My apologies, I misinterpreted what you had said (I thought you mean that you were using it during FBO, but afterwards it wasn't warranted). I have mixed feelings about the spell; the components of it are just weird. For the most part my thoughts reiterate what Cicely has said. To break it down into parts: Skill: Abjuration Mana: 8624 As Cicely said, the mana usage of this spell makes very little sense considering the damage it does. We are already have significant mana issues in raids; a spell that costs 8.6k mana better do something quite useful. 1: Increase Hit Damage by 150% I suppose this is a nice boost, but because it has stacking issues with FBO it doesn't work a fairly significant amount of the time. The damage bonus is hard to quantify because of variability in pets' damage depending on external factors; I did a rough approximation in beta but Aristo modified the % slightly since then. That said, I am somewhat skeptical that it is a huge boost. 2: Increase Current HP by 18025 per tick This part doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If it was meant for tanking, then why does it have a 35% hate reduction on the proc? If it's made for a DPS pet, what is the point of the HoT? Maybe I'm being somewhat limited in my thinking, but if I wanted to heal my pet on a raid an 18k HoT would not be my first choice (I'd probably use an AA heal tbh). 3: Add Melee Proc: Dichotomic Companion Strike 1 with 200% Rate Mod Hate: -1 1: Decrease Current HP by 27731 2: Decrease Current Hate by 35% The proc damage isn't terrible, but the buff falls off so quickly that you're getting 2-3 procs, as Cicely said. The hate modifier suggests that it's for DPS pets (likely in raids) to help manage aggro, which is somewhat useful in that scenario. However, this makes it essentially unusable if your pet is tanking (which is where the HoT might come in handy). 10: Increase Base Stats by 200 As I said, no idea what impact this has. I have basically no experience with this modifier and it was added pretty late into beta.
Could you imagine the thread if our Dichomotric spell was the one that can be bugged in Damsel of Decay raid instead of the berserker? As if our class is not hated enough as is, but then to be able to spam our Dichotromic for 220 million of total damage? That would have won the 2015 thread of the year...
With today's patch-message I understand the use. It's to avoid that your dps-pet takes the tank-role in case of a real Tank in your group.
For what its worth, when I run my earth pet in a similar setup, I go old school, send it in, count to ten and then send in the rest. Dicho spell is used for the air pet to keep target agro sane. One big thing I noticed that wasn't in the thread was companions wrath. Big boost to agro keeping. I switched once I got the defensive AA's to a fire pet for tanking and an air pet to keep mob stunned. Using Companions relocation, bump it towards mob. I have only a little extra work to do on heals, aegis etc to keep it up, but nothing has pulled agro from it so far. (Excluding player tanks of course). Give it nuke (or agro weaps), set the merc to burn, and go nuts. Give it a go. I usually cast my delayed heal on it before pulls first.
My earth pet on mage has been just fine. Just don't use dicho. Melee mercs on burn were taking aggro when I starting toying with it. Rage weapons and keep the haste buffs on and taunt on.
