5-21-14 Patch: - Magician - Renewal of Volark, Sirqo, and Hererra now heal for more and are more efficient. - Magician - Weapons summoned by Grant Spectral Armaments, Grant Manaforged Armaments, and Grant Frightforged Armaments have changed: -- Damage procs have increased in power and have had a small hate override added. -- Angering procs now add a percentage of hate instead of a flat amount. -- Jolting procs now subtract a percentage of hate instead of a flat amount. The pet heals were already pretty amazing imo, now they are even better! I also really like the weapon overhaul. They have buffed up the damage on the non hate mod weaps and changed the aggro weaps to percentage based procs! This will allow them to function much better when they interact with PC who are also aggroing the same mob. Good changes!
How much of an increase on the pet weapon proc? Does the agro increase allow for melee? Sorry just can't log on till tomorrow.
Not sure which heals you were looking at but outside of promised, the pet heals have long been very, very pathetic to the point no one mems them anymore. But I agree, good change.
that isn't about aggro, that's about pets being specifically coded to be ignored by NPCs if a PC is in melee range, and that will never be changed.
Sooo my instant heal crits for over 60k now. The delayed heal crits for 64k~. For someone like me who was already soloing without a merc, the heal buff is a huge (if unnecessary) boost. Personally I thought the heals were great to begin with. Here's what my cycle was, and still is: -> RS > Rain > Rain > Spear > Instant Heal > Delayed Heal > Repeat With that cycle the delayed heal will trigger about 1 second after you are ready to recast it in the cycle, so there is a tiny bit of waiting. It should be noted that the healing portion of the cycle is flexible. If your pet hasn't taken much or any damage, then skip the heal portion and repeat another DPS cycle then reevaluate. You can also feel free to use multiple instant heals to play catch up if your pet is hurting. Using this strat with the earth pet lets me solo yellows easily with no cleric merc and no down time beyond my normal mana limitations. Dropping the merc effectively doubles my solo exp rate so I find using the pet heals very worthwhile. Now granted, a lot of folks are happy to let the merc leech exp in order to build up merc AAs, but if you are looking for a fast way to grind out regular AAs, or you have already maxed out your merc AAs, this is the best method I've found. I was shocked to hear that people on this forum (and in the game) viewed the pet heals to be bad and unusable. Being a newer Mage I never "grew up" with the hang ups regarding certain spell lines that many Mage vets seem to be hanging on to. I was able to use the old heals just fine, but this new heal is amazing. Honestly it seems too good because it heals for nearly as much as the delayed heal does at instant speed.
Hey Viz just adding in old mage stuff. Back before pre pet rune nerf.. that line of runes was larger than magi heals.(uncapped damage on limited on number of hits) So some of us used runes, so of us used a mix of the two, some of us adjusted "yoyo" for different things.. both summoning and non summoning kite. Back in DoDH, Rags was a class changer as well. Off tank with RS to slow dps on main pet.. and just burn burn burn . So styles and options changed with the times. Imo best thing I enjoy about mages if different styles. Pure solo, Molo, (supportive roles or more of dps zerg) all about the options. Yeah subscripts aside for max dps within a raid. We mages can adjust and play whatever role we wish. Pure dps, off tank adds, CoN superstar suck pullers.. so of us recall the gpp days. Coming back to adjustments, good or bad, we mages have them. Personally I mix up my style and its 100% mood based. Run 3,4,5 box team? See friends online and group without mercs? Solo/Molo? Chase progression pugs and pray someone recalls you from the past? etc Have not been ingame for awhile.. hope the agro based swords support more AE style toggle switch pet targets style.. aka 2 3 4 mobs on pet at once.. and rain rain doesn't get killed if I play my toggle targets right. the 60k crit number.. that with maxx AA and what focus? I run around with bard.. this could get interesting running both bard songs reckless and pulse..21% to crit and 12% improvement on base.. healing merc good bye. maybe.. I am lazy too often heh. have a nice day.
I dont know of an AA that we get that INCREASES the crit heal amount, only the chance to crit. But yes I have max crit heal chance AA. I also have the CoTF / RoF heal focus. ALl of my gear is group gear. Regarding the new pet swords, they seem pretty much identical to the old ones from a solo molo perspective. I think the change to a percentage aggro mod was to allow the pets to scale in a non trivial way in longer fights.
Looks to be about a 300 dmg increase on the highest level weapons. As Vizier said about the aggro, it's just to help them build aggro faster.
