tier 3 pets are goodness

No screenshots today, sorry. Not like anyone is watching! Hit 27 on my /dark pair over the weekend and that means - you guessed it! Tier 3 pets. Assault bot is very nice. Lich is, well, lich is a tier 1 or 2 pet really, he's really pretty lame/unimpressive. Sure, this might change with the final buff, but btw. assault/lich/oni with only the level 6 buff, lich loses hands down. With me doing nothing, a lich can take an even LT. Assault bot took a -1 boss. Still, that is fairly impressive either way I suppose. And he does heal himself, which is very handy. Not to mention he gets fear & hold at 32...that should be worth waiting for.

The only real thing wrong with the lich is torrent. It's like gale, only a little bit weaker - and he does it constantly. Unlike other pets which have different AIs at different ranges (basically everything except tier 1 mercs), the lich only has 1 ai - he rotates tentacles (a fairly small cone it seems), torrent, dark blast, and life drain as soon as they become available. Sometimes he'll stand around for 5-10 seconds (hopefully this will go away with 32 buff). Still, even doing nothing is better than using torrent. True, SOMETIMES torrent can be very useful - but that's in the hands of a player - it requires massive micro to be useful on a pet. I guess I could do that...and I'll probably wind up doing that eventually, but...bleh. It's just annoying.

I do understand that the lich is not a damage pet - he is more of a pure control pet like dark servant, with two attacks thrown in (blast & life drain). I'm sure I would love him for his control bonuses if not for the torrent bit...basically his tentacles don't seem to reach much from his default attack range, and I'm not into micro on this guy, so I usually only see one or two enemies immobilized at a time. Still, that is better than no immobilizing. Except for that bit about the knockback...oh, and did I mention the knockback?

Assault bot on the other hand, is a damage pet. With 2 dmg SOs his melee attack hits for 70! His lasers are nice too. I was rather dissapointed to see the short range on his flamethrower cone (think fire blaster, not ar blaster), but all in all I'm very pleased with him. Recharge time on flamethrower also seems very long, but that could just be the AI. All in all, very pleased with him.

Our 3 man team tore through the respec 2x the other day - once at vicious and then again at villanious after we couldn't damage the AV. On villanous we couldn't quite finish either (although we did make it to the AV despite the vines counter bug) - we were doing fine at damaging and surviving the AV but got taken out when the vines and ambush spawned simultaneously. We'll give it another go soon now that we've got commando/lich/assault bot backup...(ok, the lich probably won't help, but I didn't want to make him feel even worse by leaving him out of the list.)

On another channel, I've been working on my plant/fire dom a bit in the hopes of making him not suck (most definitely going to respec him asap). Worked from 14->16 over the last couple of days and I still really don't like him. His damage is very low and his control is subpar (except for Seeds of Confusion which is very good if you like confusion). I will start an ice/thorns eventually, but for now I'm really going to try to stick him out to 32 and see if it becomes worth it at any point.