Automaton massacre: The need for some form of Automaton damage mitigation

[Balloon]

I understand that Puppetmaster might not be the greatest DD in the world, but with Oatixur, good gear, and Divinator it can be respectable. Except in any new content.

Keeping an automaton alive is a great deal of work, when a single WS can take it down 50%-75% and with only repair and items to keep it alive, and role reversal to keep it alive.

Maybe something to allow our pet to mitigate more damage, maybe changing replicator to no longer be when your HP is low, and having shock absorber be more potent.. And more native PDT.

It's just tedious having your automaton dead more often than it is alive.

[Balloon]

I'm not talking about for solo content, I'm talking about new content - Content where large amounts of PDT and shadows are required in order to even survive.

There's next to no way for automatons to recover in a speedy way - Beastmasters have repair and around 6k hp for their pets, Dragoons can function perfectly well without their wyverns and Summoners can quickly resummon their pets.

'Knowing how to play the job' - really is a nonissue here. We're talking about new content. Not level 75 content that you solod.


Even with AF1+4, Guignol and Miniexpac pants it's hard to keep an automaton alive in new content, and if your solution to that is "Keep 3 Light maneuvers up" ... a solution that eats massively into dps of both automaton and master, and even if you were just using whm automaton anyway would cause the pet to cure at 90% which is massively inefficient,. then there's a problem. We're simply much less effective in new content thanks to a mixture of a need to micromanage our pet, our lack of automaton and the need to balance automaton stats and master stats.

It's strange to me that DRG, a job less focused on their pet, can manage to keep their wyvern alive longer than an automaton can stay alive. When I did AA TT with 2drgs their wyverns stayed alive for a good 70% of the fight, whereas my auto died in the first couple of minutes.

[Balloon]

The only way I can see that is with a lot of earth maneuvers, in which case you're eating so far into yours and your pets DPS that it becomes a moot point. JA delay is a huge problem in this game. You'd also have to alter out some of the attachments and it's already a crapshoot with the accuracy automatons have.

The game doesn't accomodate a jack of all trade job. And part of the solution to that would be allowing us to not worry so much about our automaton HP.

[Balloon]

But the idea that Pup should somehow be more powerful is not something I would go with, it is already powerful in the right situations and if played in the according way.

I don't see the balance in having a job that can sometimes kite a little better when there's effectively 0 content based around that. Let's not pretend that all content is equal. When 90% of the new content is geared around mobs that spam AoE, and that require high levels of PDT and Damage Mitigation to survive, then jobs should have some way of dealing with that. Most do in the form of shadows, or having a whm around that can help you deal with it.

I took my automaton to skirmish in Out'Rak - I could stay alive thanks to our WHM. My automaton had to eat Back to back AoEs. It has 1.2~1.3k hp depending on your animator. When 1 of those does 700 and the timer on repair is 3 minutes I fail to see a way it could have survived, sparing spamming maneuvers and severely reducing my dps.

Call beast is also on a 5 minute timer, and pets usually have enough hp to last that long, if not there's reward, if not there's muslum. We have to respawn our pet with 330 hp. It dies near instantly if we can't repair it quick enough. In terms of pet survivability, BST has us beat and then some.

Pup has a place, but that place tends to be doing Ilvl < 110 and soloing old content. All I want is for some way to make it even remotely viable on content that has heavy AoE

[Balloon]

I don't even.. All I said was that in party content the automaton can not stay alive. I didn't mention solo. I didn't mention always using WHM auto, in fact, I rarely do outside of solo situations.

You might not have a problem with automaton survivability in your content, but I fail to see how others don't if their automaton is in melee range. All the AA have extensive aoe abilities that hit for upwards of 1k . And no, sacrificing lots of Master Haste acc atk etc is not a solution to that problem. Eating mountains of ja delay to keep up 3 earth maneuvers isn't either. You become useless either way.

Try going to an AA as a melee character without shadows. Without PDT. You'll die. That's the situation our automaton faces.It's not about being 'uber in all situations' - It's about being completely useless in many.

Also, putting 5 merits into Repair means we lose upwards of 10 acc in either ranged accuracy or melee accuracy. Once again, something we can't afford to do. With a RoE animator you already sit at around 710 accuracy, which isn't enough to have even a 30-50% hit rate on content greater than Normal. Even on normal my automaton had trouble hitting with just RoE.

Divinator helps a little, but I'd still argue that Regimen, Hurch'lan, Stabilizers, scope, and a whole slew of other boons are needed just to get an acceptable hit rate. Then you need to pile on the attack attachments, Turbo charger 1 and 2, Optic Fiber and what you're left with is very little in terms of slots.

A job as weak as puppetmaster currently is shouldn't have to make all those sacrifices, because it makes bringing one untenable. 'Oh hey. I'll bring my pup, but don't mind me I'll just have to sacrifice HUGE, HUGE amounts of damage in order to keep my automaton alive, and even then he'll probably only hit 50% of the time because I had to remove all boons he could get to throw on earth attachments and maneuvers... What's that? You'll just bring literally any other job. Okay '

When your perspective is "New Colonization Reives" I'd hazard a guess that we're not talking about the same content. I can keep my automaton alive with nothing in those.

I also don't think you understand just how damaging ja delay is. Keeping 3 maneuvers on at all times reducing dps by as much as 20-30%. Then you're reducing it further with repair, then even further with attachment choices, then even further removing 5 merits into something useful.