Over the course of playing the game I’ve enjoyed a lot that the game has to offer and there’s decent potential for many things. One thing currently that is not in a good state? Companions.
I will go over various points of why the companions aren’t worth the time/effort at the current time.
(Observations and mentions in this post are from experience playing ‘Hunter’.)
N.B: This post is quite long and if you want the bare-bones glance, a summary is provided at the end.
Cost
Companions aren’t cheap, but leveling something like Hunter you get a voucher for a free companion. The free voucher is nice (even though you can’t decide which), but you’ll sink a lot of money into companions if you’re planning on battling with them.
Just like with all other classes you can go to the Hunter Master and pay to level up attributes and gain effects. Nice.
Unlike all other classes you have to pay a fair chunk of silver to upgrade your companions stats.
Would you like 1 stat point in Attack? That’ll be 300 silver.
…and the cost increases after every point.
(I can only imagine how ridiculous this gets in the late game.)
There are additional costs as well if you want to buy anything for your companion such as equipment or… Food.
The food is incredibly important, because at current it’s the only way to restore your companion’s Stamina (without them leveling up). I’ll touch more on why this is a particularly bad thing in the next section, but sufficing to say you’ll need a lot of these to make your companion battle viable and they cost 500 silver each.
They are definitely a drain on money and if you don’t have that then you’re going to feel pretty weak out there without something you’ve invested circle ranks into leveling up.
Stamina
As I touched on the previous section, Stamina doesn’t restore unless feeding a companion food or leveling up.
This becomes very annoying as a mechanic for numerous reasons.
The first of which is simply that the stamina drains away over time while having the companion out and idle. Standing around doing nothing for a bit? You’d better hit the snooze button in the companion menu to preserve that stamina you have. Stamina also drains faster while using companion abilities.
So from what we know and putting them together - Stamina drains quickly. From a full 60 stamina I’ve managed to drain my companions stamina in a couple of minutes.
Stamina will go straight to 0 if you’re companion’s HP reaches 0. This wouldn’t be a major problem if you had control over where they are and what they’re doing. If you’re in a boss battle and it starts attacking that boss when it’s channeling an AoE? Your companion has now lost all of its HP and Stamina, making it useless. (Hope you brought plenty of food and are in a party so you have 5 seconds to go through the canned animation without dying). Just hope that after feeding it that expensive food to restore it’s Stamina that it doesn’t just rush back into the fight and…
Stamina (as we mentioned) is not restored by anything. A simple solve to this is (as I thought might be the case) making the stamina canisters we’re breaking open, affect our companions. Why don’t they already? Why was this the design choice?
Battle
In battle companions are pretty cool. They can charge at enemies for decent damage, hold the enemy in place and allow all other manner of cool things.
…If you have stamina and health.
There’s no way to restore a companions Health or Stamina during combat - Especially if you’re solo.
With a companion at 0 HP they will be stunned for about 5 seconds with every hit they take, making them non-viable in combat.
With a companion at 0 Stamina, they will only deal 1 damage when they can hit. They will also have sluggish movement and will fail to catch most enemies or strike in time.
Even when you have a functioning companion with >0 HP and Stamina, sometimes they’ll just decide to attack traps and other nonsense in the field that you’re not even attacking.
In boss fights they offer very little to you and in the field they’ll run off and attack things that you’re not targeting.
Oh, yeah… Any abilities you want them to execute, will cost YOU, YOUR SP…
Mobility & Control
Again from the title of this section you’ll know we’ve already touched on this, but it’s important. What is the point in going through so many circles of this class and investing so much money into my companion, if I can’t even strategist in the field to make it a viable companion. Every RPG out there with AI party members has a function where you can change their nature.
“Attack all out!”
“Stay out of trouble!”
…and such. So why can’t we have control of this a little bit?
TL;DR
It was a reasonably long post about it, with a lot of things needing said about the bad state of companions which is killing many people investing into these classes.
Most probably didn’t read all of it, and I could’ve gone into more detail.
Problems
• Companion Stamina drains too quickly.
• Companions cost too much to improve and maintain battle viability.
• Companions have very bad AI and no control.
• Companions have no battle HP/Stamina restore options.
• Companion abilities use Stamina AND SP.
Proposed Solutions
• Balance out the stamina levels (or see last point).
• Costs for companion leveling should be balanced (or removed).
• Some amount of opt-in control over companions should be made available to those that wish to strategize with their companion.
• Options for in-battle/quick items such as pills/potions, that can restore companion HP and/or Stamina should be added.
and finally…
• Companion stamina OR character SP should be a resource for companion, NOT BOTH.
•If the characters SP is still going to be used for the abilities then remove Stamina as a companion mechanic. (You could always increase ability cooldowns if really necessary)
I would like to hear what other people leveling companion classes think about this, as well as those that are interested in the idea of leveling them.
Most importantly I’m interested in hearing from the devs on this matter. There is a lot wrong with the companions and it can’t be swept under the rug. Big changes are required.
People are investing 1/3 or more of their characters circles/ranks, leveling into companion classes playing what they want to play, only to be disappointed and becoming inferior when their companion isn’t viable in the fight anymore (and it’s not their fault).
