Greetings all. I've been lurking on the forums here for a while now because I have been considering firing up my accounts again. It's been a little over a year since I've been active. I played a five box crew: Magician, Enchanter, Shaman, Wizard and Ranger. All level 100 and all decently geared and aa'd. My questions are: Did they really nerf pets? If so, how badly? Even nerfed is the above mentioned box team still going to be able to kick ? (at the time I quit those 5 toons were a pretty formidable force) Thanks in advance for any and all helpful responses. Oc.
Pets are being whacked pretty hard yes. But with an enchanter box it almost doesn't matter you have all the CC you will ever need, slow, cripple and the buffs to put your pet back into his position prior. Until they decide that outside buffs for pets are not working as intended.
Hi Oculus, it is true, they have nerfed pets, a few times in the last year or two I think. As I understand it the pets were getting full benefit from all AAs/armor as if all the AAs/armor were shields, making them much better tanks than intended. From what I've seen pets should still be able to tank, will just require more focus/heals than they did in the past. I'm not sure what your definition of kicking is, but seems a pretty good group set up there, and I don't think the pet nerf will kill it. Be careful who you hear pet info from, it seems to be very biased lately. With the petists saying everything is over and coming to an end and the tankists saying the nerf isn't bad enough.
A player tank with less gear will outperform a pet in just about every way if he is using his cooldowns intelligently, as was shown by parses on test where a warrior in group gear was taking ~5k dmg/hit less than a RAID geared pet (em18 I believe). The issue gets muddled up because pet classes get angry that parsing has traditionally been with "afk-tanking" which makes pets look overly-strong in an unrealistic environment where everyone is linkdead. And tank players get angry that pets DI values STILL look better than theirs. Then pet classes get angry that parses are only vs singles, where pet effectiveness plummets vs multiples due to lacking %mitigation. So a lotta anger, lotta accusations. But ultimately, a pet class will do better if u don't have the gear or the ATTENTION to play a tank well, as active tanking on a tank requires a crapload more button presses than a pet class (although mages trying to dps well and keep pet up will be pretty furious with hotkeys too). So for a box group, I personally would go with pet class. For solo play or a smaller box (like 2 box) I personally would reroll a tank + dps/cc combo
The nerf is ongoing and no one knows how bad it ultimately is going to be. But regardless of whether it's bad enough to render your team obsolete, it's the principle behind it that ought to worry you, not the exact details. The devs have shown that they have little regard for the play style of pet tanking. They've shown this through introducing zones ie PoWar in which pet tanking is flat out disabled, and they've shown this through their determination to make pet tanking not as effective as player tanking via nerfs and mechanics. It is not logical to take the risk that the devs are going to continue supporting your planned play style, even in the event that the nerfs aren't that bad. They have never, ever made that guarantee, and have shown through their actions that they don't have a set standard for how to deal with pet tanking. Just make a warrior and save yourself the hassle of having to worry about it.
Pet will still be able to tank all group content that dosen't have a specific '' you shall not pet tank this'' mechanism ( aka, PoWar.. who BTW don't only screw pet classes over, but have mechanic to screw everyone over, like reducing tanks threat generation by 95% or so...). on a slightly unrelated note... your chanter with 1 cleric merc ( maybe 2) can facetank all the CoTF names... so pet tankiness hardly matter.
