Test Update 8/5/2014 - Pet Changes Round Two

The +dps difference in the water and necro rogue pets will NEVER be enough to warrant their use henceforth, and we all know it. Pets in general are going to be pretty much paper already, at least against T2 mobs, that an extra 200-1k dps is a joke. I personally will never use the rogue pet out of general principal at this point, in addition to the complete lack of practicality. At least air has a semi-functional stun

I am pretty sure the proposed DPS changes to pets are not on Test yet. Unless Aristo added them to the most recent patch (which it does not look like it). So they stand to gain some ground, but I agree pet DPS is not looking so swell on top of the tanking losses we are getting.

Is what was listed from the initial changes and I have seen nothing about further changes to the DPS of pets thus far. As I said the problem is that minimum hit was lowered for the Rogue which means lower overall DPS even in a 30 minute parse due to hit distribution. Here are 2 shorter parses (so the graphs are useable) in which the exact same pet with the exact same buffs fought the exact same spider twice for 5 minutes. That spider and I have bonded over the past few days...


Dingbat -vs- A murkweb spider: -- DMG: 658229 -- DPS: 2216 -- Scaled: 2209 -- Hit: 658229 -- Non-crit rate: 100% -- Attempts: 555 -- Hits: 555 -- Accuracy: 100% -- Avg Hit: 1185 -- Max hit: 3078 -- DMG to PC: 3739062


Dingbat -vs- A murkweb spider: -- DMG: 568216 -- DPS: 1907 -- Scaled: 1907 -- Hit: 568216 -- Non-crit rate: 100% -- Attempts: 477 -- Hits: 477 -- Accuracy: 100% -- Avg Hit: 1191 -- Max hit: 3078 -- DMG to PC: 3621572


As you can see melee hit distribution for pets mimics the same patterns that you find with the DI distribution when they are tanking. Hence when you lower the minimum hit you lower the pets DPS.

A good place to start so that this pet is in some way useful would have been to increase the minimum hit (instead of lowering it) and also increase the maximum hit. Then it might do 400-500 DPS more than the warrior pet which is still pretty sad if they are to have different roles (or use for the Rogue).

In my opinion, given their lower tanking ability, both of these pets should at least match the DPS of the Mage Earth pet to begin with. The Earth pet can out tank both of these two combined at the present time so at least give them something.


**Edit
Had to upload the graphs

Ok so Brutial and I ran back down to test and parsed another two yellow cons in Argin-Hiz.
My pet EM20 had all pet buffs, aa's etc. running all aa's maxed and all spells at rank three.

Brutial played his warrior the same as he usually does over the course of the 13 minutes or parse time, cycling discs, abilities and disciplines throughout the entire 13 minutes.
Some warriors were saying that their class can only cycle their discs abilities, and disciplines for 3-4 minutes and then they would run out. This is untrue as as any talented warriors realize
if you know how to play your class well, and you cycle only those abilities that stack, and they learn not waste or consume aa's, discs, etc. that do not scale over the ability that is already running.

If you look at the chart, you can see improvements in AC that went live on 8/5/14 but you can also see that the pets damage intake (DI) round cap is now coming in at 57K versus prior to the patch being a DI of 40K.
Hopefully this is a bug, or error and the cap can be corrected.

I am very proud our SI warriors have the integrity to be honest and straight forward with the community and the SOE developers when they see something bad happening.
I was chatting with all of them in vent tonight while we were running the parses and they truly are an amazing bunch.

These are the parses that should have been shown, over a year ago to prove that the whole situation was overblown and unnecessary. Instead we had to deal with parses
made by warriors/tanks running no actives against pets which are by nature front-end loaded. What a scam.

We still have not gotten a logical and well-organized and easy to understand answer on how the pet classes (as they were before this whole mess started) were hurting the game and other player's experience.

I again insist that this was all backlash over the change on pets showing up in HOTT aggro and tanks egos getting bruised by Fluffy having his name in the HOTT instead of theirs.

We had some warriors a ways back (before our current group) who would constantly complain (PET FADE! GET PET OFF AGGRO! etc., etc., etc.,)
Geeze Louise talk about pet hate it was terrible! Thank Tunare that is a far distant memory!

Now we have warriors and tanks who run their discs, abilities and disciplines properly and ALWAYS have their name in the HOTT window.

Trust me...... the mages in our guild constantly try (with zero success) to pull HOTT aggro off our warriors and we can't because our warriors know how to play their class.

My point of view is to revert all changes back to the way pets were before all of this occurred, and to keep the air pet stun cap change to +3 over current level cap. That would still be down two levels after of the House of Thule expansion nerf which brought it down five levels. (it was always +5 over level cap)

Hopefully our developer team will have the time to review everyone's point of view and make a real good decision for what is best for the community, and longevity of the game.

