This is important to note. Magician pets are beefy because they have to be, beastlord pets being strong is a solid advantage, but strong necromancer pets is another tool in the toolbag. Even in times where necromancer pets were historically weak, necromancers didn't have problems excelling solo. It should also be noted that a lot of effective mitigation against hard-hitting targets comes from the pet hit-blocking line of buffs, which completely ignore pet defensive attributes. These buffs bring the different pet classes closer together because a blocked hit is a blocked hit regardless of pet.
I have a buddy that I group with daily that's a 100 Necro in group gear and another buddy that plays a 100 Mage that is raiding end game content. The Mage pet giggles and says that tickles when 4 normal tier 2 mobs hit him. The Necro pet maxes at 2 tier 2 mobs hitting him. That's my easiest comparison. Myself (100 Ranger) and the Necro exclusively duoing have a few visible armor bits to farm in tier 2 but that's with his pet tanking all the named. We've never been in any danger except trying Body of Many (ha-ha) and Velishan. He was in fear mode when we tried him. If it wasn't for that Necro pet, we'd be playing other games My 76k HPs and 7k AC unbuffed just don't cut the mustard tanking tier 2.
I'm updating my progress here, on the off chance anyone else has this question in the future, at least all my info will be here for them to find if they search. Necro is now 94, the same level as my beastlord, both wearing a twitching snood focus. At this level, the pets are very very close(Comparing 92 necro tank pet vs 93 BST warder). The necro 92 pet took a pleasant jump up from the 87 pet(which noticeably lagged behind the 88 BST warder in max hit/dps). The 92 necro pet's max hit is still behind the 93 BST warder, but the necro pet more than doubled from the 87 pet, bringing it's max hit closer to the BST's. At this tier the BST pet had a max hit of 977, the necro pet had a max hit of 798. In 5 minute or longer parses, over time their overall DPS was very very close. One parse would have the 92 necro pet at 51% with the BST 93 warder at 49%, then the next parse would swap those. Again, somehow the necro pet is getting more hits in over the same extended time frame, even with a lesser haste spell. At the next and final pet rank, the necro finally gets a matching 85% pet haste(matching what BST and Mage had since like lvl 60ish), but currently at my rank the 92 pet haste is 70%, 15% behind the BST's lvl 93 pet haste spell. This was the first pet tier where I tried to compare actual tanking ability. This is much harder to provide accurate data for, as there are so many variables when tanking out in the field. But having both pets tanking in beasts domain, where most mobs that i was fighting were around lvl 93, they were very very close. Both pets could comfortably tank any of trash mobs in this area, with a cleric merc healing them, without breaking a sweat. I might say that the beastlord pet was a slightly better tank at this rank, but the difference was very minor, so minor that it could have just been random variable between the 2 fights. Neither pets could comfortably tank the named mobs, altho I was lacking the pet defensive cooldown AA's on both classes. I had all passive pet tanking AA's on both(companions agility, durability, sturdy companion, and so on), but did not have Fortify Companion or Companions blessing. I might go back and retry the named once I have those, in particular Fortify Companion, which looks like it could make a difference. In both cases, the named mob that I attempted to have the pet tank was Slaughter, the named wyvern near the gate entrance to argath. In neither case did the pets get completely rocked, no 1 rounding or anything, and in both cases the cleric merc was able to keep the pet up for at least a minute or so. But it was more than the cleric merc could keep up with, and eventually the pets went down in both cases. I had experience in this same area previously with a mage using a lvl 91 air pet tanking(the mage was lvl 92 or 93, did not have access to the 94 earth pet yet). In this scenario, I was healing on my 99 shaman. We were able to take on that same named, Slaughter, but this was with my 99 shaman healing the high holy crap out of that air pet, and I guarantee that my 99 shaman is a much much stronger healer than a 94 j5 cleric merc. I'm fairly confident if i was healing either that beastlord pet or necro pet with my 99 shaman, they could have tanked Slaughter. TLDR; At the 92/93 pet ranks, the beastlord and necro are very very very close, in both tanking and DPS. Possible slight edge to beastlord pets, but so close that it's hard to concretely call it. They were also both very very very capable tanks of same level content.
Heh, I told you max hit wasn't worth looking at. Your own data proves how useless max hit is as a useful metric. The whole pet dps package is what counts.
Well, I never really argued that max hit was a valuable metric, but when there's no data period, at least max hit is something concrete that is pretty easy for someone to check and let me know of. That's the reason I was asking for it, because it doesn't require someone to parse or do any of the testing I did, all they'd have to do is scroll through whatever window has their pet melee spam, and they'd see it pretty quickly.
One last update, I just hit 97 on the necro, and did some quick parsing with the 97 necro tank pet. Using a twitching snood, which is EM12, and i imagine almost every 97+ pet class will have access to, the 97 necro tank pet has a max(non-crit) hit of 1488. With no pet gear, just a raw summon with the EM12 focus, the pet held up over 2600 DPS, which I was quite pleased with. With a full set of the top rank of pet toys, the pet was sustaining 3200 DPS, which seems like a larger jump than pet toys made in the past. 3200 sustained dps is also quite a nice number, coming from a tank pet. Unfortunately, since my beastlord is only lvl 94, and i'm not actively working on him at the moment, I can NOT do a side by side BST pet vs Necro pet comparison for this last rank of pets. If I ever do someday level him up, perhaps I can update this thread at that point. After a bit more testing on the tank side of things, with the 92 necro tank pet vs the 93 Bst warder, it appears that the 2 pets are very very close in toughness at that rank of spells, with the beastlord slightly edging ahead, which I believe is due to the significantly higher proc rate for prism skin on beastlord pets. Beastlord pets get a 2 stack prism skin every single time their warder procs the beastlords pet proc buff, which has a very high proc rate. Necro pets never got any form of prism skin until the lvl 92 pet, which innately procs it, but not tied to or anywhere near as often as the pets lifetap proc. I guess it could be argued that since the necro pets proc is a lifetap, that could give it a slight edge on tanking, due to self healing. But I have no idea what the necro pets lifetap proc hits for and heals for, as it does not show a number in the log the way beastlord pet procs do. All we see is the 'staggers' message on the pet and the target, each time it procs. I should probably ask in another thread, or maybe specifically on the necrotalk forums, if anyone has every figured out exactly what the pet proc lifetap hits for, which hopefully scales up with each pet rank. I'm sure the spell data must exist in lucy somewhere.
