I can see in the descriptions for INT and PRE that they increase pet damage and health respectively. Is the scaling provided by those stats the only scaling for pets? Or is it like melee powers where they'll scale with your superstats and then get an additional bonus?

If those stats are the only means of scaling, that seems a poor situation. An entire category of powers rendered essentially not worthwhile unless you focus on particular stats doesn't fit with the rest of this game - to use the same analogy, it would be as if melee attack powers ignored your superstats and scaled only from STR.

So someone please tell me it's not that :)

Not scaling with superstats doesn't make them worthless, because they already scale with level. Scaling with superstats is just a way to make equipment matter, and isn't really necessary for making the powers good. As it is, melee scales with strength, but it's never more than 20%. Same likely goes for pets, but the scaling doesn't really seem to be working at all for that anyway.

Some sort of scaling with gear is necessary. If they don't scale with gear then powers that do will outstrip them. If the only way to achieve that scaling with gear is focusing on INT/PRE, that's a problem.

As I said, the way melee works is just fine, since it scales with both STR and superstats. What i'm trying to find out is if that's the case with pets, or if they completely ignore superstats. Has anyone done any testing on this?

They do scale. Just not in any useful way.

Pre scales Pet HP and does work, it just does very little. Last time i tested it was something like 1.5 Hp per point of Pre. which means it is worthless to bother with Pre for just pet HP. Think about it, at level 25 for example the zombies get about 1800 HP stacking Pre to 115 at that level gives them an additional 165 or so HP.

Int is much worse as far as testers can tell it scales a % of damage but the percent is so small and in general pet damage is lots of small ticks of damage that it is fractions of points of damage. So you might boost your int to see no number change in damage.

The broken part of pet scaling is ranks. Some pets scale with rank and some ranks are just broken for other pets. The general rule of thumb is that you don't rank a pet unless it changes it's type or adds an ability. So Nightmare pets are good to rank and zombies got the double duration perk (they also change type at higher rank and get an AOE).

The exception to the scale for new powers/type are circle pets they get new AOE damage at higher ranks but it actually lowers their overall DPS because there Aoe powers don't scale with Int at all. They throw these powers with long animation and duration times in and end up hurting thier DPS.

I tested INT with Pet this morning for a bit. I am only lvl 15. I put every stats in INT to make it cap my damage strength at 32% (which is usually high enough for other stats) and for Command Animal, I see on average about +1 more damage (two of them will be 2 damage). This is sad...

Then I put Rank 3 in Command Animal and I see about +1.5 damage increase. This is sad too.

Overall, it is not worth it to stack INT just for extra pet damage. You want to stack INT because you want better recharge and endurance discount. That's it.


Rank 2 and Rank 3 in Command Animal, Attack Toy and Munition Robots are not worth it either.

If you have nothing to spend, put rank 2 in your energy builder attack. That is way better than getting that tiny extra damage from those 3 pets.

I don't see why its a problem. If you want good pets, you should SS the stats which affect pets.

The melee analogy is not valid, since ranged powers don't have an equivalent scaling ;)