I should take a moment to talk about pets. I didn’t realize it at first, but my pet is an example of a place where I unconsciously was altering my play style without really realizing it. I read on the forums recently about pets being able to summon minions on their own, so when the first spell I found was a skeleton summon I popped it on the dog and ventured further into the dungeon. At first the occasional skeleton was just a cute distraction for the enemies so that they couldn’t surround me as easily, but as I watched I noticed the skeleton wasn’t just mindlessly smacking things, it actually had some sort of fighting skills included in its AI! Once in a while it would give a powerful smack to a monster, and quite often was picking things off on its own.
Shortly after this I realized that I wanted to keep my little skeleton friend alive, so I bought a spell in town to heal everyone, and dropped that in my pet’s other skill slot. I noticed at this time that not only are there multiple levels of spells (Summon Sword I, Summon Sword II, Summon Sword III, etc), but the more you used a spell the more powerful it becomes! This really became apparent when I sent my pet back to town for an extended time and suddenly found my ass being handed to me. Apparently, the pet’s minions and healing capabilities were causing me to alter my playing style in a reckless manner, that I could only pull off when I wasn’t required to constantly pay attention to my health and when the monsters had distractions to keep them from ganging up on me. Alone, my adapted playing style was pretty dangerous. This is something I hadn’t experienced before in any ARPG. With regular minion masters or healer classes in games you pay a great deal of attention to the little things like hp and mp levels, and how your minions are doing. I had an immortal pet who I gave a summon and healing spell to on a whim, and suddenly my melee character was being supported without even realizing it!
Once I had this realization I went and bought the most expensive summon spell I could find for multiple minions: Skeleton archers (it was still pretty early on). I gave it to my dog to replace the single skeleton warrior. This brought another shock: the little skeleton archers that I once again figured would be a mere distraction were actually mowing down enemies for me! Where the skeleton warrior would distract enemies by rushing into them head on, the skeletons where picking off things that were around me – often things that were coming up behind me. Even better, as my dog became more adept at spell casting more skeletons began to appear and get stronger!
