Pet Tanking Raid Mobs

What if everyone participating in the raid put in the time and effort to "gear up to the extreme", would you still let mage pets tank while a bunch of melee dps scratched their eachothers butts with godly daggers?

If everyone had the same "level" of gear as what most guilds main warrior raid boss tank have, the overall dps and support power would make it possible for the tank to perform without grinding so high on aa or getting the perfect augments and armor sets every expansion.

I think it speaks to the sad state of the Warrior class when a summoned pet has better survivability than a raid geared Warrior.

Someone tell me again why pet survivability and agro needs to be so high it often exceed player tanks?

Shiftie explained it best. It isn't that pets tank better. They don't on a one to one comparison with a real warrior or knight. Pets are effective in teams plus they can't be banished and so forth. Pets have been used even in the old days in Sanctus Seru tanking the 4 minis for the arx key/earring since they can't be sent to jail. Raids like BD require an abundance of well geared tanks to manage adds as well as deal with the banishment etc. If the Beast King is pet tanked, that probably reduces the amount of strong tanks needed for that event by half. It also massively slows it down, which risks failure. That is the downside of it.

So it isn't just about raw tanking. A pet comes up short every time there. It is more about what is the best way to handle amnesia/blurs/banishment and other tricky mechanics that hose up even the best AAed/geared tank and can put a real hurt on guilds that have only a limited supply of them.

People have the idea that earth pets (and its only earth pets that can tank raid mobs) are going to replace war, pal, and sk if for some reason a few raids in a expansion can be tanked by a mage pet.

It wont happen using pets to tank raid mobs is simply a tool that can be used for certain events and that is completely worthless on other events.

If you cant tank mobs without using pets then you get zero NToV loots so wave good bye to 30+ loots a week while guilds that can tank those dragons zoom ahead of you.

No raid guild will survive in RoF if they can only tank raid mobs with pets. Just like they would not have survived VoA if they could only use pets to tank.

That some raid events are tanked by pets by some guilds is just the result of certain guilds using different tactics then others for certain events.

Pets lack the defensive skills/disc that a warrior has and they rely on base HP more then a warrior to stay alive.

Pets lack the agro skills/disc's that a warrior has and they rely upon base attack agro along with basic taunt to hold agro.

^^ this

at what point should tehse pets be able to tank group bosses, and at what point should they be able to tank raid bosses, at waht level of aa on their owner , at what EM rank focus? Dok's the only one that seemed to not completely skip over my point about real tanks having to farm 40-50 items on top of aa's, discs, and spells, to upgrade from one expac to the next, while a pet need only a couple spells and a new ear. This is waht offends tanks about pet tanking, and what's offends everyone is that the pet is immune to so many mechanics taht everyone else is not, so that sometimes there seems to be no choice. What bugs me the most, is when it gets to the point that the freaking main tank is suggesting pet tanks on events. At that point you KNOW it's gone too far when the best geared warrior you have thinks you should use a pet.

To whoever was talking about BD...why pet tank? I understand the mechanics and why they suck if you dont have a ton of tanks, my guild does not have a ton of tanks, and we don't use tanks to tank it (at least not full-time) however the event has a built-in tank MADE to tank it, why use a pet?

You pet tank BD because no one dies except maybe a few of the pets if you do it right.

You can also do raid with lower numbers because you don't have to kill the event before it kills all your tanks.

no, why use the pets?? use Kalda, that what i was saying, you'ren ot going ot lose a few pets, you wont even lose one. Kalda will tank it just fine but still like a pet, requires you to range dps

We tried that once but she died. Normally we had four to five mages per BD raid so there was no reason to ever need Kalda.

In a group where there is melee dps, I would much rather have tank. If I don't have melee dps, I'll have my pet tank. I don't hear you complaining about the 100pp it takes to pay for a tank merc. Also, the pet ear isn't the only reason why a pet can tank effectively. Knowing is half the battle...

you do realize that magicians have to get just as many pieces of gear per expansion as warriors, right? make an argument that pet focus should be spread out over all of the mage gear, but saying that one class should have to farm twice as much gear as every other class is absurd.

and btw, no we havent pet tanked anything if rof yet. that is why my comments were about voa raids.

it was jsut a suggestion, not sayign they shoudl have to do so. spreading out the pet focus would be nice, except it would then remove focii from the mage. The poitn about the pet gear vs tank is that for a mage's pet to tank they dont need to have upgraded their entire set of armor, they only need the ear and new spells, the rest of hte gear is for the mage itself to do more casting damage etc. Tanks are extremely gear and aug reliant, casters and priests not so much so. focus yes, gear and augs no, not so long as you ahve a modicum of hps for ae's and the gear has the needed focii on it. That's why tanks often have to upgrade every tier not jstu wait til the second half and use old spells until then or wahtever.

I see 2 things that need done here, remove the invulnerability to mechanics that pets have on these encounters, and make pets take more upgrades to get to max power than they currently do, whether thats as many as a real tank or not, who knows, but more than 1 items and a couple spells, yes. See, you bring up mercs, but merc tanks for example arent usable in raids (thank god) they level with the player as opposed to jsut being magically top level/geared at whatever level the owner gets the new one at, they also take up a group spot and take xp, which pets dont. Using a merc to tank or to heal or to dps, takes up a spot wehre another person could be in your gorup wehreas a pet doesn't, another advantage to forming all-caster gorups to farm whatever, while melees have to use real or merc tanks and cant take part in a group taht is usinga pet to tank. I don't have a problem with what pets can do so much as what they can do above and beyond a player tank, as is i believe most people's problem with them. Let them tank, but not better, and don't make it exclude large portions of hte playerbase if one does use them.

