Mages and their pets... Luclin status?

First off, /pet attack X needs to be disabled or changed so that a pet cannot attack anything that is not in the mage's LOS. Saw a crew in Rathe (Phinny) mass clearing the Hill Giant mound for hours (days according to some others that were trying to farm there) running a pet attack macro. The crew stood in the same spot, motionless the entire time, the only activity being the three fire pets running a /pet attack script. If anyone tried to pull around the group or engage something in their range their pets would KS it.

anyways, we've gone from Classic-->velious with pets that have a fraction of their survivability (and dps in raids) A while back a dev post indicated that pets wouldn't reach full strength again until LDON. Is there anything being done to allow their pets to not be out dps'd by cleric hammers and shammy pets?

It's long been a problem that players can /pet attack while afk and a shame that nothing has been done about it. If you can't sink to the level of afk plat farming then the best thing to do is stay away from the zone. Plat will never become trivial (like the Runnyeye gear that was heavily afk farmed in classic) so it will always be permacamped.
Are they looting FS weapons? I could use some to level smithing, other than that the only use I have for the zone is JBoots.

Mark of the Old Ways is what destroys Mage (and Necro, and soon to be Beastlord) pet dps in raids. MotOW is tied to Mitigation of the Mighty, and so long as MotM is around (which will basically be forever, since they use it to prevent nameds from spawning in picks) then Mage/Necro/Beastlord pets are going to continue being all but useless on raids, unless DBG changes it and removes MotOW.

With the release of Beastlords impending, this issue will get even worse. As a Necromancer, I am fully intending to parse my pet for a week, realize it is doing at best 5% of my dps, but causing probably 25% of the aggro I generate, and then choose to not use pets at ALL during raids, because it will allow me to do more dps overall through not throttling to avoid pulling aggro.

Nah, there was no need to stoop. There were 5 of us that banded together to not-afk kill. ) There were still enough giants for a few other people on the far end of the hill, but the mage crew easily snagged about 2/3 of the giants that spawn around there.

Aye, I expect a good influx of BST next week. They're a great grouping class and should be a great raiding class as well, but adding another pet class to raids means exactly what you said.

If I recall correctly, the devs have already said that BST won't be affected by Mark of the Old Ways.

If this is true, it is an even larger spit in the eye for Mages and Necromancers.

Wouldn't disabling the auto loot feature on the TLP fix the afk farm problem?

Send a petition (recorded video helps). Action generally taken against afk pet-farmers for monopolizing an area, as long as people take some time to petition/report them

Aye, but it's a darned good feature, I would not want to give it up to foil a few bothers. Just disabling the auto money loot would end it in rathe, but I'm sure someplace there is someone AFK farming mats or gems.

I agree with our necro petfellow. MotOW makes pets ridiculous, which hurts the most mages, as they rely more on pet dps than necromancers. If there is no way to remove MotOW, maybe DBG could flatten it out as they did for MotM ? Making it weaker each expansion, by reducing the amount of the penalty and/or increasing the number of pets for each level of MotOW, that would be a reasonable solution I think.

*Crosses fingers for a dev reply*

/Meemers

I understand the feeling, but you have to look at it from a logical perspective.

If Mark of the Old Ways didn't affect mages or necro pets, it would be the return of mage armies, or mage stacking in raids. Same thing would happen if it didn't affect necro pet, people would stack necros, because they're casters, so its easy to setup an entire army controlled by macros and a few buttons.

Beastlords are a melee class with a pet. Nobody is ever going to box 24 beastlords. And even if they did, they couldn't stand safely in the back avoiding the AEs while slinging bolts or stacking dots while the pets are clamping the boss far in front.

Sure it sucks for main mages and necros, to have their class penalized because of a few individuals, but MotOW affecting beastlords would just plainly be stupid.

Except for the fact that MotM now makes it so all pet aggro is transferred to the caster, and pets cannot be the target of bosses.

MotOW was created before that aggro change, which is what REALLY killed mage/necro armies, was implemented. It is a relic of a time when pets were "overpowered", which they are in no way by this expansion, and was never removed.

Necromancers and Mages are pet classes. When you get to the point that your theorycrafting is basically I should remove my pet completely because I will do more damage that way, something is wrong.

If the targeting issue has been resolved, then you'd think the motow is no longer needed, or can be drastically scaled back.

Yes, MotOW was introduced as a reply to pet walling before the aggro overhaul. Therefore it is not needed anymore indeed, +1 here.

Wasn't there a big thread on this in July that went into great detail about all this? I'm sure the answers to the questions here were all in there.

Yep, here's a link to the thread, and where a lot of info about the pet nerf was provided (and why it's no longer needed)..

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...ze-about-pets-and-luclin.234002/#post-3451605

Luclin's going to raise the pet mitigation to original classic values instead of the current state where they were lowered to even below original classic values, and then stay at those values until the LDoN release where they would be unnerfed back to original values.

We, even with all of the very detailed and well thought out information in that thread, it didn't even get a dev response there, so I doubt we'll get one here. They seem to be more concerned about responding to threads that either have no real impact on anything ( https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/a-plea-to-just-one-dev.234954/#post-3465682 ) than responding to well thought out and informative posts about how the current nerfs to pets are unneeded anymore with the Agro changes to pets.

The issue at Rathe Mountains is not /pet attack, it's that they are afk auto-firing. If they weren't they wouldn't die so often. When a pet is on a mob and it goes oor, it will not attack a mob that attacks the owner of the pet. That's why we know he is afk auto-firing. You will often see R.I.P. (his name) when zoning in.

He is often around to answer tells, but often he isn't and he dies.

I realize ks'ing is allowed, but this guy is just auto-firing in all directions and those Fire pets have huge range.

I know DBG has a hundred petitions on the guy, and it is the same guy that owns all the bots, and I know for a fact three of them. THE REAL ISSUE is that he is monopolizing an entire mountain of Hill Giants. If you don't want to ban him, then warn him to stay away from Rathe or else.

The Rathe Mountain bots are back at it, at least four of them.