a question about pets/tamed creatures

so, as the title suggests, i have a question about the pets/tamed monsters. my question is, do they have energy? the reason i ask is because after much time spent exploring high level planets to find a pet that 1. has a good ranged ability, 2. is a small, capturable creature, and 3. on a planet where my end game gear doesnt just 1 shot it, so i can get it below 50% without having to switch to a low level weapon. so, after all of that, i get my pet. and now it hardly ever attacks. it will shoot its acid spit only on occasion. and if it misses, it just stands there doing nothing, or jumping around until it shoots again. it kinda reminds me of how i do when im out of energy with a gun and dont wanna switch to melee. as if it were waiting for a recharge between attacks. i never see him shoot more than 1 every 30 seconds or so. hell, sometimes he even waits longer than that. just standing there doing nothing for like 2 minutes. so i was wondering if its just a bug or something with their behavior, or if they had energy that needs to regen between shots. and since it is a ranged attacker, it does no damage from walking into monsters(though he gets hurt from it) so basically its completely useless for the next 30 seconds-2 minutes if it misses that shot.

 

I would guess that the reason things are the way they are, is because pets attacking non humanoids is an after thought. To give you an example: If you want a third arm attached to your body, but you don't want it to take a lot of time or money; You find an arm that matches your blood type and you get is stitched on. The problem with this is the connections that need to be there, aren't there. Your skeleton was not designed to accommodate a third arm, and so the necessary ground work just isn't there. Mmmmm bad analogy maybe.
We know that animals attack humanoids, be they player or npc, with no problem. The problem is that something isn't working when you swap the AI's 'rules of engagement'. It may be that they nerfed it for no reason, but I can almost guarantee its a programming oversight. Something like:

Code:

PSEUDOCODE:

if (distanceTo(x,y,enemyX,enemyY)<meleeRange){
    //Melee attack
    }
else if(distanceTo(x,y,humanoidX,humanoidY)>meleeRange){
    //ranged attack
    }

Now, the above code would never be used in a modern game for reasons I wont get into, but it demonstrates how problems like this can occur.
The code is looking for two seperate ideas (we are under the impression code was changed) in the if statement the function looks from the players location to an enemy's location and checks the distance. However the programmer missed the else if and the second function looks for the distance from player to humanoid. This can cause very strange behavior as the ranged attack will only be true if there is another bug somewhere else that still is logging a humanoid. In this case the animal would always melee attack, unless the second function returned true. This has not helped you at all, sorry.

 

The pet right now works like the ones in the field, it will launch specific attacks/touch damage animation after a duration, but it only aggros mobs that are really close to it and have aggro'd you. I don't think this is energy based, as there is always a delay between monster attacks.

 

yea im not sure, i guess its just that the acid spit one has a longer "cooldown", i guess that would be the right word. last night i got one of the ones that shoots out a stream of bullets(the acid one was just temporary, i wanted one with a wide arc that can hit multiple enemies), and the new one is constantly shooting. he waits like 2 seconds between attacks. that is, assuming he even has to attack twice because the bullet monster attack is incredibly OP. got him to level 13 or 14 so far(assuming he starts at whatever the planet level was i caught him on, which was 8) and each separate bullet does almost 1500 damage. which is almost as much as my Impervium 1h sword. only difference is that he shoots out like 10 bullets each stream. so thats 1500x10, like i said, incredibly op. and thats just level 13 or 14, i intend to take him higher, obviously.