Think the point is retroactive changes are (for right or wrong) part of this game. Granted pets have existed more or less in their current state since at least SoF (and have existed since the game's inception). Still, if there is an error (even if it has existed for 7 years) the dev team needs to fix it. I'm more concerned that they won't compensate elsewhere for the change than about the change itself (which seems to be warranted barring any contradictory data). I do agree it's somewhat pointless to have debates about player's personal opinion on where they think pets should be (obviously the devs have decided); I guess I wish they'd just get on with the process and let us test it (even an early version).
I've seen this claim made a few times, but never really expanded upon with specifics. Are you saying that the warriors weren't popping AA disc's in the tests while the pets were getting some AA boosts? From what I saw - the tank parses had the tanks using discs. I'm curious if you can point out a particular post that shows deliberately skewed results, and explain what was done intentionally wrong to get those desired results? All that said, I'm not in favor of nerfing anything. And never have been. -R
For our oft abused Dev's - game development is indeed real life. It's their RL job last time I checked. Therefore, it's always better to test things appropriately before releasing them to live. Doing otherwise tends to piss off your customers, the ones that put real food on the tables - not Black Bread. -R That said, I understand mistakes happen and need to be fixed. However the "retro-fix" method should never be a taken for granted S.O.P. norm. Why? Because it makes customers unhappy.
Originally the parses only compared passive mitigation, though there were further parses demonstrating "intelligent" cycling of discs. Unless there's a significant discrepancy between mitigation between CotF T1 and T2 (which we've seen no solid evidence of yet) I'd say the parses are valid. The only thing I saw that was disingenuous was when it was calculated how often a warrior would receive 6 DI 15+ rounds compared to a pet. The way the calculation was done seemed to assume both were always getting hit (which skews the numbers because warriors in reality get hit significantly less than pets). Still, the data seems valid that in CotF T1 versus single mobs pet mitigate much, much better than player tanks (and also avoid significantly worse). I'd still be curious about multiple mobs because, whatever the warrior might be hitting to stay alive, player tanks seem to take on multiple mobs much better than my pet (can't say why, but they do). Also if there is a discrepancy when looking at mob types that should be looked into (though there's no proof that there is at this point).
The original passive mitigation charts and graphs were enough to get the lynch mob incited and the ball rolling. Pretty much one person with some bar graphs is all you need to nerf your fellow players.
One person with some bar graphs is enough to incite a deeper investigation. I was just asking questions - I honestly don't know what to make of the whole thing. I do wish players mitigated as "smoothly" as NPC's (pets and mercs) do. It's the spikes in the RNG that take tanking players down too easily IMHO. -R
Totally agree, it's basically EverSpike at this point... I feel the exact same way, the smoothing out of pc mitigation would be a boon to us all, I doubt it will ever happen. AA idea: Resiliency of the veteran: Drop max DI maximum 3 levels above character- 19 costs 100, 18 costs 200 etc... just a thought.
I remember back when I first started playing, I was playing a rogue and we were fighting in North Ro. The warrior in the group was going down (do you remember how long that took?) and the cleric was medding and healing every chance he got. As a rogue at the time, I'd stop for a moment and bandage the warrior and go back to fighting to keep him up. It took a team effort to kill anything really, and medding took ages! I don't want to go back to that.. but I do miss that strategy and tactics that were involved to keep people alive.. more than just 'chain heal' and such. Anymore it's just heal more than mobs, and dps as fast as you can. Tactics kind of addressed that I guess, with the plane of War... but I think it went overboard. Into the land of "if you don't know how to do this, you are just dead" instead of "you need to learn to do this to do it effectively". Who knows. Nostalgia.
Yes, Nostalgia and rose-colored glasses. In the old days after the planning of resource management, the battles slowly unfolded, and you could do your 10 sec bind wound and tank for some reason was very very still. Nowdays you slam every button and disc as it pops hoping it will be enough. It's a "point and click" style of shooter, but you use your spells and discs and don't need to aim a crosshair. It's not brain surgery, it's button-mashing. It didn't use to be like that but now it is.
The Dev's noted, in a beta thread, they found pets were taking lower end DI's (I don't remember which specific ones they mentioned) far more often than they intended. In finding out why, they discovered a math issue with pet AC causing it. Fixing that AC value to make the DI's inline with the team's target is all they care about--not the bar graphs, not what the warriors want, not what the lynch mob wants, nor how pets compare to warriors. They want pets to hit close to that DI mark which they never disclosed. It doesn't matter if that guy's graphs were wrong because pets weren't hitting the Dev's' intended DI spread.
