Because when I asked yesterday in /General and /Mage channel wether I should give my level 81 Airpet(focussed with EM V) an Extravagant Combatants Belt or if the belt he came summoned with was better then that, I was answered by 3 (friendly) mages who all thought my pet did not come summoned with stuff. One said I was wrong in thinking that and that I had to summon myself and give the pet stuff, and the two others said "they had heard about that, but still summoned all the stuff for their pet anyway". And that the opinions were 50/50 on wether the pet actually comes summoned with stuff. One of the mages was level 100, the others were 81 and 89. I go by this page: http://eqevolve.blogspot.nl/2012/04/some-new-info-on-mages-pets-and-rules.html Has anything been changed? If not, then it is a bit worrysome that high level Mages do not know this, then again the game probably does not tell you that your pet now comes summoned with armor at some point, or does it? I can understand that not everyone scours the internet for details about their class, but still. Anyway, I felt like a noob for asking my question, and then I suddenly found myself in a situation where I had to educate like every Mage that was online. Unless I am wrong off course and that page I linked is a lot of boohaki. Thanks for any clarification.
Don't confuse level with knowledge or experience in that class. It's common to run into max-level people who really don't know the gritty details of the class they're playing, especially if it isn't their main character. Serious raiders are more likely to have a clue, but even there I run into relative newbies. You already linked a site that explains it fine...and it links a forum that explains it even better.
This thread might help a little http://www.eqmagetower.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3947 Since TSS, the pet comes pre geared. Since SoF, the pet comes with a cloak. There are some easy ways to test. Symbiosis works well. Nuke your pet with it. Give him a pet belt. Nuke him again and check the change in spell shielding. The fright forged belt has 5% spell shielding vs I think 2% so he should take 3% less damage if he was wearing a belt, 5% if he was not.
It comes with most things, not all. I approach it with the thought that if I can't prove it, best to be sure. I parsed the pet and saw no difference with or without adding a mask in RoF for example, but I can't technically prove it as I don't have access to the serverside coding of the pet when it's created, therefore I figure give it a mask.
It comes with everything except weapons as long as you summon it with a pet focus of some kind. However, while it is intended that the pets get summoned with everything except weapons (since level 76+) there were some cases where in alaris (or maybe it was RoF) the pets were incorrectly being summoned without masks. After it was brought to the devs attention though this was fixed and they started coming with masks again. Everytime there is a new tier of pet spells though it pretty much needs to be parsed in beta / early in the expansion to make sure no gear was accidentally excluded from the template.
they added during ldon the phatom plate to summoned pets with vt+ foci so it has been going for some time granted it might have stoped for a bit when devs changed and stuff but right like falos said the pet armor and non weapon such spells are only really good for non magicians now but you can still give your pet a better item from the bazaar like defiant plate at your level it an item has more AC the pet will use it over what it has armorwise or if it is lower delay weaponwise so if you see some cheap stuff in the bazaar you might grab it =)
I don't know about what the EM focus requirement might be. But, I know mage pets come with all the extras. On the Tower of Frozen Shadow raid some of our mages would get charmed or something, and in the end the pets would not be connected to them, so we would kill them, and even though the mages didn't give them anything but weapons... they had all the gear.
Delay is what determines what weapon a pet uses. IE if a pet is given weapon a with 1 DMG no proc and 10 Delay x 2 and then a 1000 DMG 100K DD proc 20 Delay weapon, that ridiculous fake weapon would get eaten since it has a higher delay than the previous crappy two weapons given. What Piestro means is the DMG on current pet weapons is pretty negligible the only important stat on pet weapons is the proc. Decrease/Increase Hate and DMG procs.
more clarification: once upon a time, pets had whatever melee damage and delay they had when summoned - and the rule was "if you give them a weapon with a better value they use that value, if the value is worse they won't use it" - so back in the day it was very common to give pets a fine steel dagger (which had if i recall was 3 damage and 12 delay) to make pets attack very fast, without sacrificing their damage per hit. this was changed i want to say some time during the kunark expansion, to where pets were given a static attack speed that would not be modified by weapons - which lead to another amusing issue where you could give a pet a high delay high damage weapon and it would hit very hard. (that issue ended up resolving itself over time, as the innate formula for damage output pets use became better than what could be attained with a weapon)
A little more on this. Necro pets would utilize the delay, while Mage pets would not. This made Necro pets notoriously wicked. They were blenders with FS daggers, and Necros would KS Nagafen at raids. /chuckle This was noticed by the Mage community qualitatively, especially when our pets became of-level to dual wield. Our suspicion, based on nothing more than eyeballs and a fierce Necro jealousy, was that our pets were not dual-wielding. Verant (remember?) was convinced to take a look by a few extraordinarily persuasive Mages, and Verant found that Mage pets, indeed, were *not* dual-wielding, and this was fixed. To Necro dismay, the study also uncovered the fact of Necro pets using delay on their weapons, and so they suffered collateral damage to the Mage fix, because this delay utility was removed from their pets even as Mage pets gained dual-wield. Necro pets were monsters, machines. The first year of EQ, the nicest thing to be said about Mage pets was that they were idiots, and where damage was concerned they didn't hold a candle to Necro pets. The dual wield and delay change was the first step in a fundamental recognition that Mage pets needed to be better, if not best, when the other Mage vs. Necro attributes and skills were observed side-by-side.
