im looking for a compressor to add to a patch ive been working on lately, but the omx.comp~ is much too overwrought for what i want to do. i need a more basic compressor, and i swear max 5 had a compressor that was something along the lines of just: attack, release, ratio, makeup gain, lookahead, and a sidechain input; thats all i want. ive looked for a while online and for some reason i cant seem to find any patches available for some reason.

compressors

Take a look at the MSP Compression Tutorial 4: Compression on Real Instruments. I think that may be what you were looking for.

"and i swear max 5 had a compressor that was something along the lines of just: attack, release, ratio, makeup gain, lookahead, and a sidechain input..."

(in komp.maxhelp see sidechain input for the bpatcher; ...personally, found great use with komp-multiband.maxpat...)

see in your max/examples folder:
.../effects/kompressor/