Test Update 08/12/2014 - Pet Changes Round 4

First of all, I apologize for the timing. Ordinarily this would have happened tomorrow morning, but SOE Live means we need to get this online tonight.

Here's a brief summary of the pet changes that are in this update:

• All pets received at least a small AC boost. Necromancer pets got a bigger one, and the big three swarm pets got a much bigger AC boost.
  • Mage earth pets should have a bit more noticeable AC advantage over air pets.
  • Necro warrior pets should be close to Mage air pets in terms of AC now.
  • Necro rogue pets should be close to Mage water pets in terms of AC.
  • Swarm pets now have AC just below Necro rogue pets.
• Increased the HP of Shadowknight, Shaman, and Enchanter pets.
• Figured out a kludgy way to have the big 3 swarm pets (Skeleton Swarm, RS, Feralgia) set themselves to full HP just after they spawn. Hopefully this will not melt any servers and cause me to have to talk to the IT ninjas. They're... grouchy today.

Would it be possible to have the pet itself LoH(or similar) itself 0.1sec into existence with a 1 point hate override? Or they spawn with a buff that does that to them.

At this point, why even bother? You've nerfed the nerf into virtual non-existence.

I haven't played my main in a couple of months. Truly, what is the purpose. Anything I gain will just be nerfed into the ground so I am less powerful than I was before all the effort! This nerfmania has gotten totally absurd! My main was a max level beastlord. You may notice I said WAS as he is now retired. I had 4 accounts that were all access. Three of those have lapsed to silver and the fourth has less than two months left before lapsing as well. I have accumulated 30 kronos which I no longer see a reason to use, so I will just hold onto. All this may may be easily verified by the devs and I welcome it. That is over $500.00 in profits SOE will be unable to put on the books since they are unspent. What goes around comes around. Payback is a b*****. This game has gone so totally against the player base it is pathetic.

Steamboat, Drinal server

i know that with SOE live coming up this won't be fixed, but i have to ask: are you aware of pet enrage being broken? because it's totally broken, and making a pretty huge impact on the feel of proper pet testing.

I'm sorry that the nerf wasn't up to your expectations. Maybe next time, they will make necro pets the strength of an old-world velious snow bunny. Would that make you happy?

Thanks I am glad to see someone in EQ has a sense of humor, if you could make a snow bunny illusion for pets I would buy one - thanks

Even if it ends up the exact same as live server is now, live is still significantly and noticeably nerfed from how pets were before

Which, if you were really honest, is not a horrible thing. As a Necro, even I admit that some change was warranted. Certainly not as drastic as Pet Nerf One, but still...

No but pets were already taking D1 damage a majority of the time with the last patch. If the devs were trying to stop that from happening, the last patch was already a fail. This is just making it worse.

Seeing as how mages and necros are still soloing named, I have to disagree.

I don't understand why everyone is griping about all these pet changes. Take into consideration nobody should be able to solo everything in game. People who keep griping either need to learn how to adapt and play better or they need to just roll another class. The amount of griping is seriously . I play a BST and not once have I seen anything really different since all this began. Play better or smarter either way!!

I still have a problem with the nerf my necro tank pet was much better last week then it is now. I was able to tank many mobs (not at the same time) in the new zones that now my pet gets killed fighting. I was fighting in in the fourth gate today and my pet died like 4 times on mobs that I could kill last week. Unlike a mag pet a necro pet does not get pet gear, and this is a big differences in the ability of the pets. Every one is saying the necro pet is as good as a mag pet, but it is not. Seeing a necro cannot give his pet the gear when it dies. So necro pet are not as good with out a mag around to help it. As well as you use a EM ear that is a raid piece that not every one can get. As for the EM 20 in POW that some one said the Named you have to kill is rated as a few groups to take it down and that would be a raid force. I for one do not raid and do not like to raid I am a group player but we have all ways been over looked by EQ over the years.

Show me where the Devs said Magicians are not intended to solo named? AFAIK there was no intent EVER spoken by them stating that Magicians should not be doing that.

The most they have said is they do not want Magicians to afk solo named, they want us to work to keep our pets alive while killing mobs. The changes do that. If it is not up to your standards, that is entirely your problem. Aristo has been given hours of parses and these changes are what he deemed fit.

