Hell modes
Not certain what to do with these at the moment. They are hell mode so they should be difficult but I don't want them to be a bore, and they should be rewarding. I think the fact you can get good cards is mostly fine when it comes to reward, but gear is a difficult one because of cards. You won't necessarily want the gear even if it's got more stats on it if you already have good (paid for) cards in your existing gear. And it's only well geared players that can actually do them successfully and trying to carry a few players is probably not possible, at least in hell 3-5.
You also have the high rank pet skills books dropping in there which you can't get anywhere else.
I'm not really sure what additional rewards I could add to make them more attractive to geared players so give me some ideas.
I can certainly look at reducing Max HP on bosses again but I really don't want these modes to become easy like the rest of the game otherwise there really isn't much point to having them at all. They were added for the sole reason of giving players something very difficult to do. Maybe damage could go up slightly to compensate if HP comes down.
When would you update the Pet Shop to have all Rank 10 skill books sold for Moolah?
I'm not sure that will happen but I am looking at ways to make the skill book system less of a pain.
Combining rank 1 books was never intended to be the main way of getting high rank books, although it is an option if you are patient enough to actually do it. Originally I had planned to only sell 1 or 2 ranks on a vendor and ranks 3-10 were only going to be obtained from monster drops. The book combine thing was added as an afterthought so you could make use of duplicate books you obtained from monsters or from other players.
Having a better system that would let you make a rank 10 out of however many ranks 1 books in one go would be great of course, but then there would be absolutely no purpose to having the combine system in the first place - may as well just sell the rank 10 on the vendor which I don't really want to do. I want there to be some effort involved in gaining rank 10.
Maybe it's fine to just sell some of the higher ranks on the vendor and be done with it. The problem, as I see it, is that the more stuff can simply just buy from vendors, the less reason you have to go to dungeons for drops and then feel there is no point to them.
I am thinking about options though. I wouldn't want to stand there manually combining books either - have better things to do than that. The game should not be a chore.
How exactly does the Pet HP Heal and MP heal get calculated? I have a pet whose stat on heal is 8,577 with a skill book Heal Blessing at Rank 10.
It works exactly the same as character's HoT skills.
+Heal / ticks + heal_amount_you_see_in_heal_skills_tooltip
When heals are calculated there is some randomness added to the total +heal you (or pet) has though, which is why you always see slightly different numbers from heals, it's a +-10% change. I don't really know why it's like that to be honest with you, but it just is. It's the same with damage/defense calculations - just so you don't see the same damage or heal number over and over I suppose. I was considering removing it tbh.
Anyway, so if your pet has 8,577 healing and it has rank 10 of Heal Blessing which heals for 500+heal every 3s for 12s:
8577 / 4 + 500 = 2,644
The reason it's 2.5k for you is because of that randomness on +heal that I mentioned.
randHeal = heal * ( 90 + ( rand() % 21 ) ) / 100;
It basically comes down to adjusting your total by + or - 10%, so it could end up being as low as 7719 +heal resulting in ticks of 2,429 or as high as 9,434 resulting in ticks of 2,858.