What were you fighting? Hard to believe an EM 12 pet could sustain that without any help. Mostly only see parses of my pet on named mobs, might be why some of the ones I remember are less than that, even with much higher EM focus.
I have been camping Slaughter a lot on my Mage bard shaman 3 box. I can say that the 91 Mage air pet or 94 earth pet can tank him with j5 cleric merc heals, no problem. This is with twitching snood em12 focus, all pet AA. I use Fortify companion if it is up, but not required. Sounds like the Mage pets are more robust for tanking, as one might expect.
All of the parses i've been listing have been on a level appropriate combat dummy in our guild hall, and they've all been from the backside. So obviously, those numbers are a bit better than what I would be parsing in most real playing situations. It was more intended as easily re-creatable comparison baseline. In the field, with the same full set of top mage pet gear, but while tanking yellow con mobs face to face, my pet parses seemed to hover right around the point that the dummy parse reached WITHOUT pet toys... around 2600ish. Also, I believe I've found the pet lifetaps, at least the final 2, that would match up with the 92/95 pet, and then the 97/100 pet. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spell.html?spell=30499 and http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spell.html?spell=36605 If you look up either spell, Spectral Lifetap or Spectral Lifetap X, on raidloot.com(I would link to directly to the spells there, but I can't seem to get it to give me a link directly to a specific spell), you will see that the prism skin on both of these tap spells has a listed 5% chance to trigger, which is much more in line with the prism skin proc rate i'm seeing out on the field.
This is very true if you're after xp, but for named mobs, a necro pet can hold its own, although that's largely based upon having the proper pet focus. To the op, all 3 classes are fun to play, I play a necro (main) bot a mage and sometimes a bst, each one has its advantages and disadvantages, but are all quite fun to play, I prefer necro to the other two classes though.
Ahhhh ok, yeah I am sure hitting from the back will make a difference. Just parsed a few fights with my EM 18 pet, just merc buffs and rk 3 pet haste, and he is around 3k to 3100 DPS over the length of the fights I did in Xorbb. Would think that would hold true for most T2 RoF trash mobs, but would definitely go down on nameds.
I'm assuming your aware you have two different pet spells per 5 levels that are two different types of pets? At one time there were 3. I always thought a TRUE Necro was someone that played a Necro because they liked the class. Guess I was wrong. There was also a time Necros fear kited. There was also a time Necros could even heal in a group. There was a time Necros even charm fight. There was a time Necros CCed in a group. Heck there was a time Necros pulled, dps, heal and CCed all together. Guess I'm a Untrue Necro. Amorcen Amorcen
I use my pet for just about every mission and task that I could not kite. He had no problem taking 3-4 t2 mobs and I've used him to kill every t2 named I have come across. Is it the pets ability? Or the em/aa and my rotation of spells and aas to keep him up. I can tell you if your focus when pet tanking with a necro is dpsing the mob while your merc heals him you're wrong and you won't get far.
I box a 100 Mage, Necro and BL. I have an em18 ear for all, max pet aa. Fully buffed and with mage gear, the Mage air pet is pretty equal to the BL and Necro pet on non stunable mobs. The earth pet tanks the best, but the lowest dps. I often just use the water pet and necro rogue pet and let the BL pet tank. DPS wise, the water pet is definitely better than the other pets, but they do pretty well also. The big difference is when you use Frenzied burnout and Virulent talon with the mage. That turns the pet into a killing machine!! After the recent pet nerf, I notice the pets taking much more damage. I never used to see any of the pets health drop more then 75%, but now I see spikes, esp on the necro pet(rogue pet), where it can sometimes drop to 50% or lower against trash(rof T3) with the merc healing. All the pets still tank better then my RoF raid geared Bard with 9kac and 90k hps, max aa. So I am not crying a river, but the pets were soooo good before lol.
They dont have to pay for survival in terms of DPS. that was old EQ. now the game is going more towards find the most overpowered class and use that. there is no tradeoffs anymore. some classes are bad and some are good. as easy as that. bad classes are atm: Warrior, Berserker, Rogue (a bit less than the former 2), mage (stil doing alot better than bers and rogue). This post is not trolling, its fact. the old utility cost DPS is no longer an issue since a some devs play necro in their spare time. DPS on mage pet is a bit better than beast, but around the same as necro. mage pet tanks a bit better, but necro pet is not far behind.
You put mages under bad classes?? They are one of the bandwagon classes now, because they are so good. Every one and their brother has a mage now. Warriors always sucked outside of raiding and always will. Rogues zerkers need way more non burn dps. Monks have become like big foot sightings.
How does your mag/nec/bl group operate? Does the Beastlord tank or stay out of melee range and just use dd/dot spells?
