Huge
support!
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, so I’m glad this suggestion already
exists.
(I’m sorry
if the following ramblings don’t make a lot of sense, I just wanted to write
down my thoughts, so I can stop thinking about it. This also ended up way too
long. Sorry. xP)
My main
issue with companions as a whole is how their different “features” (for lack of
a better term) actively get in the way of each other.
For me the different “features” are, like OP already mentioned:
- Playing with companions
- Using companions in battle/team building
- matching companions with wolves for aesthetic or lore reason
Currently
it is next to impossible to engage with all three of these aspects to their
fullest at the same time, because they just aren’t compatible with each other:
Playing with companions locks them to a certain wolf for at least 1 hour
(unless there is a companion with a 30 minute cool down, I’ve forgotten). This
means that you CAN’T switch them out which is a problem for
using companions in combat, where you can only use companions with the same
wolf they are attached to. Since lorwolf has an auto-battling system, the
actual gameplay aspect of the campaign and the gauntlet (as well as hunting,
where you have to match the right synergies) is the team-building. So the
companion-cool down is actively getting in the way of the main (and arguably
only) gameplay of these three major activities, by preventing you to freely and
easily switch your team around.
And even IF you ignore the cool down, the fact that in order to use a specific type
of wolf and a specific type of companion on the same team they have to be
attached to each other, means that you CAN’T
freely match companions and wolves for aesthetic/lore, unless they happen to
also be a combination you want/need for your teams. Something that becomes less
likely with rare companions you might only have 1 or 2 copies of, or even
companions you just don’t like and don’t want to put on your wolves.
If you want
to engage with any one of these three features to their fullest, right now, you’d
have to ignore one of the other two.
Wanting to match your companions with wolves and even the companion cool down, aren’t
a problem if you never intend to use them in campaign, gauntlet or hunting and
you can freely switch your companions around whenever, if you just never play
with them and don’t care for aesthetics.
But, at least in my eyes, the fact you have to choose which of the site
features you want to engage with at the cost of neglecting the others is a BIG
problem.
Separating
the team building aspect of companions from the other two, by just letting you
use any companion that is attached to any wolf, would solve a big part of this
issue, since it gets rid of the two big negative relationships between the cool
down ->
team building -> aesthetics.
(I also find it hard to believe that putting a hard cap on how many companions
can be in a party would be significantly harder to program than this roundabout
way of limiting them by tying them to specific wolves.However, my programming knowledge so small you'd need a microscope, so I'm probably wrong.)
On top of
that it would also get rid of the giant QoL issue of having to go to a completely
different part of the site just to change which companion you can use in your
team.
This, in my eyes, is an even bigger issue than the first, simply because you
CAN get around the first issue by playing differently (even though you really
shouldn’t have to).
Like I mentioned, if you are mainly interested in the campaign, gauntlet and/or
hunting, you can make your life a lot easier by just never playing with your
companions ever. I know this, because this is how I’ve been playing since
forever.
However what you can’t avoid (unless you somehow have enough wolves and
companions to permanently cover every possible combination of wolf-companion
that exists) is the endlessly frustrating UI.
For example:
- If you need a different synergy for a hunting quest than you have currently
available, you need to leave the hunting page (or open a separate tab) to go to
the specific wolfs profile, a wolf you first have to find in you den.
- But even once you’re on the profile of the wolf, you might realize that the
companion you need on this wolf is already attached to another wolf and you don’t
have another copy. So you either need to go back to one of the team-building
pages to look through all your wolves there, before going back to your den, or go through all of your wolves
manually.
- Once you find the wolf that has the companion you need you have detach it, go
back to the first wolf, attach it there and then go back to the hunting page to
actually start the quest.
- Potentially repeat for the very next quest, immediately.
And that’s just when you try to find synergies for hunting. When you actually
want to experiment with different companions in the gauntlet you can add having
to go to another part of the site, separate from the gauntlet or the den,
because, for some reason, the only way to see which attacks a companion has is
to go to their individual page, which you have to find by going to the “Companions”
page first.
My point is that the current system requires you to jump around all over the
site and click way too much, just to accomplish something that you should be
able to accomplish directly from the team builder.
Sure, if the companions are still only usable when they are attached to a wolf
at all, you’ll still have to switch them around sometimes, at least early on
when you don’t have that many wolves, but it would be way less than it is now.
My preferred
way for this to work would be the following:
1 - If a
companion is attached to any wolf, you can use it in a team, even if that
specific wolf is not on the team.
Why do I think companions should still be attached to wolves at all? Mostly
because I’m assuming (and I’m not a game developer or programmer in any way, so
it’s really just a guess based on the features that exist) that the game is
currently only able to “detect” companions as distinct entities when they are
attached to a wolf. That’s why the cool down exists at all and why companions
are stackable in the inventory. So my guess is that it would be easier to “just”
change what makes a companion “usable” on a team, compared to completely changing
the companion system from the ground up. (However if my guess is completely wrong
and it would be easier to change how the game tracks individual copies of
companions, please get rid of the cool down altogether. )
2- When
choosing a member for a team, all the companions you have equipped show up as individuals,
the same way wolves do, preferably in a different tab than the wolves.
So if you have 3 Basidios for example, you would see 3 different Basidios to
choose from and you can’t choose the same individual twice on the same team.
3- “You
cannot have more companions than wolves in your party”. This is the same limit
that already exists; it’d just be explicitly stated instead of being a
side-effect of the current system.
To summarize:
Separating team building from what specific wolf the companion is attached to
would be a huge QoL improvement, because you would no longer have to ignore one
aspect of the site to fully engage with another and it would also cut down on a
lot of unnecessary jumping around all over lorwolf.
It would also not really change how companions can be used, since you could
still do the same things you can already do with them. You just wouldn’t have
to pretend that the “Play with companion” button doesn’t exist. xP
