Mage Pet Mitigation stealth change?

Earlier this week (pre-patch), I opted to make my mage a HC. I quickly got my J5 Merc, and proceeded to do the Level 85 daily quest in Old Bloodfield after getting buffed up in the Guild Lobby.

I was happy: my Air Pet and J5 healer merc were able to handle three mobs (mixture of white/yellow) with me putting up Earthen stance periodically, and letting my Rain of Molten Scoria and other spells add some damage. I had not yet loaded any AA's onto my hotbars--was just a "let's see what this pet can do" scenario. Next-day (still pre-patch), I did the daily quest again for some AA's. Day after, ditto.

Fast-forward to (post-patch) today. Had my AA's loaded, Air Pet, J5 Healing Merc and my mage fully-buffed. One mob? Easy-peasy. Two mobs? Death.

Rinse, repeat--but with a fully-buffed earth pet instead of Air pet. Same result. Two mobs meant a fast death.

Now, the other night on Drinal, a level-100 mage was whining intolerably for HOURS about this same situation, only it was his XV-focused highest-level pet--in the same zone. He was crying stealth nerf, wanted to know what happened, etc. Told 'm to petition or take it to the forums--to my knowledge he did neither.

Did something change with Pet Mitigation damage with the patch? Maybe specifically concerning mitigation (either avoidance and/or damage soak ability) vs. multiple mobs? I had only just started playing with my HC Mage, and have no logs to back up my pre-patch / post-patch observation. And, I see no other threads on this, so maybe I just got extra-lucky pre-patch with the quest when it came to pet being able to successfully soak damage, and extra-unlucky post-patch?

Something zone-specific, perhaps?

Ultimately, no skin off my bum: only had run three 85 dailies with my Mage before the apparent change--so I'll adjust my tactics and move on. But, am curious and wanted to post something.

There certainly is a nerf coming, sounds like it may have been implemented already.

I don't know though, I've only been in PoWar the last bit besides raids, and I face tank those mobs with my mag, since that's pretty much what's required for any pet class there.

I expect it's a glitch. It's not due to a nerf.

We had a similar thing go through when we were all waiting on the pet raid tanking nerf. Each patch brought new complaints. Khauruk is probably closer to right: if anything is actually making a difference it is due to a bug. I suspect it's more of a RNG issue and the mob types since you spent your time there only a few times.

I can still occasionally lose a pet on the beza tower. I have had times where I can bring the whole roof down on my pet and times where 5 mobs just mop the floor with him. The RNG and other factors (an untimely buff drop or failed proc) can wreak havoc.

A change to pets would be time consuming and I'd be surprised, with the All Access business going in this week, if Aristo had time to work out changes to all the pet templates that would be necessary. Mages have 5 pet templates per focus. That's 15 pets just for one class for one expansion for the new focii. I think it's somewhere around 30, give or take, for each expansion iirc.

Having played a tank back then (OBF mobs were wrecking balls back in the day) I would say the second scenario is closer to the capabilities of player tanks of that era than the first. I've also done a good deal of grinding in OBF over the years before it was a hotzone. 3 mobs unslowed with a merc healer wasn't what I'd call auto-win, even at 90 / T4 HoT gear / full augs / max defensive AA.

What mobs were you fighting in both instances? Some of the enemies in OBF hit like butterflies and certain mobs will actually fight each other.

Also the Ikaavs can haste nearby mobs as they path around. Hasted mobs are no joke - they are intended to be dispelled/slowed.

I think we all can agree that changes to pet mechanics will be coming eventually. Just because of that I leveled an SK to 100 with 10k+AA to fill in for my air pet.

I disagree. I think magicians will still be able to molo with their pet in current content. I just have a difficult time, from a business standpoint, seeing SOE make such a dramatic and drastic change to negatively impact their bottom line in a semi significant way. To make drastic changes would be to change the pure nature of the class, and the reason why many of us still play magicians to this day.

You can make changes and not have it negatively affect pet performance. To me I feel this is the way it may go, if any changes even take place within the next six months to a year. ..

You can beat changes will still be coming though. I think we'll see similar things to what is occurring in PoWar. A mage can still solo single mobs, but throw in a named or multiple mobs, and you'll need a real tank.

Probably. I think the best move would be to wait til the next expansion (hopeful level increase), and modify pets there. People are more likely to get angry over a negative modification to their class rather than a "slight" bit of stagnation. Lets say our pets could tank 30 mobs at once in CoTF all the time. If the next expansion rolled out and they could only tank 20-25, I wouldn't mind that much. But if you nerfed my pet currently, I would be more inclined to be upset (these numbers are completely arbitrary for a reason).

