In general if my pet is going to main tank a named I prefer to have 2 cleric mercs (or a real player) healing. Be careful of any mechanics that the mob may employ, some are particularly nasty for pet users.
Some players mistakenly believe that if anything nice is said about their class it will cause nerfs. Unfortunately this tends to make their statements less believable, since it implies they are trying to hide information. Nerfs don't come from the forums, they come from devs looking into an ability and deciding there needs to be a change. Then there is coincidence. Last year a player posted a video of a enchanter perma stunning a mob. A month later we rolled out a patch that updated the code base of EQ to a more modern way of handling floating point math. That happened to cause a slight delay in the recast of a spell. Of course people would rather believe that it was intentionally nerfed than the math just becoming more accurate. No one likes a change they believes impacts them negatively.
It was never supposed to work that way. We had wanted to fix it for a long time, but never got around to it until the change was finally made.
There's no need, assuming you AA as you go. The 97 pet is perfectly capable with even a balanced merc if the fight isn't too crazy. But before that, pet tanking anything is pretty inefficient, imo. Kind of like swarm pets and fast dots.
How exactly does "Math" become "more accurate" haha? Of course...SOME people lead others to believe that the change was "intended" as that is quality damage control to the fact that they didn't know there was an issue~
I would imagine that as long as the Named doesn't AE big enough to kill pets, that it will eat 1 per combat round and never really be able to kill them fast enough to get to the caster. even a 1 hp sissy pet will buy you a few seconds or save a main pet from death. Used to see necros stack a pile of corpses and throw wake the dead pets into the mix to stall the named long enough for the stack of dots to land, and clicky things.
A spell from SoF given in 2007, then given an AA of the same ability in 2010, yet it was wanting to be fixed for a long time? Seems like after all the complaining done on these forums it was made a priority. And I'm done derailing.
It almost seems like lately you've been playing down the forums as if nothing we say here has any impact on our classes at all, which seems highly unlikely. It makes it seem as if you are saying the devs do not take players seriously or as a valuable asset, yet we are the ones who have to test the mess that makes it through beta.
Nerfs don't come if the devs don't know about it. Something might get inadvertently nerfed, but not directly if there is no knowledge about it.
I dunno, I guess my necro could solo an RoF T2 Xorbb named (conned red to a level 99). I tried one with necro/mage and had it easily down to 30% but it blew us both up because I was just brute-force bursting it down and didn't realize it's adds ASPLODE But for necros the lev 97 warrior pet with EM17 and max pet defensives can tank named 'ok'. He can still die to damage spikes to the T2 names, so I'd have to be running Fortify and Companions blessing and maybe 1 necro pet dmg mitigation spell to be sure. You'd want to burst hard, and I can't think of anything that cranks out more sheer damage than Funeral Pyre. Sometimes for fun I'll stack everything, use hand of death and get wacked below 80% to trigger that, then kill the mob to keep the buff up. Then I'd do third spire + anguish robe click + frenzy dead. Then Rise of Bones, Swarm of decay, skeleton throng spell when it's up. And a crapload of DoTs, swift dots taking priority. I'm no solo expert, I've just been cruising to 100, just got lv 100 recently
Odd. I remember the idea of nerfing deatthbloom coming from here. The idea of making swift dots not work on raid mobs coming from here. I can even name you the people who mentioned it first and the dev who responded that it could be a good idea. In fact, the person who ''suggested'' to nerf swift dots has a sig on here where they mention that they are basically proud of what they did to necros and that it's funny. It's not said entirely that way but we can all read between the lines. So yes, it's not us being crazy and thinking that things will get nerfed. It happens! Some people on here are EXPERTS at getting necros nerfed. It's like a game for them. They can't call for a nerf by asking for one directly but it's so easy to do indirectly. Especially when you've done it often. Ask a question related to what you want nerfed like in this thread- pets...Then wait for some necro to say exactly what you wanted them to say and wait for the nerf. It's been done OFTEN. To answer fransisco's are we all jerks? No. We will actually help each other out. We just know who to watch out for and you're one of them. So I'm sorry if most of us won't bite and give you exactly what you want.
Only speaking for RoF expansions, I haven't yet decided to purchase the latest one... In working through the Hunter achievements in RoF zones I have taken down almost all of the named, in every tier. The ones I haven't done yet are just lack of time but I don't expect that they will be any more difficult than some of the Epicenter named I've already done. There are a very select few that would be impossible to handle, and a small number that I have done that took multiple attempts and a little luck on incoming burst damage but in most cases they are very straightforward and can be done without using swarm pets. Your pet is too mushy to handle adds while fighting a named so you must be able to deal with splitting and clearing fighting space. Every single named in the ROF zones (except for the ones that insta-summon their own adds) can be singled out successfully if you have the right aa's and gear (here is where the CoS really shines) All it takes is some practice and patience...
So computers can't* do exact floating point math. It's almost always an approximation. A programmer could explain this better than I, my background in programming is limited. There are plenty of programmers in the community however. *Can't is a big word, and this isn't always exactly true. Still for a generalist it's true enough.
We definitely take players seriously and consider them a valuable asset. That being said we also have to realize that people both intentionally and unintentionally bias their statements.
Sorry, what do people call them these days, Journeyman Rank V? Raiding was one way to get it. Point I was making was, unless you sink some serious AA's into the pet, and maybe get yourself a better than group foci, tanking named is going to be rough going.
J5 merc, aye. There is no way to get it via raiding, nor can they be used on raids. The task/missions required to obtain it are solo/group-based. As for the major pet classes, getting relevent pet AA's does make a real difference. As does the the foci, although the best of the group ones isn't to be sneered at, it's quite adequate.
SoD theme completion unlocked them, and you could do it with either group or raid progression. I had EM12, still couldn't pet tank Shard's Landing trash with a J5 clr, had to invest more AA's.
