Nice of you to nerf this after I already spent loyalty tokens to get one for all my toons. Can I get a refund?
Right? They really owe us an explanation of why they felt a need to nerf low level HP and low level Damage swarm pets. Who was complaining? They certainly were not over powered. This is 100% a nerf Players don't like and even worse, they spent Dev time to do it when there are so many other things they need to work on!
This and the whip. The whip was already nerfed before EoK released so why the second nerf was necessary I don't know. These were some of the coolest weapons in that era and they totally screwed them up
I have no real strong opinion on this subject, but out of curiosity....just how good was the rabbit before the nerf? What was the avg dps and cool down and stuff?
The rabbit nerf was mostly collateral damage; it wasn't doing anything particularly great DPS-wise. It's part of a subset of swarm pets (along with Vander's Bane) that scale with the caster's level. The scaling from level 115 -> 120 was quite high (about +150%), but summoning one of these pets for 15s (or 35s w/ swarm AAs), every five minutes continued to be pretty marginal DPS-wise. I don't have parses of the rabbit off-hand, but with everything available in-game to boost swarm pets, I don't think it could've passed a few casts worth of damage (likely in the ballpark of 5-10 million total damage, quite a bit less without perfect conditions). The "problem" was Vander's Bane under a combination of conditions: 1) On a class that can use the weapon and has swarm pet AAs (SHM/SHD/BST). 2) With auras that can boost swarm pets (MAG Theft of Essence, MAG Arcane Distillect, BRD Aura, SHM Pact of the Wolf Aura) 3) For peak DPS, the weapon could be used with Glyph of Destruction (which boosts swarm pets) and, if on a Beastlord, with Bloodlust, which makes the swarm pet proc every swing. Fierce Eye will also increase its proc rate. To be clear - none of the above is a bug. I've heard a few people get confused and think these things aren't supposed to work on swarm pets (to the contrary, many work as they do specifically to boost swarm pets). To the extent there was a problem, it was that the scaling on the proc pets brought their hit damage to about 2.3x that of a Magician RS pet at level 120. Again - that would work fine for Vicious Rabbit, but it's not really balanced on a proc pet. For reference, this was a parse from beta of just the pets with a Beastlord under all of the conditions mentioned (including Bloodlust and Glyph): Combat Dummy Azia in 521s, 1.77B Damage @3.39M, 1. Kenon`s pet = 1.67B@3.20M in 520s And without Bloodlust/Glyph but with Fierce Eye (i.e., sustained, but with a perfect group comp): Combat Dummy Beza in 369s, 506.74M Damage @1.37M, 1. Kenon`s pet = 476.18M@1.32M in 361s Neither of those parses included Funeral Dirge/T`vyl's; either of those would've increased the swarm pets' DPS by an additional 30/31% (yes, melee damage scales perfectly with that SPA). I don't think many people were setting up groups that had all of those perfect conditions for the weapon, though that was partially because knowledge of it (and how to boost swarm pets generally) was not widely available. (As a disclaimer, I don't think anyone ever used the weapon at all on our raids, it was just something I tested as a proof of concept on beta).
The rabbit was just fun.. I parsed it a few months ago actually and at 120 it did just about 1 million points of damage in 15 seconds with a 5 min recast, if I remember right. I liked it for farming, pull a bunch of low level mobs and let loose the rabbit of war..
