigger issue at play causing the hate to be skewed so heavily towards the summoner that this removal of 1 point increases per BP does not resolve.

Will just have to see how it all pans out I guess. Just not very confident this will resolve the erratic hate issues well enough, requiring further adjustments.

The idea about giving avatars a +enmity trait like BST pets would be the more appropriate solution that you guys should work on adding as well. Once implemented, this could have it's strength adjusted appropriately to achieve the desired level of balance--if it initially is too strong/too weak it could more or lease just have it's value raised/lowered. (by the way, that is what was mentioned....a trait for the avatars, not a Snarl like ability. This would be an inherent trait to the avatars themselves, like Stout Servant).