Was bored and conducted a bit more testing. Same issues occurred, so no major changes, but I did discover the following:
- I appear to be wrong about [x] companion skills. Tested Call of the Wild and Aspect of the Stampede more thoroughly and there was no change in damage to passive wolf attacks - so a x30 and an x25 had no effect.
- I tested active wolf attacks as well, and although there was not as large a sample of attacks, I wasn’t able to discern a difference in damage with the [x] modifiers mentioned above, so active wolf skill appears to be suffering from the same issues.
- Another oddity which I hadn’t noticed about the [x] companion skills is that they don’t reflect on the tooltip in town, but do out of town. I’m not aware if this is universal or particular to [x] companion skills.
Without any bonuses, actual passive damage appears to be around 45% of tooltip damage (on polar bears in world tier 2). I’m not sure if this 45% is simply due to the enemies’ armor, but I did test my basic attacks as well and found a number that was fairly close.
I tested a few other bonuses and again saw reflection on tooltip but no reflection on damage output on either passive damage OR active damage with wolves.
I only tested wolves this time. If I get bored again I’ll go back and test ravens (poison creeper seems like a larger pain to test).
On a related note: I watched the fireside chat. They actually had a guy who knew what was going on for a change, which was nice (although he also seemed to be the guy responsible for many of the boneheaded pre-launch decisions; at least he owned up to some). They discussed druid companions and said that they were surprised that so many players want to play a companion focused build… So, they’re adding a couple of buffs. These buffs will be on-top of the broken damage though, so I expect they will have no significant effects. They still seem to have zero idea (or perhaps they know and don’t want to share) about the broken damage calculations of the companions. All we can do is keep complaining (or stop playing altogether). Hope they figure it out.