Anyway, depending on how bad the probably changes will be, and what they do to pet code (or what they can do currently) I just hope it doesn't affect my pets survival on raids. The original Aegis was great for keeping pets up on raids, and the nerf to that (which I still feel wasn't needed) made it so I had to heal my pet more, thus a greater loss of dps. If my pet is constantly falling over on raids (probably won't happen, just saying) I'd be better off being a wizard main in my current guild (I raid on a wizard in a different guild, but in my main guild I am a magician).

You can rest assured, something is going to happen to/with pets. I'm not saying it shouldn't either. I can say for certain (after recently healing both, on same mob) that a full raid buffed earth pet is easier to heal, tanking a raid mob, than a fully buffed/geared/aug'd/AA'd SK is. (Since I know some will want to know which, it was one of the first 3 bees in Bixie2).

If they implement PoWar effects throughout an expansion, I'd probably stop playing, at least my magician. I don't have any issues finding groups, or anything like that, but the fact that I have to hold back on siccing pet, and have to constantly fade it to keep agro low... would be like making all mobs absorb 30% of their received melee damage for their first 25% of their hp and if you got above 60% on agro meter, for the mob to immediately agro lock on you, and expecting melee dps toons not to be upset about it. Throttling pet dps is not the way to go.

I really hope they just adjust the pet's AC, or whatever it is they believe is the problem. I personally don't understand how, if a pet is set the same as a tank merc, how a merc is so much worse, supposedly (that's not quite true - I imagine my 2k AA or so put into pet tanking AA probably has something to do with it - shocking, that 2k AA spent for a single purpose would have that great of an effect, huh?) If it's strictly due to the HP pool size, just reduce the HP of pets (but for Inny's sake, make them summoned full HP again, please).

If they do that, though, I really hope they fix Companion's Blessing, I'm still really irked the way that works, and that it always fades too early. Just drop the dang rune portion already, so that way we at least get the full heal effects, because right now, the AA is garbage if the pet is taking any kind of damage.

Also, beefing up our promised heal would be nice, so that I wouldn't have to use more than 1 spell gem for pet heals during raids.

Running a parse now on test to see if this is just a fluke on your part or a change to pet mitigation. Taking an air pet to EWK right now.

As to the pets vs merc. Pets have a buff-based reflective "block" proc. Don't underestimate that. Unbuffed earth pet at EM15 is about 180k hp. Merc is closer to 90k with some buffs. Fire pet with certitude has more hp than merc, that reflective "block" and better mitigation. Mercs mitigate well, but they don't have those "innates" and blow their discs retardedly. They have bad AI but 1v1 in the controlled situations you see with pet tank groups, they do very well.


Edit: watching the incoming damage now it does not appear that there have been any stealth changes - i will, of course, have the data to back that up posted shortly.

Not necessarily. The "sturdy companion" likely adds a set amount of ac mitigation to pets. With them not being subject to the softcaps, this line of aa's may ultimately (along with their base ac values) be the culprit in the mitigation debacle we're presently faced with. Simple tweaks to this line of aas (fewer returns per rank) would be a quick across the board fix. The rest is simply a matter of adjusting the base ac values they are summoned with - or simply coding these pets to have ac softcap returns comparable to PCs.

Having said that, I would not think such a change would come so quickly. Bare minimum I would expect the inevitable changes to be a few weeks coming - likely with the next major patch or included in the next release of content. The challenge will be in appropriately testing it to ensure that the changes are neither over-reaching nor insufficient. A single over-nerf would be extremely damaging and bad, and multiple small nerfs spread out would be equally bad from a demoralization standpoint.

The appropriate fix should be balanced, well thought out, and decisive with one change. It won't be well accepted in come circles, but it would be for the good of the game if it ever happened.

Finishing the confirmatory parse now.

Short parse I know, but it's conclusive enough (far superior to what any PC can expect) in it's overall shape to verify that there has not been a stealth nerf on pet mitigation.

%Hit was at 75.6% .... again ... no changes.

No change to mitigation.
No change to avoidance.

Test subjects: Unbuffed EM15 mage air pet (no certitude) vs a yellow con trash mob in EWK

Only gear on the pet was the gear it came summoned with (no weapons or buffs given).

Rather than seeing content evolve to exclude pet tanking (I think we can agree this is a bad idea - but in my opinion a necessary thing given the current imbalance), I would prefer that pets were simply balanced appropriately vs player characters and allowed to be used as surrogate tanks on all content without the need for mechanics that exclude them. The alternative is to keep pets in their current position and simply make them useless in the most desirable of circumstances.

Double post sorry

Wonder if it wouldnt be better to just allow players to fight alongside pet tanks. As it is now, I feel utterly useless many raids when we pet tank and I'm sitting there staring the mob to death. It's either that, or make it so that pets simply cannot tank raid mobs (through mitigation changes, mechanics or whatever), and the latter doesnt seem to be happening any time soon.

