You are right im sorry they don't get root, they can send their pet in, get agro let the add come to them, ramp servant the add, fade pet and sick him in, leaving the original target there and faded. If they get 2 they just keep one tied up with ramp servants. I usually play my mage and wiz and use wiz to root as i sick pet in with mage. Thanks for correcting me.
its a false story, you got it in SoF with everyone else http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=72394
Well first off, I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear (I tried to) that I was addressing the changes that the devs stated were coming. Unfortunately I do think that tanks (and things tanking) need to tank the same way, so pets may need to have their mitigation lowered (and avoidance adjusted to compensate). I'd rather have tanks mitigate like pets but apparently that would add balancing problems. For the scaling part, I'd be happy if pets were effected by all my gear. If the devs were willing to take the time to code this I'd have no problem. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. It's a valid argument that we put in less work, but the Mage who has put in all the work possible has no upside at the moment. I don't know how you can quantify tanking... If I could tank 10x the mobs a raid geared ranger could I would say I could tank 10x better, but I can't. If you had said mitigate maybe, but you would have to sum it up as 1 number. Pets not allowing melee limits the usefulness of their tanking ability. They don't tank any worse, but the number of scenarios allowing them to tank is diminished significantly. Situationally powerful abilities are common in the game (rains for example). Neither pets nor tanks have to position in an all caster group, but pets aren't allowed to in a melee group, so I don't see how it's unreasonable for pets to be more useful than, for example, a ranger in an all caster group. I agree with your last statement; I've tried and it is certainly very difficult to play a tank effectively. Personally I wouldn't mind if pets had some of their innate abilities removed and allowed for player intervention that reached equal and higher levels, but my understanding (could be wrong), is that pets can't have discs like tanks do, leading to their innate abilities.
ATM the way to quantify tanking ability is by incoming dps and spikiness of the rounds. Raid geared wars are subject to about 5-10x the likeliness of getting one rounded or dying to 2 rounds than a pet because of the way pet AC manipulates the DI curve. the item idea is cool but wont happen as they don't have the resources to do that. but is a cool idea. Tanks getting DI curves like pets would break the game, means anyone else would have 0 chance of survival if they got attention, and that would be bad overall.
I really don't think it's accurate to equate spikiness to tanking in the way you did. From what I've read your numbers are correct, but if my pet is truly 10x better at tanking I really should be able to tank 10 mobs and take the same level of damage as a ranger tanking one mob. If we can get over that, I'll concede that in one on one tanking pets tank as well, if not better than, any tank in the game (with significantly less spikiness, you'd know the exact number better than me). Unfortunately you're right pets most likely will continue to use the earring/AA system. This is great for under geared mages; really only one piece of gear dictates your pets tanking ability (plus AAs). It just sucks for the fully geared/AAd mages who have done significantly more work with no upside pet wise. A possible solution would be to make the ear significantly harder to get (like how em18 is from a difficult PoW named). That introduces a whole boatload of new problems. In the end I can't give a perfect solution, just saying the way scaling works out now is unfair to fully geared mages just as much as it is to fully geared class x because of the way we get our pet power.
Or they could set a % system to the earring, to where the EM focus only works at a percentage based on how well geared the mage is. Lets say we determine that STA, AGI, INT, and spell power are the factors. (I imagine we would take an even greater sample than that.) So if heroic stamina were 200, agi 100, int 250 and spell power at 300 on a raid geared player (average gear), we could set that as 100%. Say you are using EM 20... at 100% it functions as EM 20... So a mage with decent raid gear, would get full em 20 out of it. A mage in group gear might only get EM 18 out of it. A mage with really good gear might get EM 22 out of it. Each rank of EM would just have a value for what 100% is. So a raid geared mage using an em 18 earring might get em 20 out of it. But a group geared mage might get em 18 out of it etc. Would take some work figuring up the values and balancing it, but would make the focus gear dependent. So not only would you need the earring, but gear to back it up (plus AA that already factors in).
