Mage Pet Mitigation stealth change?

Discussion in 'Casters' started by Putrify, May 3, 2014.

  1. Voragath Augur

    I thought it was when we got ship to ship combat?
    Cicelee, Enkel and Potawatomi like this.
  2. Voragath Augur

    The pet avoidance was where they wanted it and noted it was worse than PC tanks. There was an issue with the AC formula that made the DI's so low and frequently so.

    As to pet ears, people need to stop pointing that out. The gain in pet power is small from level to level. The gain from the ears from group to raid is not that large and only 3 level difference. The AC error might be making it huge at the moment, but a fix to that should bring it back in line. Getting a raid ear over a group ear is not a huge jump and intentionally so after the SoD fiasco. In the end, max focus from expansion to expansion doesn't see much change in power relative to current level mobs. The pet ear argument became irrelevant after SoD.
  3. Voragath Augur

    This is a false dichotomy that was pointed out years and years ago. There isn't tank and dps. There is tank at one end, dps at the other end, and a ton of in-between. You can tank and dps well, tank exceptionally in this situation but dps terribly at it, tank terribly in this situation but dps well.

    Mages are like that: we can't tank a raid but we can dps well there; we can tank well solo or in non-melee groups; and we can't tank in melee groups. Also, we dps poorly in fast killing, high dps groups. I have been in many groups where mobs die so fast I'm lucky to get in more than 2 nukes.

    Mages are a hybrid and people need to understand this. We consider ourselves dps because we can dps in more situations than we can tank; but that does not change the fact we are hybrids. Rangers, pallies, and sk's all do things better than tank in many situations but they are all still hybrids. Bards consider themselves support but they can tank in limited scenarios as well. I have seen berserkers tank and they are supposed to be pure dps like wizards.

    This is part of the problem with the warriors' argument: they are making all of EQ black and white and using themselves as the yardstick. EQ is grey and the yardstick is the current fancy of the development team.
    Baramos and Wayylon like this.
  4. Voragath Augur

    Tanking 3 mobs or more allows high dps groups to spread the dps and keep it going; it also slows the lag down between pulls by allowing a mob or more to be in camp at all times. It also allows for great use of AE's which are, typically, highly efficient for fast killing/exp groups.

    In a group where you have an actual tank (and moreso if you have some melee as well) there is no reason to pull less than 3.
  5. Enkel Augur


    When did that kickstarter happen? I must have missed it.
  6. sojero One hit wonder

    The Buried Sea expansion that was one of the "features."
  7. onyuyan Augur

    Uhm I know you're just stating the devs position not defending it, but even the warrior who started the thread that lead to all of this said that pets avoidance should increase with the AC decreases. If my pet mitigates like a tank does passively I'm looking at 35% more incoming damage per mob than a player tank... And because I have 35% less of a chance than they do to avoid the next hit my pet will have a significantly higher likelihood of taking more bad hits than a tank. Granted I haven't seen this in action, but stupid things like somewhat higher pet heals (basically equal to or lower than mob dps) aren't going to save my pet in this scenario. I'm very very skeptical that just bringing pet mitigation to player tank levels without having some give somewhere will result in a God awful pet, not just a "fixed" pet.

    Looking at the parses on the evil gamer forums, and this is assuming I mitigate like a group geared warrior (best case, could mitigate like a knight/ranger), a pet would take 8,645 DPS compared to the warrior's 6,062. If we look at the measure used as a "spike," being 6 bad rounds (DI 15+) in a row, the likelihood for the warrior is 0.000084% ((313 DI 15+/3224 incoming hits)^6). For pets I first take the number of DI 15+ hits and divide it by the number of incoming hits (to find the percentage), making 17.17% of the hits DI 15+. Now if we multiply this by the number of hits the pet had we end up with 479 (.1717*2792). Now if we look at the probability of 6 DI 15+ we end up with 0.00042% ((479/3769)^6). I don't know how that translates time wise (both numbers are rather small), but the pet has a significantly higher chance. That's just spikiness, after dealing with larger DPS. Please note I'm doing all of this without computer access so please check my math (numbers from http://www.evilgamer.net/forums/showthread.php?t=9099).

    I'm sorry if this sounds overly dramatic but what you're saying sounds rather bleak to me.
  8. Voragath Augur

    I cut out most of the quote for brevity.

    This is why they aren't concerned with balancing pet AC around warriors/tanks. They have an idea of what they want for pets. They noticed AC was keeping them from acting in a manner that matched that idea. It could be they want pets avoiding worse than PC tanks but having better AC/mitigation.

    Pets can still have better AC without making them better tanks. A position many anti-pet posters seem to be unaware of.
    sojero likes this.
  9. onyuyan Augur

    Thank you Voragath, that made me feel quite a bit better. I'm hesitant as I have to see where pets end up after the changes, but I'm cautiously optimistic that the AC will be balanced around the avoidance.

