Actually the majority of our hate is activated these days. Swing hate took a nose dive since the move to sword+board, hate from weapon procs has stagnated terribly over the years and AA/imbued procs are unwieldy - too big and slow to be reliable. Ultimately I think the answer is to fix Dual Wield.
I'm more referring to your volleys, snare/stun/DD throw timer, and your battlecries, but yes of course your autofire DPS is included in there. A decent healer knows when to ignore healing specific members of the party. Now if you're talking about a merc, I can't comment -- there's a number of tactics that don't work that well with a healing merc, including this one. For the record I know nothing experientially about the "wizard merc on burn is too much DPS" issue, as I'm currently a silver account holder. A5 wizard mercs definitely don't feel out of balance to me at 90, but J5s may be a different story -- or they might not.
no no no we want mercs because so many of us remember the times that we had dps players out the and groups broke cause there werent tanks or healers. mercs were put in because people dont want to sit around waiting on certain classes to log in. we can find a friend or two, or mebbe none as a mage, and go do something fun. in my fellowship, we often pop mercs waiting on folks to log in. mercs are a placeholder of sorts. we lost our tank, and rely on the merc way too much. however, no tanks want to sit around listening to us reminisce. the merc doesn't mind 15 minute breaks shootin the shiz. the merc doesnt mind questin old content for checkmarks. the merc doesnt complain when my pet outtanks him. we want our mercs for the reason they were put in in the first place. dont stagnate them or we'll go back to the days of 4 players wanting to continue to hunt and not being able to cause certain classes arent around. tank or healer goes to bed? ok the rest of us are bored. no thanks.
You mean, before the mercs, it was even harder to find groups? No way! The OP knows better! If the mercs are gimped, everybody will instantly start grouping with each other, and clerics and tanks will magically appear every time they are needed!
The biggest issue mercs addressed when it comes to class composition is healers. Merc DPS is cool but back then LFG DPS were plentiful. Merc tanks are just bad, and so do not make up for the scarcity of group tanks. What has made up for it is pet tanking. Without pet tanking, I imagine there's till going to be a lot of issues forming groups.
Until SoD, the biggest issue was to find healers, mainly clerics. Tanks and later dps flavor mercs have always been secondary.
The problem with EQ in my view is difficulty scaling. Too many people run around with 3 accounts so they can make a group of 6 solo. To me this is kinda silly. Early zones for each expansion should have plenty of camps available for players to "Molo". This experience should be good enough for player to level at decent clip or earn aa's if they choose. These areas should not offer great loot, but the first tier of armor for the expansion seems fair. From there difficulty should ramp up significantly. I was here in 1999 so I know the game has become drastically easier since then but I still believe for a 14 year old game accessibility can be improved. Now, I do have 3 accounts, 2 of which are gold right now but I absolutely hate playing 3 at once. To me it removes any immersion whatsoever. I am not suggesting others are wrong for enjoining this type of play I am only asking that early zones in new expansion offer content that can be completed with a single character with a merc. I think at this point doing so can only increase the lifespan of the game. Also in doing so I don't see any negative effect on raiders or 3 boxers. I
No don't ruin mercs trying to force someone to group if they don't want to. Also at lower levels its damn hard to find a group 50% exspecialy if the majorty of your guild is high level with few alts, most hey can do is ocassionly power level you. If anything mercs need improved, they die to easy. I don't know about level 100 though just speaking up to level 70.
I mentioned it in another thread but I would like to reiterate it here. I am strongly in favor of pets being able to keep agro. I enjoy playing my Beastlord (95, 2500ish aa) but I feel like I am at a huge disadvantage because I can never melee unless I have a tank. Allowing pets to maintain agro while player characters are in melee range does no harm to anyone and would be a huge boon to players like myself. I don't see many beastlords in the game these days, i wonder if this is part of the reason why.
Pets not being able to keep aggro over melee is a Faustian deal for them keeping their current DI and hp values, which are above that of an average group tank. Beasts were designed to play healers for their pets while pet tanking and DPS while player tanking. That's why Beast pet heals >>> Mage pet heals - so that you guys are fully capable of running a Wizard instead of a Healer merc.
They changed it to where pets wouldn't hold aggro over a player long before pets had really large amounts of hps I thought.
Yeah, that particular design choice is ancient. Pets haven't been able to hold aggro over players since I started playing the game, which was in Velious era, and back then pets were nothing exceptional as far as tanking is concerned.
I was pretty sure it had happened sometime between original and Velious, but I couldn't remember. I do know pets weren't that great back then.
i may be opening up a can of worms here, but here goes. pets should not hold aggro over a player imho. my main's a mage. i have the t3 raid pet focus, so my pet is pretty beefy. thats the choice we have as a mage. do we want our pet to dps? then choose water or fire. do we want our pet to tank? then go earth or air, depending on mob level. the last thing i want is my water pet ganking aggro, cause he's not built to tank. he is good dps, especially with aa running. he'll die a lot if this change goes in. the addition of the aggrometer has shown us all the aggro that pets generate. long before its introduction, i thought my pet offered me safety from a bad tank. i dont have to keep below the tanks aggro, just my pet. it offers a consistency in my dps that i've always appreciated. on the flip side, i'm all for pets holding aggro over healer mercs. they die a lot standing still trying to heal themselves instead of letting stunny tank.
