Haste is on any real belt you hand the pet. I use the Combatant belts from dailies on shm doggie because shm uniquely among classes with summoned pets don't have special pet haste buff to max out with just mask.
any belt? or just the Combatant's belts because they lose on AC to the lv91+ summoned belts? Dimensional Warrior is higher AC
Is there such a thing as a weapon that can stun or slow (or an otherwise nifty effect) mobs up to lev 108 that is affordable/easy to get to give to pet?
EM23 air pet stuns up to level 108. (3 levels above pet's level, which with EM 23 is 105) They changed it back to how it used to be. In fact, there was a time when almost no mages used earth pets for tanks.. was all air. Earth users got laughed at until they nerfed that stun.
Earth has the aoe taunt, which I never bother to split singles, can be helpful even if it saves me the extra tabbing sometimes. My em23 Air is ok, the dps gains I didn't see as warranting the loss of tankability, but I didn't bother buying a full suit of crafted gear and strapping that on. I'll do air or water in groups sometimes. Earth with a pair of rageswords is just enough tanking and aggro (barely on the aggro nowadays) for me, and I don't bother with player-crafted gear (yet). Extra ac or tanking isn't a factor, what makes me want to quit TDS is the mind-numbingly annoying mob hp totals on T3 warrior mobs, and the only thing I like to use for that is extra players (boxes or people LFG). What I can or can't do as just mage is irrelevant to me, because in either case going through the T3 missions and HA's with just 1-2 players is slow as balls
Only takes me 40 seconds to kill a mob in TDS, unless it's a name type mob. 1 Character + 1 Healer merc. Even if it's 60 seconds, that's not a long time to kill 1 mob. CoTF had you spoiled with 5-10 seconds of fighting per mob..
I think 2 things are messing with your perception: 1. You always outgeared group content (like I do, but moreso) in cotf 2. You have taken level 105's back into cotf content (as we all tend to out of boredom sometimes) For a rag-tag patchwork group of undergeared or group geared players leveling up cotf content was fine. Sure, mobs died fast with a completely full group but not the later HA's. The last HA's in multiple cotf zones I have found far harder than the TDS stuff so far, but I havent been all through T3. Mobs came in bigger groups in cotf, CC'ing felt more important there, and burst was just a strategy, only a win-always for a full group or one that overgears the content, or one that was doing a stupid-easy HA. And I have not yet looked at AH or ToR progression still I'm not saying cotf was great, I think a happy medium would be somewhere between cotf and TDS in regards to relative hp size
I do think you might be full of doo doo and feces. (To paraphrase Michael Jackson, rip.) Yesterday, just myself, merc and pet. I have max AA and CoTF raid gear. I did EVERYTHING on this fight, including a hard, silent burn from the start. Pet was loaded with gear. My pet is only EM21, but Earth pet fully equipped with dimensional armor or better...and just yesterday Necromaticus Abomominaticus splatted him. I got the mob to 40% once and 37% another time. So twice in a row. Maybe mob got lucky lol. But I think you are making up fiction, Dazherz!