    That being said, am I wrong that either Aristo or Eldiroth (forget which one, and it's gone now) stated that they wanted pets to average in the middle of the DI range (meaning DI 10)? If it operates similar to a bell curve, it cuts out some of the spikiness we would other see, but if the average is 10 we would go from 17.17% to 25% with DI 15+ (further increasing the numbers in my last post). I do hope DI 10 is the most likely outcome rather than the average outcome.
  10. Voragath Augur

    It was Eli though I don't think it's just his opinion as these matters are usually a team decision/concept--not to mention, Eli is a lead dev and Aristo is in charge of pets.

    From experience, pets taking only the low end of the DI is clearly not right. It used to be uncommon to watch a full HP pet with buffs just fall on his face dead in an instant--that would be one of the higher end DI's. Someone who played long enough would realize what just happened. It was far more common to watch your pet drop about 20-30% hp every couple of seconds if he was tanking. My guess is that they want to adjust the numbers to make it more like that again which would throw us back into the days that the occasional spot heal will be needed while tanking.
  11. onyuyan Augur

    I'm going to hope you're wrong on that, but I guess we'll wait and see. I could go over the numbers showing why that would be a significantly weakening change (20-30% sounds reasonable until you consider the 185k pet HP pools), but it makes more sense to actually wait to test the changes.
  12. Voragath Augur

    Sorry, my point wasn't about the numbers. I was just stating that it used to be a steady amount of incoming damage with the occasional huge spike. The huge hp pool was to offset that they mitigated poorly. Basically, a pet's declining health turns into maintenance for us. Whether that come in the form of heals, extra work to out dps the mob, throwing out extra defenses, or by reeling the pet in for a moment and let someone else tank.

    The runes were to prevent a pet from falling on his face; if he did, you weren't paying attention.
  13. Necromonious Augur

    Mage caster heals suck so bad, I hope they don't get put in a situation to need these in addition to merc heals. I can't think of any situation where completely shutting off your dps to cast a Mage pet heal is EVER beneficial , considering how tiny they heal for. It's all about the AA's for healing, or letting a RS take a few hits but they can't take much vs cotf mobs.

    And yeah I agree why even bother talkin about tanking 4+, most of the group stuff and HA's aren't set up to need that... and I was trying an EM19 pet and no way could that tank 4 HA mobs without major defensive AA use. And mages are a basic and simple tank to play *unless* you need both good tanking and good dps, in which case it's a fury of button-mashing and cool-down spamming like any other class. Mages for me just seem really front-heavy in general. Either you loaded up a couple defensive AA's like FB and fortify (or stagger these depending on ur dps obviously) before you engaged the named mob...and you got your fingers over the pet heal AA's or your pet is probably dead...pretty simple. Frontload your defense before you engage or you're screwed
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  14. Raneern Journeyman

    Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the claim during beta that pets were getting 75% of hits to DI one or DI two? On my 5 minute test on a Tower Scion in the TOR (would of done longer but it's a tough zone to test anything) what I saw was only 18% of hits in DI one or DI two. That's an EM20 earth pet, best raid level pet available. It would appear to be a fairly large discrepancy. And presumably it's reasonable to test on current content since that's actually where most would like to fight. Obviously I need to run a longer test but something isn't looking right thus far.
    Wayylon likes this.
  15. Wayylon Augur

    The "tests" were conducted in a way to specifically get pets nerfed into the ground, by a warrior.
  16. sojero One hit wonder

    The tests were done in a way to shed light on an issue. I am confident that the development crew did their own tests to confirm and that is why they are looking at the issue. All you can blame on "that warrior" is bringing the issue to light.
  17. Raneern Journeyman

    Whether or not the data analysis has been or will be done accurately is material. However, it’s secondary at this point. The primary concern is with wanting a do over 7 years after the fact. Do overs in real life are fairly uncommon for good reason. I’m pretty sure the guy who built my house won’t be back seven years later to retroactively downgrade its foundation. In this case during the prior seven years thousands of customers made decisions on whether or not they wished to own an account, play this game and what class to roll. They did so based on the available information and what they did was reasonable to do. At present the scope of the “nerf” looks to impact the foundation of everyone in three classes. We’re talking about 100% of all Necs, Beasts and Mages in game having their class retroactively tinkered with 7 years after the fact. No one can say where this ends up yet but it is a cause for concern. The impacted players may well represent 40% of all dps players’ game wide.
  18. Potawatomi Augur

    Check the alarmist attitude. While you can be concerned, this has happened multiple times across varying classes. We may not like it but it's the reality we live in. If you want to try and make a difference, participate in the testing of the changes because that's all you will be able to do in the end.

    Things get fixed or retuned all the time.
  19. sojero One hit wonder

    welcome to reality. were talking about a game, not real life. when you play a game you accept the fact that things can and will change, and mistakes will be corrected.

    welcome to sk, rouge, ranger, berserkers all getting epic, decapitate, head shot, assassinate changed. Which have been in the game for longer.
  20. Nickster86 Elder

    Except our pets do not get the ability to do one shot kills like those abilities. Still takes time to kill a mob even if we use AA. So not too sure what you were going for with that one. Don't try to compare beam ( which was nerfed) to headshot and decap either because that's apples and oranges