Someone mentioned pet aggro..yeah pet aggro is otu of control if you watch the aggrometer. Myself i dont see a good use for the big aggrometer i just use the one i ntarget window, but in jsut the target window they overtake everyone else and even the tank to the point that yo ucan't see when an actual player is overaggroing. But, that's a bug taht pet owners have brought up sicne beta taht idk if they'l lever fix. They do for sure need to fix the fact taht they bypass mechanics though. I can understand personally using a pet to tank so taht you can do soemthing you woudlnt be able to because of tank gearing taking far longer than pet gearing, but they do need to remove the OTHER reason people use them, to bypass mechanics that otherwise they would be able to tank as well with a real tank.

anyway im neither for nor against pets being able to tank group or raid mobs, it's moreso the methods and reasons that they are being used that i don't particularly enjoy. Reminds me (i think i mentioend elsewhere ) of the anniversary MG mission where the final boss is tanked by a merc or pet and ranged down like cake, while if a real tank is there they would get their rearends handed to them without a couple mezzers (when it was new, these days im sure it's cake either way) and thus tanks had to get people to bring merc tanks or petclasses because they coudlnt tank it due to assist/aggro mechanisms taht pets bypass, and this event dropped one of the 2 best tank augs in teh game atthe time, so tanks had to do it. Even with the necessary crowd control to use a real tank, it didnt make much sense to do so after the lengthy mission to get to this final mob in the first place.

I am a mid-tier warrior, there isn't many mid-tier guild on my server, and all of them use pet tanking, not because they can't do it with war, but because it s the easiest way to go about events.
Pet shouldn't be able to tank raid mob they aren't and never have been intended to, this is a trend that s been getting worse since HoT, it needs to be suppressed for the health of the game, there is 3 tank class, there is no need for a dps class to steal an archetype role, I am sure you wouldn't feel the same way if warriors were suddenly topping parse, all while tanking.
Devs need to get their act together and stop this, for the sake of the game.

I've actually seen plenty of classes that shouldn't be topping parses do so.

I have yet to see a developer say that a pet tanking a raid mob is never intended.

Has your guild done Beast's Domain raid using the tank and spank method sans pets? If your definition of "mid tier" is a guild that is not in the top 10 elite, than you should be able to do it just fine. Your healers might have to work harder and you WILL have tanks dying regardless but you should win if your dps is decent. Otherwise, if you definition of "mid tier" is that people need to bring boxed toons to raids just to have the numbers/classes or that you have 300 members that all raid 2 days or less a week than you should be thanking your raid leader for cutting you a break.

Honestly, your problem is not solved by making demands of the game developers. Talk to your raid leadership and see if you can work out an understanding to do events like BD without marginalizing the role warriors play. If not than find a guild that suits you. That is the easy solution. Otherwise there is this pandemic on these boards in that if something doesn't 100% suit the personal preferences of people in this game, than the devs need to act to fix it for them in some Nanny State type manner. "For the sake of the game". BS, you mean for the sake of yourself.

Sorry mate but life doesn't work that way. Just because you don't like something that happens in 1% or less of raid events in EQ that there needs to be a referendum to nerf a particular class's abilities on raids. As a rogue I am not a fan of pets tanking either, but it is a team effort to win and not about the glory of the topped parse for the individual. Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one as stated by a certain pointed eared person who wasn't an elf. Logic doesn't seem to apply here though.

You're correct that it's seldom "just about raw tanking". These events are producing high spike damage, mixed with even bigger spell hits and throwing complex mechanics that the tank has -zero- capacity to do anything about, while a pet can avoid these abilities simply by being a pet, or getting buffs from their master.

The solution isn't to nerf pets, it's to share these advantages with tanks.

I don't see how either of those are justified. Any advantages a pet has over a tank class will produce situations where the pet is preferred.

Why should a merc that every class is able to get, and which costs nothing gear wise, AA wise, spell wise, and auto levels with you, be a replacement for a far more gear intensive group tank?

Answer that first, then I answer why mage pets ought to be able to tank group content.

The pet is a tank it needs to be able to do it's job, that job being to tank mobs.

If a player tank needs disc/AA/skills to tank a mob then a mage pet needs base hp and agro high enough to tank without discs/AA/skills. The result is pet tanks have better base hp and base agro then a player tank.

Using a pet to tank in a group requires that you pick up a pet class, so you are giving up an exp slot. Further, it requires that you use no melee DPS. Further, it requires that you don't fight mobs that have abilities that require actual tanks, for example mobs with de-aggro abilities, pull ins, and jump-to-player abilities. Further, it requires that you don't fight packs of mobs because pets have no AoE aggro abilities. Further, it requires that you're not in a tight space because pet positioning is a pain and one small mistake costs you to wipe due to players taking melee range aggro.

They also tank worse than actual tanks and have no utility beyond tanking. Yes, they don't require gearing, which is a plus, but saying they don't require levels is false. The earth pet is only available at level 99. A level 99 tank merc is able to tank everything the pet is able to, and suffer none of the disadvantages I mentioned earlier. Yes, mages are also able to DPS so overall you want a mage over a tank merc when the option is there, but that's the perk of being a player and not a merc.

They obviously not going to say the obvious, that would be as stupid as having to state that a wizard will never be a healing class.