Just wanted to add that I notice similar experiences in our raids. Pet deals about 1/9 the dps in raids as in groups, and often stalls out. So definitely not just an Xegony problem. (Cazic Thule Raider, here)
I still believe these issues are rooted in how their combat code works. Basically everything in this post is calculated every melee round. With how often players and pets attack, and how many NPCs are engaged in raid boss fights, it seems to me that optimizing these calculations to be done on zone in and then only updated as needed (Buff, Debuff, gear change, skill change, level change) instead of re-calculating them every melee round. I'd imagine the offensive side of the calculation is as large as the defensive side outlined in that post. In talking to a Dev last year, they basically confirmed it.
I can confirm. Currently raiding CotF on Selos and pet damage on raid is wonky as hell. I find on single targets it isn't as bad. But when switching him to adds like the phoenix's or the fallen's I will hit frenzied... go through an entire wave of adds and even 30 to 40 seconds into the boss after the wave pet will still have Virulent Talon buff up.... that is usually gone within 30 seconds on a group mob. So its pretty weird having it up after a minute of killing adds and almost a minute back on to the boss. I will also see times on raids where my pet is rocking about 3k DPS for quite some time when he is normally around 8-10k DPS in group content.
We need a new boss mechanic. Something that kills all pets in the instance every 30 seconds or so. Watch the lag melt away!
Just make pets only hit once every 6 seconds for 1 damage with no other calculations! Profit! Sancus approved!
I've seen this too on Miragul in a group mission. I would command /pet attack and the pet would just sit there. Similar problem with mercs not healing.
Made an observation recently. It appears extremely fast hitting melee characters can experience this too. I noticed a beastlord on a griklor raid hit his full burn with a 2 hand blunt (60 something % hhe from spirit frenzy, max overhaste from his bard, 2hb for bl has very low delay etc so he's hitting fast af) and he only did like 600k some dps. Ive seen this dude do well over 1m dps under the same circumstances so I decided to delve into the issue. I searched logs for that fight for his crush attacks and noticed the number of swings he made per second were not only sporadic (sometimes 3 per second, sometimes 10+ which isn't too too surprising with flurries and such) but there were some seconds where he skipped and didn't throw any swings. Pretty much every 4th second or so if I remember right. On the very next dervish we attacked, the beast had much more consistent hits and there were no seconds that went by with no crush attacks. Way more hits were picked up in the logs that on the boss we were burning. Any updates on a fix?
A beastlord is subject to spell lag just like all casters. They cannot swing during spell casts, and with extreme spell lag, the amount of swings go down.
Lol. He was spamming dots, instant cast. Unless somehow instant cast spells still cause interrupts in melee swings? I genuinely don't know.
I've noticed the same things with our Beastlords when comparing very good and very bad burns. When one casts a spell in a laggy raid environment, there is the spell cast time (this is 0 for Beastlord DoTs), an interim period of lag (this can be seconds long in extreme cases), and then the GCD triggers. My theory, which I can't substantiate, is that melee swings can't occur during that interim period prior to the GCD actually triggering. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some degradation in melee swing rate in general, but that theory is the best I could come up with to explain why hybrids with instant cast spells seem to see a much larger DPS decrease than pure melee classes in laggy environments.
I have experienced this sort of lag (in raids) being described on my Beastlord as well, for the the entirety of this expansion. Even some of TBL but not nearly as bad as it has been in ToV.
Could be, thanks for the perspective. I'll recommend he try not casting any spells next griklor raid and see if his melee dps sees a dramatic increase or not and report back!
Actually, on my Beastlord, the lag makes it too frustrating to keep playing him. I opt to play my shaman instead because too oft my performance is squandered by lag.
The lag seems like it has been much worse lately. On the Wedding raid last night I noticed swarm pets not only spawning slowly, but barely attacking.
I know this post is over 3 years old, but is there any update on a resolution to this specific pet issue that is still happening and seems to be getting worse? I play a BST on raids, and any raid instance with any amount of lag I am seeing my main pet do about 1/8 of its normal DPS on a consistent basis, and while I don't have the charting Sanctus listed in his original post, I have sat there and watched my pet not swing at all for 10-15+ seconds. In numbers terms, it is going from 300-350k DPS sustained on average in a normal raid instance to 50kish over the same time frames. The raid lag definitely hits everyone a bit, but pet classes are essentially getting a main feature of their class removed in over half the raid instances as the lag is nearly constant now. It's extremely frustrating to have no chance of parsing well on raids and there is nothing I can do about it. The raids are getting to the point for me personally where they just aren't enjoyable anymore as my class is not even functioning as intended unless the stars align and we actually get a good raid instance.
It is being addressed within the scope of the general raid lag issues I would think, it's an overall processing congestion issue so once the changes to address it start to filter in improvements will be seen, I'm expecting a gradual change/shift rather than any big steps taking place as the issue has hundreds of "moving parts" in volved. Once overall lag starts to become better managed the issue with pets will eventually see improvements but I imagine this being a "years in the making" solution. Unless of course they opt for a more "nuclear solution" and make some wholesale combat changes that radically depart from what combat has been doing the past 10 year or so, reducing overall hit counts but bumping up individual hit damage values to compensate.