Knights are still moloing last tier's named too, guess the game is just broken all around eh?

And yeah, pets pre-nerf were messed

how do you molo on your bst. do you tank with a cleric merc or do you let your pet tank while you heal and use wizard merc to dps. If you tank with cleric merc you won't see much change. If oyu pet tank with wizard merc you will.

On another thing. I just went to test and tried out one of my fav ha's.

The following was all trash mobs

1v1 not much different then live. Cleric merc had to do some extra healing and I just did my normal casting runes. Pet life went a little lower then normal but nothing to bad.

1v2+ now this was a different story. On live if I less then 3 I can just cast runes and get the mobs slowed/rooted/off tanked with swarm. On test I had to cast fort right off the bat or pet was dead with in a few sec before I could get both mobs slowed or cced.

Swarm pets -- was able to off tank a trash mob didn't have the dps of live but had enough hp to get the job done.

I won't be home from work to run parses for another 4 hours, but if what Aristo wrote wasn't a typo and ac values were raised at all further for the tanking pets ... does not compute.

As of 3.0 EM 15 earth pet on long parses was seeing DI 20 rolls 0.4% of the time on yellow con trash and minimum hits 50% of the time. If the problem is average incoming dps there are more ideal ways of tackling us instead of just returning to the model that was clearly broken. A 10% increase in reduction via avoidance will give you 10% lower dps. A 10% lowering of dps via raw mitigation will have exponentially larger impacts on the frequency of spike damage. You get the same average result on incoming dps by 2 different but very unequal means.

So yep, if parse data reflects the quoted changes, you will eventually end up right back where we started - except now pet healing has been boosted for no reason at all.


I am pleased that we're seeing measured improvements to swarm pets that got neutered with this whole venture.

Soloing or moloing? A mage with a pet and merc is a cleric/tank/dps group. If they shouldn't kill a named, then what should? I've played with some really amazing necros, and they could solo nameds 6 years ago, so was that supposed to have changed at some point?

Necros could solo underfoot named. Before our pets could tank.

• I don't want to speak for all pet classes but swarm pets feel like they serve their function again after this update. I did not parse the dps of these at all, if the ac and hps are still lower then prior then their dps should be boosted imo as they are still going to die more often then prior and were basically innocent victims in all this.

• The necro tank pet still has issues verse some trash mobs even with reasonable support. Reasonable support should not be 6 pet dedicated spell slots and a dedicated healer merc for a single yellow con trash mob or two dark blue mobs when it has raid focus, rk 3 spell support and max pet AA. Tank mercs at this time are a better option over a necro tank pet despite raid focus, 3-5K pet aa and all the support pet spells.

1. They could use a lot more hps and would not be infringing on other pets. This could be upwards of 40K hps and they still would not infringe on other pet classes hp pools. Even with tuning change number 4 necro tank pets are a yo-yo of hps often hovering at 1-30% hps a lot. Showing they still don't have the hps to handle the increase in incoming dps nor the larger and more often incoming spikes reliably even when over geared and supported for a trash mob.
2. They could use more AC or some help with mitigation and would not be infringing on other pets. This could be as high as 10% passively and 20% activated/proc'd if often enough and it would not infringe on other pets. Again raid focus tank pet, with max AA, dedicated merc and support from owner with rk 3 spells should not be on the edge of death with 1-2 db mobs or a single yellow con mob.
3. Or they could use a lot more avoidance without infringing on other pets. This would have to be quite a bit of avoidance to offset the incoming dps and spikes that a raid focused, rk 3 spell supported, max AA pet with j5 support is seeing if non mage group pets are ever expected to serve as a tank again.
4. Please please change our pet stuff to no longer change targets. If its flagged as pet only why must our target change to our pet in order to work adding to the confusion of trying to juggle pet support, dps, heals, runes, etc while managing targets when some of them auto change the target every other cast.

Again a em 19 necro tank pet, with max pet AA, j5 merc with adept healing, rk 3 pet runes, slow and rk 3 owner heals and buffs should not be struggling with trash mobs.