I may be incorrect, but I believe early versions of the DPS increases have already gone live, so the DPS on live and test should be very similar.

I'm disappointed to see the shape of necro pets. An Em20 pet is supposed to be at least _somewhat_ like a warrior in equivalent T3 RoF raid gear. An em20 warrior necro pet can't tank a cotf t2 trash mob, could a T3 raid-geared warrior do so? I know pets aren't supposed to replace players but come on, doesn't even look close. As it stands now, the age-old question of who is better at solo'ing hard content, mage or necro, may finally have a definitive answer

Nah some pets are off by like 400 DPS, higher on test then live. Air is the only pet (out of our 3 DPS pets) that is close, but still about 120DPS higher on test.

Something seriously wrong with water pet DPS...

Roon vs EM 20 water pet, max AA, burnout rk3, iceflame rk3, hate proc swords, merc buffs, and that's it @ 684s

/tell Nylrem Mobstopper -vs- Roon: -- DMG: 496655 -- DPS: 726 -- Scaled: 710 -- DirDmg: 355255 -- Slash: 125608 -- Backstab: 15792 -- % dmg as normal: 87.2% -- % dmg as critical: 12.8% -- Non-crit rate: 97.9% -- crit rate: 2.1% -- Attempts: 1292 -- Hits: 1241 -- Missed: 23 -- Defended: 28 -- Accuracy: 98.2% -- Avg Hit: 400 -- Max hit: 7544 -- DMG to PC: 9152672

/GU Tanking summary for: Mobstopper (Nylrem) --- Total damage: 9152672 --- Avg hit: 10742 --- Swings: 1278 --- Defended: 330 (25.8%) --- Hit: 852 (66.7%) --- Missed: 96 (7.5%) --- Accuracy: 89.9% --- Dodged: 19 (1.7%) --- Parried: 42 (3.5%) --- Blocked: 86 (6.7%) --- Riposted: 39 (3.4%) --- Absorbed: 144 (11.3%)

Mobstopper (Nylrem) - vs - Roon
Attempts 1196 100%
Missed 84 7.02%
Dodged 17 1.42%
Parried 38 3.18%
Blocked 84 7.02%
Riposted 35 2.93%
Absorbed 137 11.45%
3496 6 0.5%
3884 167 13.96%
4811 15 1.25%
5165 2 0.17%
5738 19 1.59%
5999 2 0.17%
6665 36 3.01%
7592 35 2.93%
7667 3 0.25%
8448 1 0.08%
8501 2 0.17%
8518 37 3.09%
9335 2 0.17%
9445 35 2.93%
10170 1 0.08%
10372 39 3.26%
11004 2 0.17%
11299 37 3.09%
11838 3 0.25%
12226 34 2.84%
13153 37 3.09%
13507 2 0.17%
14080 39 3.26%
15007 26 2.17%
15175 3 0.25%
15934 31 2.59%
16861 31 2.59%
17677 1 0.08%
17787 27 2.26%
18512 1 0.08%
18714 23 1.92%
19346 4 0.33%
19641 17 1.42%
20568 11 0.92%
21495 70 5.85%

The water pet can't tank worth a darn. It was taking everything I could do with a max healing real cleric plus 2 mercs to keep the pet alive vs Roon.

Something really wonky wrong with the water pet's DPS, as well. Avg normal hit of 356... serious issues with it.

Do you have everything turned on? Because lastnight I had water pet at:

/GU Combined: Roon in 690s, 2813k @4077dps --- Boss 2811k @4098dps.

Unless they patched today and ruined some stuff, possibly a bug?

Wouldn't a rog pet who is tanking have less DPS than it would normally have?

Has anyone parsed the rog pets DPS while it is behind the mob?

How do necro pets proc Prism skin?

Necro pets got this ability innate at like level 85 or something. I don't remember when it started exactly. Maybe someone else can recall when.

For Necros, Prism Skin came with HoT I believe. 5% chance to be a recourse from the 300HP lifetap that the pets occasionally proc. It originated with Beast Lords and Mages around lvl 70 if I'm not mistaken as a recourse for some of there other pet buff stuff. 2 Hit Rune and I'm not sure what the damage cap on it is. Numbers could be a little off as it has been along time but I don't believe they have changed at all.

I just went and molo'd Roon real quick, again, with water pet after seeing this.