Well with the release of Argin-Hiz pet nerfs across all pet classes certainly went live. The changes also affected mercs. Outside of raids I spend most of my time moloing and the changes are terrible. IMHO pets are mitigating approximately 60% of what they used to and if you get an add, you may was well gate or pop just about all your pet defensive/dps discs you have if you hope to get through it alive. This is a terrible change, and reminds me of how unplayable mages were in 2004-2005. (POP/GoD eras) Solution: Cut the nerf changes 50% and see what happens Intended side effect: I am sure all the nerf fans' egos are now effectively stroked. (having zero positive effect on everyone's gaming experience)
I understand this. However, it would be one thing if this mathematical error had been made a few months ago, or even a year ago and it is entirely another issue when years upon years have elapsed since this "error" was introduced. Entire Mage 'careers' have been made, since 2007 and before, based on the behavior of these pets. Selections of the Mage class have been made on these same criteria. If the Mage pet infringed on Tank necessity, it would be one thing. But they don't. Despite anomalies, anyone who suggested 'let's use a Mage pet' instead would be laughed off the field. This class takes a back seat to the pure tanks and to the pure casters. The ONE... count it.. ONE thing a Mage can do the best is to solo. And you know what? It takes a LONG LONG time for us to perform these solo miracles. But we don't care, because we love our pet, and we love the independence, and we love the game. Regardless of how a single pet performs against mobs re: DI or re: a mathematical flaw found years after the fact, it would do NOTHING to the integrity of the game to leave it the same as it's been for years. Until such day as a pet is routinely taking the place of TANKS our pet should be pronounced "good" and let's get on with the game as we know it. This whole thing saddens me, not just in the fact that my beloved class may be nerfed, but also that others in my community have gone to such lengths and such ranting to cause a change which, in the final analysis, will not bolster their own class, but will surely nerf mine and completely change my playstyle, if these changes come to pass. (As many in this thread indicated, it may have already happened. I'm waiting for a dev to weigh in.)
Part of what allowed us to tease apart the reason behind the mitigation discrepancy was the long awaited release of the ac calculation the server used for player tanks. Before this, we were aware that more ac is better, but we were clueless about how the invisible numbers were quirked out behind the curtain. The deva released it -- and I scoured that post and that information for a long time. Pets also have a number. I suspected that the culprit from a mitigation standpoint was the fact that at NPCs they weren't subject to the same cascade of massive diminishing returns that every single PC is subjected to based on class, level, and aa count. In essence for NPCs every point of ac is given full power while for PCs there is a sharp drop off in potency. If I remember correctly you can also see the ac of mercs. Despite ac levels way lower than player tanks, they were likewise mitigating like demi-gods. -Enter the testing - results were comically out of whack. -Enter the community discussion, which quickly got comically out of control Based on what little intel I had at the time, the issue started getting looked at hard by the team shortly after the inital tests. I was informed that if I wanted to understand and then discuss ac returns beyond a reasonable softcap I should get my long parses quickly because these levels of mitigation would not be around to examine at some point in the future (ie it was looking like the devs were even shocked by the results). All of this is second hand hearsay though, so I can't comment on the accuracy of what was said to me. I did, however, stockpile dozens of hours worth of parsing for future comparative purposes. It would seem that this was never intended - and that which isn't intended usually does not stay in game. /shrug As long as the game stays balanced, I have no regrets.
In a sense, you are correct. I donated my time verifying anecdotal observations. The community and devs examined (and at times bickered with each other about) it. The developers ran their own analysis and found big problems. Now it's getting addressed.
Now we just need to show some long comically out of whack parses of warrior tanking verses group named while under nttb and other things. Compared to knights tanking under their stuff. Based on how pets are being handled when severely out of whack in that case warriors should be 'balanced' instead of knights getting boosted up. I suspect the devs wanted warriors ahead in this regard but not to the comical degree it is currently where many named are not doable unless you have a warrior because of how out of whack their mitigation is at times compared to knights. Hopefully we can get this addressed so the 10 years played on my shadow knight are not wasted. I won't be re-gearing up a warrior instead to take advantage of iwin tanking nttb + things to play in the group game. And saying hey I can't tank this named after spawning it can a warrior come out and tank it for me because of the giant discrepancy isn't balance.
If you cant do anything in group game as an sk that a war can, your doing it wrong, quit using your bot accounts to come over and spread false information. As to the people bashing Daegun, you should really be thanking him for assisting in finding the issue now, instead of a dev finding it later. With him finding it they have to address the issue in view of the players, instead of a real ninja nerf that could have happened. As a fellow player with all 3 tank classes and 2/3 pet classes that I play regularly, Thank you Daegun for donating your time to help the community.
And if a PC tank can't do what a pet can, then you are doing it wrong. Sugar coat it all you want, but a witch hunt is still just that; a witch hunt.
I agree, and no one was saying that they cannot do what a pet does. The change has nothing to do with that, it is the DI spread that the change is addressing, and tweaking pet dps, mostly for the better. Excellent players will still be able to pull off amazing things. pets were where pc's were with their dmg mitigation abilities running (lower end ones) and with their pet owner abilties going they were at what a pc mitigated at the higher end. The pc still had all their other tools at their disposal,epic clicks, AA clicks etc, and if they didn't use them then they were just bad players.
