Is it really intended for percentage-based damage reductions to stack additively rather than multiplicatively?
I am specifically meaning for the Argus Pet Battle vs Foulclaw. As a “boss” type pet, he already has a 50% damage reduction. In addition, he uses Crouch, a move than gives him 50% damage reduction for 3 turns (on a 4 turn cooldown). This means, that on average, you have 1 turn you can do HALF damage, 3 turns you can do NO damage, while it just gets to swing away.
Sure, there are strategies that exist, using various convoluted methods to try and kill it before it murders your whole team (and many of them still rely on RNG). But this honestly seems like a blatant oversight, more than design intent.
I guess technically it is impossible to know without confirmation from Blizzard. It’s been this way since pet battles started in MoP. There are devs that do pet battles so they must know. There are definitely other systems that Blizzard changed from multiplicative to additive and vice versa (haste comes to mind). My personal belief is no matter if it was initially intended or not, they have intentionally left it this way. Again, just my belief, but you’ll never get proof either way unless a blue posts in here, they mention it on a Q&A, it gets tweeted, etc.
Unfortunately, yes, that is working as intended. It was that way since it went live. We made the Devs aware of it, and their response was essentially, “Tough cookies.”
Although in beta, there was, apparently, a time in which Foulclaw’s innate damage reduction and crouch did not stack additively, and incoming damage was reduced to 25% when Crouch was active. This is evinced by the presence of strats on Xu-Fu that wouldn’t have a prayer of working now.
I think it is more to do with how both abilities apply the exact same buff (similarly to how Howl and Stampeded both apply Shattered Defenses, so they overwrite each other, but both will stack with the debuff from unholy ascension). Is there a different buff ability that reduces damage by raw % but with a different value? It would be interesting to see if they stacked (I am guessing they would then).
Not to be overly dismissive here, but is this really a thread complaining about how Boss pets are more powerful than ours?
They’re supposed to be. It’s been that way since the inception. Yes, they have more powerful abilities than ours do. The idea is to make it a challenge to bring them down.
It started that way, and his question was answered. However, it quickly devolved into a whinefest about how unfair it is that boss pets can do this and we can’t.
I’m all for challenging and difficult pet bosses. No complaints about any other that I’ve fought to date. But having a battle that literally is 1 turn out of 4 you are even allowed to damage it, and it’s only @ 50% of allowed damage, with no way to CC it (Critter-type, immune to stuns), while it can just wail away on 2+ pets of your own while it’s immune, doesn’t seem right, and mechanically seems like a big oversight.
Will it get looked at? Probably not. Does it change the fact it’s probably the most unfair setup for pet battling, in that there is absolutely NO way to bypass it (cause even if you apply something to boost your damage done by a percentage, it stills takes nothing with Crouch up). Other fights all got clever ways to deal with a boss mechanic. This one doesn’t. This is just “Best bring the exactly right loadout to be able to snipe the damage in that one turn out of ever 4, and hope you survive and don’t die due to RNG multi-hit attacks”. There is challenging, and there is not fun. Foulclaw falls in the latter, I am sure everyone will agree.
what kills me is that the post was intended as a question about a pet battle. Then turns into insults from people. If you have nothing really intelligent to say about the topic then ignore it and move to one that you might actually have something to contribute too. I for one agree with the post about boss being a little ridiculous in allowing 1 attack at 1/2 dmg. I love a challenge don’t mind failing but this is too much
I found foulclaw surprisingly one of the easier bosses for the family achievement, once you understand how it works.
It’s been a while but the majority was through stampede or similar abilities that increase his damage taken by 100%, most pet families have at least 1 pet with this. Then go to town because he was quite squishy.
It’s not broken just because you didn’t think hard enough to find a solution.
Shadeflicker on the other hand… that’s a poorly designed battle