The problem is 10 mobs can destroy a ranger where with the right healing you pet could survive because the ranger will take at least 1/2 the di's will be 10+ where the pet will take 9 out of 10 at do 1 - 3. Therefore as long as it can keep ago it in theory could tank the 10 as long as the base dog of 10 couldn't quite round it. The pet also having almost double the hip of the ranger helps on that a ton too. Sorry typing on a phone
What a shockingly reasonable argument you make. I am used to seeing posts along the lines of no reduction in player power ever or pets should be super because solo class. I hope you get what you ask for. A few smaller points... The limitation of not tanking for players is an important weakness to pet tanks but its pain falls on both the pet owner and other classes. It means rogues, monks, berzerkers and to a lesser extent rangers and bards are left out. Vitally important to EQ players is being wanted in groups and actually doing something useful in them. Classes who need to get up close and personal with the mob lose out on groups they might otherwise find a place in because pets can't tank for them. There is an important difference in progression needed to acquire tanking ability. A ranger who can tank for a group is near the end of progression with complete gear, augs and AAs. A mage pet can be there early on with a spell, earring and some AAs. Certainly it would be fun if there were more depth to the progression but developer time imposes hard limits. This point has been addressed quite a bit in other posts. The big remaining difference I don't see addressed is disposability. A dead pet is just a dead pet, easily replaced with the spare up one's sleeve or by summoning another. Sure, it is a pest and delay to summon, equip and buff but it isn't like the player dying. No xp loss, no res effects, no needing a res. I have seen this disposability used well in different encounters where chains of pets are flung at the mob until it dies. Were acquiring pets to have more depth and losing them to have more sting, a lot of both actually, I think it could be fun and balanced for them to tank for players the way mercs can. While ideas spring to mind it is probably not worth discussing in depth as EQ devs lack the necessary time to make it so. As it is I think mage pets have a good case for durability somewhere between monk/ranger and player tanks. The pet is in my judgement more of a mage than the pinch hit tank role is of a ranger plus there is the situational no tanking for players issue. Behind player tanks is obvious because that is what they do, they tank.
This talk about mage pets tanking! Only Warriors, SK's and Pallies (and melee hybrids) can hold aggro over player characters in melee range. Pets cannot tank at all in such groups or raids the mob will simply ignore the pet.
I assure you my pet is getting destroyed by 10 current content mobs. I doubt my pet could even hold aggro on 10 current content mobs. In actuality a ranger could hit weapon shield and most likely fair better than my pet (I know I can't hold aggro on 10 with DCA). And I'm typing everything on a phone lol.
I agree your pet is not going to hold agro over 10 mobs. The point I was trying to make was if the mob has a db of 2000 and a di of 500 and your pet has a hp pool of say 145k (think that around earth group focus, someone can correct me if I am wrong) and ranger has a hp of 120k raid geared ranger? (midtier) 10 mobs hitting for di 1-3 will hit say 2 times per round with an average of 3k per hit, so 60k inc damage, even at 3 hits per round its only 90k incoming damage. that leave a lot of room for a couple of higher DI hits to be absorbed, also doesn't take into account their iceflame etc. or any quick runes or blocks cast by the mage. also someone may be able to correct me if i am wrong on the average of 2 hits per round to a pet, do they take more? I haven't parsed that but I know their avoidance isn't nearly as good as a PC. 10 mobs hitting for di 10 - 20 ie avg of di 15, would be 9500 per hit. so at 2 hits per round @ 10 mobs your looking at death(190k), even 1 hit with a couple doing 2 would kill the ranger(7 doing 1 hit 3 doing 2 hits = 123500). yes ranger can weapon shield but that only lasts for 42 seconds and as soon as that is gone, so is he. That is why pets are getting looked at. It doesn't have to do with the fact that they can or cannot actually tank 10 mobs via agro, which if done right they "could" (silent casting + proper control and ext tar window) and it would take forever to kill them all and both scenarios requires a cleric. its the fact that they can survive that kind of onslaught because of the way their AC mitigates. please note that these are hypothetical using realish numbers from EWK trash mobs. These mechanics are much the same as how SK's swarmed. we had to find content that our ac reduced the hits to a lower DI that way our reposts were healing more than the incoming damage. That is also why most SK's didn't care about the swarm nerf because we were quickly getting to the mob atk inflation that we were not going to be able to do that anymore anyhow in theory. also wanted to note that the avg round in eq is 1.8 sec (avg because of server lag) therefore it would probably req at least 2 real healers to do this at a min)
Sorry to tell you, but pet fade doesn't work if you have a RS or any other temp pets up. Also, why are people now evaluating the mage class as being tied to a healer merc? I'm sorry to disappoint you all, but a mage soloing (and I mean soloing, not moloing) a named is not dishing out all manner of dps as they are actively healing and trying to keep pet alive. Now, it's no secret that mages as a class were one of the main beneficiaries of healer mercs as it allowed the mage to concentrate on dps somewhat while healer merc heals the pet. That is not a mage class problem however, it's a merc problem. If you haven't realized it yet, the addition of mercs created a whole slew of issues and is no justification to nerf a class because of the addition of a stupid element of the game.