It would be feasible if pet taunt off significantly reduced the passive threat generation (controlled via that button) by the pet owner so as to not cause pet problems.

In doing so, however, the pet would have to have it's relative "sturdiness" arguably lower than even I would feel to be balanced. If the pet is lord and master of a pet capable of JUST comparable to a player tank (ie a lot weaker than it is now) that can hold aggro off melee - how then do you justify the pet base class (necro, BL and mage) having the relative dps of a "DPS" class/ The result in that case would be a true blue "2 in 1" in most all circumstances class rather than the situational status things are currently in. If I were a ranger, monk et al .... I would become quite cross if a mages pet could out-tank me vs other PC targets while the magician itself could match me toe-to-toe for dps.

Basically you'd be looking at raw 1v1 tanking prowess looking something like:

War > knight > ranger/rog > "tank pet" > a lot of classes > air pet > most all classes > water/necro_rog > fire pet

Instead of

Tank pet > all other pets >> war > knight .... etc ... etc

The net result under such a scenario is a gutted "solo" class with a flimsy pet that can't hold it's own very well - effectively neutering an area where pet classes have so long had such a nice perk.

You're probably right. Then again, I cant justify pets tanking raid mobs over warriors either, especially when it means Im sidelined and reduced to some kind of (albeit handsome) garden decoration. Guess I just dont see a pet nerf strong enough to change this happening any time soon, or at all tbh. Bah, never mind, EQNext is out soon.

I don't really think it will be in the next few weeks. Pet mitigation has been like this for years. My best guess is this won't even be worked on until after the remainder of CofF is released and there is some dev time to work on it.

...but pets do not hold aggro off of melee toons in range, fully geared SKs do.

Does it matter how well a pet can tank if it means you lose all your melee dps? I highly doubt preferred tactics will shift to pet tanks + strictly ranged DPS.

I made a Mage because of the pet. I wanted a toon that is able to tank groupable nameds with a cleric merc healer. Mage pets can do that. I am able to solo most groupable nameds so my mission was a success. It took a lot work to get to that point, but after a certain amount of gear and AAs the class becomes self sustaining and all of the groupable content becomes soloable. I do not see this as a bad thing. Sure the content is soloable BUT it is a slowwww rate of exp. On my enchanter I can easily achieve triple exp rates than I can on my mage. The enchanter cannot solo groupable nameds though.This seem like a fair trade off to me. (the trade off for Wizards and Necros is that they can exceed the sustained DPS of both of those classes and their DPS is less situational)

Still, if its obsoleting hybrid tanks I have no doubt it will be tweaked eventually.So do they tweak the content or do they tweak the pets or do they buff the PC tank classes? Possibly some of all three? Whatever they decide you can bet that NOTHING will be changed soon. It sometimes takes them years to make major overhauls like this. Ultimately I am fine with whatever changes they make AS LONG AS they leave the ability for the mage to solo group content in tact. Like most people that play this game (although we are the tiny minority on this board) I do not care about raid content balance at all because I have no interest in raiding.

I think we're getting off topic here. Previous threads that discuss these topics have been locked.

SOE has acknowledged the issue and indicated that they are looking into pets outperforming tanks.

Bedavir, thanks for all your hard parsing work and addressing OP's concerns that there has been no stealth nerf.

Not sure if anyone remembers this from before, but a type of nerf already went in during VoA. There were raid named being completely tanked by pets, namely mage pets. The devs changed this by altering the agro mechanic of pets so that the mob would instantly jump to any PC that did any damage to the mob. I also believe that they re-tuned pets in a way that their mitigation vs. a raid target was reduced, but group/molo/solo was not effected. At this time they also made changed to Aegis of Kildrukhan (or however it is spelled) since it's mechanic was working in unintended ways across higher levels. Do not forget about the useless EM effects on the highest raid earrings that have no effect on the pats past, what is it again????, EM XVIII(18)??

I may just be talking out of my booty on this one since I do not currently play my mage in a raid setting, but I do remember these changes going in back during VoA. Regardless of the panic over changes to our pets, I do not believe another change would be due for some time. Just because mage pets can hold their own in the group setting, maybe close to an actual real tank, does not mean the pet is overpowered. A mage has to know how to play their class well in order to successfully solo/molo on their own. Just as a real tank would have to know what they are doing in the group game. Either way....people should stop screaming OP because a player is skilled at their class and can do things that they feel unbalances the game...........Next thing you know........You monkeys will be crying because raid gear is so much better than your group gear.

I say....If you see someone mastering out on their class...add that guy/gal to your friends list and chat them up for pointers and beg a regular group spot with them....just please do not envy them because they are currently better than you. Knowledge is POWER people...there is much more to the game than gearing your toon with the best gear in the game....you need to know all the numbers and learn the class well in order to truly understand what these guys are doing different than you are. Never stop learning....have fun....good hunting!!