Game Update: Wednesday, August 20 @ 5 AM PDT

WOW, that about sums it up. I don't play a mage but I do play a warrior and I have no clue what we will do on certain raids now that pets can no longer tank. I foresee lots of angry pet class players after this for sure and I bet lots never log in again. I actually feel bad for mages that have played their toon for 10 plus years only to be reduced to this! Not sure there are enough beefy tank classes and mana filled healers in most guilds to do certain current content raids now, sure that will go for others as well. I foresee lots of raid tanks with cleric boxes as a requirement.
When the nerf bat swings, it swings wide and hard! Good luck all and I wonder how this will hurt them on their next expansion pack? I bet lots will not be renewing.

The list of potential candidates is long and illustrious ... but TBH, I hope warriors are allowed to keep NTTB+LS combo. If we go around and nerf everything, we will soon be raiding VoA again, because we can't do anything else ...

Many thanks for your kind and insightful words. It's nice to know that even a few warriors are able to see which magicians have stated again and again over the last months: GOOD TANKS DONT GROW ON TREES - WE HAD (for some time), HAVE AND WILL CONTINUE TO HAVE a shortage of good tanks. With pet-tanking nerfed like this, many a group and a couple of raiding guilds will face severe tanking problems (which were previously bandaided via pet-tanking), and a lot of players will consider feeding the moloch more money twice.

Really Rangerguy? You mean except for the fact that anytime we would need both at the same time the mobs are going to last longer than both. Which means as soon as it drops we would instantly go splat.

I can see this being a problem even for bigger raid guilds out there, in certain events where you get adds at certain interfalls, it was handy to have a few mage pets to help keep the raid safe, but now...once again team dev screws up, another bad nerf, if you devs want lots of people to stop playing eq just say so in an anouncement, stop this game destruction, or just press the self destruct button sheesh...

It is pathetic that Sony decides to break pet classes instead of fixing the melee classes. My pet was always the back-up tank if the main tank died on raids. Now I guess the raid will just have to wipe and start over.

Sony has stated they are introducing AA focus lines in The Darkened Sea to nerf caster classes from being over-powered out of the gate when they buy their new spells because the melee classes have to wait until they get dropped gear for their power boost. Once again, maybe they should fix the melee classes before breaking casters (and they stated they haven't yet figured out what to do with hybrid classes)

Sony doesn't listen to nerf rants, and won't reverse their code any time soon, so pet classes will just have to limp along for a few years until Sony decides they broke pets and beefs them up again. It has happened several times in the past and will happen again in the future.

Hybrids won't escape the AA focus lines, no way, we'll get stuck with it too...

I love it how the new AA we are going to be getting won't make us stronger, they'll just bring us back to full focus..... I don't know about you but I'm super excited to start an expansion nerfed then grind some AA just to get back to normal. Sounds awesome, really can't wait.

In the raid game you already are and still would be the most desired tank. In the group game staggering nttb and your other tools has closed the knights self healing advantage. The game is tuned around you being the best at your job while under your best stuff. When that stuff drops the next warrior steps in or you have to make up the gap with more healing and support. That works great when you are 10-20% better then other tanks when under your stuff (and it lasts longer) so once knights over gear or get extra healing help they might be able to offset that gap should your guild not carry 4-8 warriors and need someone to fill in(or the warrior still gets by when it all drops). However when the gap is 50% better when under your best stuff there is no making up that gap and you either have 4-8 warriors to rotate in or you simply can't do it. No time to bleed and last stand for raids works currently but will cause issues soon enough when its tuned around. No time to bleed and last stand in groups is god mode and unbalanced. Staggering it in groups and raids is great, stacking it with last stand currently is broken its god mode.

Hush RangerGuy, please ... we had enough nerfs for one year ...

guess they will need to start letting mercs in raids and raid zones now, lol. I cant wait to see how the next raid goes, lmfao. Could this be the end in sight patch?

Afaik it NTTB was created to offset knight selfhealing for tank parity and to give warriors back that edge they lost in the group game as the behemoth that could take any amount of beatings.

Exactly so using it on its own provides you 3 of every 5 minutes on par with self healing with other stuff to fill in the 2 minutes of downtime it has. However it stacking with last stand has provided god mode as your 55% reduction in DI hit was already enough of an advantage to tune around. You don't need the advantage of that 55% reduction and then tack on a flat 3200-3400 damage reduction to every hit on top of it.

that's sad , one person ( we all know who it is ) croisade to get nerfing pet class as much as he could ( i don't care if another class perform better than me , since what we want is to have fun with a game we play ( since 1999 for me and 4 accounts with COTF expansion and 3 gold ) .......stop the class envy. ......

i will see how bad is the nerfs and might only pay for one account expansion for my raiding shaman and stop boxing my caster's group ( mage pet to tank since 8 years ) , getting all the nerfs getting really old fast and surely not helping the fun factor .

i got a heroic warrior ( group geared with 3 raid items , lv 100 and about 6300 aa's and all augm over 38 ac , and he perform very well , specially when disc's and aa's are running ( even vs group nameds with last stand / NTTB ), i just don't like to box a melee toon who is always going out of range attacking mobs.........

why take a chance to loose many subs with angry players , that player could just have quit the game if he was not happy and let others have fun playing that game.......................

sorry for all the palyers who decided to use their free heroic toon as a pet class ( or the one who paid for them ) or all the one who want the solo route because of RL things , that nerfs will be bad for them.

if you didn't like pet tanking raid boss , you just had to fix it,, not the group game .......
the raiders,usually have a lot of time to play and can get group easy via their guild.........

I hope hybrids won't get stuck with them but I have a strong feeling you are right.
Sony will just copy/paste the debilitating AAs onto hybrids and call it a day.

The biggest kick to the head is they are marketing the new AAs as something to be excited about and a reason to buy The Darkened Sea

Your...im not a war, im a Nec. Just saying. Oh and I agree about the power of it.

Atlans, there's really no reason for them not too... anything to take away player power, then give it back, and call it an upgrade hahaha.

Pets got upgraded .... Air pets will be able to stun yellow cons - until it gets considered OP and removed again for "balance".

Haha yes, the air pet stun limited offer! It'll be gone in a week when deemed OP and unfair.

At the very least a "proc rate mod" will ensue.

My prefered pet has always been the air pet. So not played much with the earth pet, can the earth pet root unsnareable mobs?

No, it can't. Runspeed immune mobs resist Earth's root spell (and thus the pseudo-rune recourse-effect as well).

Real tanks...or maybe you wipe a raid from the tanks / healers not being geared up enough. Shouldn't be able to schlep through raids using mage pets imo but if that strat works for you I guess that's fine. However now it will require the mage looking after their pet fulltime maybe for raid mobs?