/G Roon in 132s, 7057k @46427sdps -- Akirage 2104k @16313dps

Then I pulled a wolf and let pet tank it without burns on:

/G A mist wolf in 87s, 573k @6585sdps -- Akirage 474k @5451sdps

Then I tanked on my mage for a spider with pet backstabbing, then on a cougar, then on a wolf:

/G Combined: A ground spider in 191s, 1677k @8782sdps -- Akirage 1343k @7032sdps

Wow, this is still going on, eh.

Did Mage pets in their prior form tilt the balance of the game way out of whack? Were warriors suddenly replaced by pets because of their "superior tanking"? Did players flee their classes en masse to get on the OP Mage gravy train? Were you disrupted when you saw a Mage moloing some yellow or red mob?

No, no, etc., no. Heck, if you have a warrior in the group, suggesting you replace him with a pet gets you laughed out. And besides, soon as (any pc) engages, the pc takes aggro.

The game wasn't broken. The data is misleading. The class is certainly NOT overpowered. I have said it before - we are a one trick pony.

One. Trick.

Our trick? We can molo mobs and can do missions with a merc using enormous amounts of time that leaves most players scratching their heads wondering why we would 'waste our time' doing something so slowly. Did I say slow. I mean SLOW, my fellow players.

Big deal. That "trick" hurts NO ONE. it's a charming facet of the EQ game and is UNIQUE and brilliant.

This has been a colossal waste of time when effort should be spent on real problems and real issues.

If these changes are implemented as I am seeing on test instead of hurting NO ONE, it will hurt A LOT OF PLAYERS. Why do that when the GAME WORKS FINE and players are (relatively) happy.

I really believe this became overheated with rhetoric and simply poking holes in the air with our fingers.

Read Danille's post regarding her parses with her tank buddy.. It says it all.https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/...-changes-round-two.212698/page-5#post-3112300

Bara

edit: sorry double post

Denial

Were you fully defensive on the warrior?

Otherwise, you shouldn't post next to a pet.

They can only be compared to fully defensive warrior.

Why is this the constant type of response. Any warrior should have survivability running 100% of the time while tanking. If you don't then you are doing it wrong and need to practice better disc usage. Why would for the sake of a nerf you not run stuff you can normally run while parsing this. It makes no difference a 3 to 4 min parse or 10+ min parse doesn't matter. Fact is pets out tanking warriors is a poorly functioning warrior. I reparsed this today to stretch over 10min and mob died at 13min 13sec from non attack damage. At this point comments like this are just trying to push a harder nerf and I don't see why people lobby together for more nerfs. It shouldn't effect your game time if some random mage, necro, beastlord or whatever pet class kills some random mob you wasn't camping anyways. Nerfs like this hurt the player base and simply shouldn't matter what another class can do. If you are mad they can solo and you cant then you picked the wrong class. However, you are in luck with heroic chars now and aa grants you can be well on your way to doing it. If you are mad they out tank you then you are under skilled. Either way nerfing a pet will fix zero problems in grand scheme of things. If someone wants to parse with me bristle.brutial and I will go to test with you if you catch me online. Please stick to productive pet parsing post or relevant postings to the coming nerf and stop the tired old was he fully defensive or it don't count posts.

Brutial
Warrior on Bristlebane

While anyone would agree that it is good tanking practice, using non-sustainable cooldowns during a datalog will skew your results for the kind of parsing relevant to this thread.

Do you have a magelo, or maybe just a tier-gear summary for your Warrior btw?

Dre

While anyone would agree that it is good tanking practice, using non-sustainable cooldowns during a datalog will skew your results for the kind of parsing relevant to this thread.

Do you have a magelo btw?

It out of date Dre will update it tomarrow. Also why would you be tanking without rotating the same stuff you would any other time to make the pets a certain way in parse. We tank till death in guild and don't rotate defensives as it isn't needed. I rotate 3 disc / ability combos all the time. When I am in a raid or group same way all the time. It is sustainable to have survivability running 100% of the time running regardless of cool downs. Why would I change play styles to make the parse look different. Does anyone have a parse graph of a pet tanking something like Commander in WK 2 raid I have parses of me doing from 100% to 0 and I would say that pets cant fair better in that format either as some have suggested. I would compare graphs with that as well if any have a pet doing it.

Brutial
Warrior on Bristlebane

Because:

After identifying the 20 discrete DI values, we can easily sort out the effects of all the other stuff. However, if all the other stuff if used in a datalog, it makes it much harder to find the 20 discrete DI values.

That is how you figure out base mitigation Brutial. And a base di distribution. Now that's not to say I don't agree that , that is our base mitigation now with defensive stance but all your going to do basing the pets off of that now is get them boosted back above even where they were at then so your not fixing anything in that regard it needs to be parse base mitigation vs base mitigation and aristo is smart enough to add in the discs himself.