I've done the DH mission "The Hills are Alive" over 100 times. No kidding. Today my pet got chewed by blues like you have never seen before. And yellows? Put on your hats. I don't say this lightly. I have EM19 and have been doing this a long, long time. I thought hmm..maybe it's merc. No, she's on reactive. Then I thought oh, I dunno, let me make another pet (which I knew didn't make any difference at all.) It made no difference. This happened recently b/c I've spent the last 3 weeks playing around in Neriak missions, and get singles there as a rule, in the ones I run. Before anyone says "BOO" or "My jboots are slower" you'd better put your pet up to the stress test. I will bet a nickel you'll be WTFing.
What server are you on? If you are playing on a live server (not Beta or Test), then I'd be very skeptical. That being said I'll check out some before and after parses to be sure. Edit: When providing analogies it helps to be specific. Knowing the number of mobs you were tanking, the buffs, etc. would be beneficial.
I just did DH2, Scouting ahead and had no issue with pets tanking, 2nd and 3rd task were lv 100 mobs, even con. EM 15 focus.
As far as I can tell there was no change, and quite frankly no good is going to come from another one of these threads.
Just did some parsing and my pet has not changed. Not sure what you experienced, but I imagine it was a singular instance.
Make that 5. Maybe 6. And it's a dynamic change. What I mean by that is that they're "tinkering" with it, so keep an eye on it. Use whatever you want to use as a control. If you've done the control enough times, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect. I do HA missions. 3 weeks ago I began noticing pet tanking changes, and they continue. You naysayers from before all owe me a nickel. I'd prefer it was I who was handing out nickels.
As others have pointed out, there is a thread dedicated to this topic, and the link was provided. And I must say, it's a hilarious thread. Magicians are seriously complaining about the difficulties their pets have tanking five mobs at once.
What's ironic was I was just reading a tanking guide on the tank forums which was exploring if it was worth tanking more than 3 mobs at once due to the extra micromanagement involved Both are kind of pointless because with most group and HA layouts u have to go really out of your way trying to die to tank more than 3 mobs usually. So I highly doubt either mages or tanks are seriously discussing these kinda of situations
Perhaps you should go read the thread for yourself before you "highly doubt" what's being discussed on it. For a taste: "I can still occasionally lose a pet on the beza tower. I have had times where I can bring the whole roof down on my pet and times where 5 mobs just mop the floor with him."
Beza tower. Gyrospire Beza. From Secrets of Faydwer, a level 80 expansion. Yes, a level 100 mage pet should normally have no trouble tanking five mobs in there.
Being a mage, i can honestly say there was about a 4-7 day period some time ago where something was completely screwed up. Before argin was released i was running ToR1 mission and a single mob just massacred my pet out of nowhere with 2 cleric mercs and a shaman. Pet basically got DT'd it seemed. But that issue has long since passed and now with the same setup i can manage 3 at a time in argin if done right. So whatever issue sparked this thread has clearly passed. Anyone still claiming stealth nerf is just out for soe's attention to try and get a boost. Currently only have em17 and primarily use earth pet
Played for probably another 8 hours/day over the weekend. Ran a guildie thru "Excavating an Answer" lv 100 DH progression HA. The red con skeletons in there (Lingering Templar, Awakened Reaver, etc) could kill an em19 air pet with 8/8 Healing Acumen cleric merc healing it without at least 1 cooldown used per pull. So in order to speed things up and be able to chain pull, I had to whip out 2nd cleric merc. Pet woulda never been able to tank the commander + adds without all cooldowns and 2 mercs (but there are other ways such as cc'ing adds as they spawn and burning commander down) Don't have a good basis for comparison but pets don't feel gimped but def don't feel OP. Maybe the change was to mercs, maybe no change, I dunno. It was so long since I played :/
My pet tanked Ancient Corpse w/2 adds today without problems, never dropped below 50% (real cleric plus merc healing). It can tank 2 yellow con Argin trash mobs at a time (I balance 'em down for more fun, see if I can get 'em both dead with same rain wave) with a single merc healing, no issues. If there has been any change(I'm doubting there was) it's pretty minute.
I haven't noticed a change either, but yah know, 1 real cleric = 2-3 mercs. I always roll with a real cleric, so meh.
It's only anecdotal--I have no parse data to share--but I played 20ish hours over the weekend and my pet was just paper thin. One mob was fine (with an enchanter casting slows and two J5 cleric mercs) but getting an add would almost always mean death. They have made a lot of the mobs either immune to mez or highly resistant, so on the occasions when I couldn't flash mez--which was often--it was just ugly, ugly, ugly. 20-odd deaths over 20-odd hours is absolutely unacceptable. So yes, I am joining the "mage pets have been stealth nerfed" bandwagon. Also feels like they did something with merc aggro. Have never seen my mercs get aggro so much before.
<---Not a Mage A couple possibilities that seem to have not been explored: 1. Could it be another group member? I, for instance, have convinced PUGs that "This mission must have been nerfed." "This was much harder yesterday." because, apparently unbeknownst to them, I had been debuffing the mobs and/or protecting the players. 2. Could Healer Mercs be the issue? Sometimes they wander off and have to walk slowly back to the party upon aggro. Sometimes mercs just stop casting. Some spells, such as runes, can cause mercs to react unexpectedly. I've seen them apparently react to my casting a small rune on the tank, decide that it made the tank safe, and switch to healing the worthless Enchanter pet instead which was looking a little low on life! Is it possible someone's using a (new?) spell that's causing the Healer Merc to act differently?