Its called timing you can do the fade as the last ramp pet dies, it actually works better that way also we are trying to leave mercs out of it I used examples of a real healer, because a merc can not do what is needed in some situations. Mercs allow to do more than what you can solo, but they do not diminish the net mitigation of the pet, and that is what is being discussed, not anything else, just mitigation. And we are also not only talking about mage pets, we are talking about ALL pets. Beastlords, necromancers, enchanters, and shamans also have pets that are going to be effected by this, even sk pet, though ours cant tank its way out of a paper sack because of its hp pool, and maybe even swarm pets (I dont know if they are effected by the same ac mistake).
I see the point you're getting at. It's hard to compare avoidance on a round by round basis because the value is truncated. Over 10 rounds (or 1 round of 10 mobs) you'd see about 21 hits on the pet (30*.75) compared to 16 for a ranger (30*.55). Runes and prism skin are actually much more ineffective against 10 mobs than one, seeing as 8 hits wouldn't even block on round (rather a third of a round). In this situation the healers would also have to be able to match the incoming dps as well as spikiness (thinking they'd need to put out 50k points worth of heals a second). I'd say it's more than likely the pet would be dead before the 42 second mark because it still would take a bad enough round to kill it before the healers could save it. Now regardless of what I just said, your point is still valid that the pet's mitigation places it in a theoretically much better scenario than a player tank (after the 42 second mark in this example, but generally a better position). Again I'm on a phone so I can't personally parse this, but out of curiosity how well do pets mitigate in ToR? It may have been an rng thing (was only one parse), but my friend showed me a parse from that zone showing pets with much worse mitigation than they would have in, for example, wk. It's very possible it was a fluke (certainly not conclusive), but I'm curious as to how pets mitigate there.
The healer thing I really should have left out, because the point was that they ranger could get one rounded by that set and the pet couldn't. even with say 10 healers the results would be the same. its also not profitable in xp or anything else to have the amount of healers needed to do that, thus the hypothetical nature of the scenario but that is why for a long time guilds would use pets to overcome certain road blocks in raids. With only one parse I would say it is a fluke. My pet classes are 98 (nec) 92 (mage) 87 (bst) so none are high enough to go to tor and really parse. I can do EWK with nec. I do shards with mage, and havent played the bst in a long time.
You can do this once like every 7 minutes or something. And to use it in the way you describe sounds iffy at best. If it doesn't work (cause your timing wasn't absolutely perfect) you don't really have another option (plus there's the limitation of proximity aggro since the pet fade doesn't invis us). To be fair to call the AC of pets a mistake, avoidance would also have to be a mistake (if pets mitigate like a player and avoid like a pet they'd be pretty bad). I know the devs said it was a "broken" spell effect (though I'd guess it's been broken since SoF), it doesn't make sense to me to fix AC when not factoring in the fact that we get hit more often (not arguing against a change, rather saying mitigation is not the only thing that needs to be adjusted). To my knowledge RS pets have pretty bad AC but a ton of HP. I may be wrong on this but they don't seem to have increased in power at all relative to content since their inception (now we cast them faster and with less relative mana, but they also die faster when they're getting hit). They seem to have gone from one godly swarm pet to more but less powerful pets (now we have 3 instead of 1 up at once if they don't die).
Probably is... When I get access to a computer (won't be for a while) I'll try to run more parses (don't know why they would be different, but just anecdotally the mobs there do a ton of damage). But yes I see what you're saying statistically (though you could argue the ranger has a higher chance to not get hit at all cause of avoidance ). Regardless it's probably a somewhat pointless argument as no one would ever do it (personally I see no reason to tank more than 3 mobs).
I agree that they need to look at avoidance as well. I was under the impression that they got way higher hp pools because their avoidance was lower and thus going to be hit more. I may be wrong on that, only the dev crew knows what they intend. Also I agree that it is not something that can be done continuously, its more to point out that it can be done, and people need to stop saying our class cant do xyz when it can, and trying to use that as a justification against these changes.
There never is a reason to tank more than 3. The only reason most tanks do it is because they can. they want to push the limits and see what they can do in the situation. almost every class has a way to separatemobs to make a camp be 2 or less on inc at a time or even HA's where you move it can be done as well.