It's almost a 4 second cast. That is an eternity for a mage. It prevents any save, trashes dps, and makes chain healing impossible. For some, that IS unusable. At a raid, it's only use is to cure; PR and LoH being the primary heal methods or just let pet go and summon a pocketed pet or fire pet to replace the previous pet. Solo, by the time you need to heal the pet, it'll be dead before that heal goes off. Better to squeeze a few nukes or gate in and hope for the best. By the time the heal lands, the next round or two wipes out any HP gain unless you are lucky enough to crit. Again, it's all based on play style. I used to use the regular pet heal frequently, and in the manner you described. The past few years, I've been using the merc as I'm often distracted by CRT duties or talking with the mage class while playing. For me, the pet heal is useless with a merc around and a recipe for death without the merc; I'll use LoH, Comp's Blessing, or PR to keep pet up while maintaining dps (conversely, RS with a well timed summon companion can keep the pet up). In it's original form, it could keep a pet up; now, every mob and it's friend quads for so much and the heal fell so far behind, it's been seeing huge gains in the HP restored trying to get it back to that functionality. People call it useless because it requires tricks as you describe to be used and there are better alternatives. If it was viable on it's own that made us not use tricks to keep the pet up, then it would be useful. It was, for the longest time, the WORST option in keeping the pet up; by the time you needed to use it, it was better to gate or just simply die.
First are you talking about using the heals on raids or in group content? I have no experience with raids as they hold no interest for me. Anything I post should be taken from the perspective of a group player who is interested in group content only. If that analysis is directed at group content then all I can say is....the situation you describe has not been my (admittedly limited) experience. I was able to use the old pet heal just fine to keep my pet alive. I should have probably added that I kept Shadows rune, Groundswell stance and the Aegis AA on hand to weave in there if the situation called for it. In any case, no one told me the pet heals were bad so I just went ahead and used them and loved them. Now the instant heal is freakishly huge compared to what it used to be, sitting at about 80-90% of the delayed heal value. With this huge instant heal, I dont even need to keep the pet defense spelled memmed any more, though in truth I rarely used them before the heal buff. Honestly I find my self casting the delayed heal much less often now. One instant heal crit tops off my pet and lets me go back into my DPS cycle. Another thing you mentioned was the casting time being 4 seconds. Well true it is, but with spell haste mods it become 2.5 secs...not too shabby for a 60k+ heal (crit).
That is the point. The spell does not stand on its own because you are spending so much time to supplement it that you are wasting dps. The spell used to stand on it's own where you cast it when pet was about 20%, heal it, then continue on for a bit. As it is now, without supplements, you cast the heal only to see the pet drop below where he was when you started casting it. In 2.5 seconds 2 rounds have gone by and with most mobs quadding, you just replaced the hps he lost while you were busy casting the thing. And using the crit as the baseline is just silly. I do not consider it useless though many do. It is utterly useless at a raid other than a cure and sometimes LoH fills that niche. Not to mention, it isn't that often a pet needs the cure anyway since so much of that is going on anyway. The simple math is: 2.5s cast time = 2 rounds (keeping it simple here) mobs hit at 10k heal is 18k 20k-18k = 2k that the pet LOST while you tried to heal it. Reality is: 2.5 s cast time = 2 rounds (keeping it simple again) mobs double attack and quad at whatever ridiculous amount but pet mit/avoids/mob misses /etc. but pet takes 20k+ pet still loses 2k global cooldown of 2s pet takes another 20k net is 22k that the pet LOST while you tried to heal it This is why it is a terrible spell. It is better just to use the other gimmicks and forego this spell for a bump in dps to kill the mob faster. The pet is just as well off as it would have been had you tried to heal it but the mob is now 4.5s closer to dead; and likely 4.5s closer to dead than your pet is.
Our heal spells are terrible lmao. They serve no purpose in any kind of content save raids for cures. In Solo or Group you have mercs or live healers to keep your pet healed perfectly fine. You could even argue that casting a Garg pet will be greater to you because it will probably eat that 60k+ in DMG by out aggroing your pet while also killing the mob. It is also a shorter cast time so you can almost get 2 DMG spells off in that 2.5 seconds vs 1 heal. From a 900 second parse with and without weapons on my pet facing the back of the mob Weapons gave like a 200 DPS increase. Odds are that is lower just because of RNG. Increasing the proc DMG on Weapons was dumb, they should have boosted their DMG elsewhere possibly where it would actually get noticed.
Yeah guys.. look at SOE's track history. Here are my concerns: 1 - They are adjusting pet stuff... that means we know their focus has turned to mages/pets. 2. - The devs have a history of making changes that are positive to a class before pulling the rug out from under them via a big nerf. 3. - The direction of these changes shows that our pets will be taking more damage and are going to have aggro issues, or these spells that have been in the game for years would not have been changed. 4. - Why else would these changes be made? I haven't seen anyone in the Mage community demanding better heals.. 99.999% use a merc to heal our pet. I haven't seen anyone in the Mage community saying our pets don't do enough damage ... so why up the damage on weapons? I haven't seen anyone in the Mage community saying their pets have aggro issues.. so why UP their aggro making ability (and also lower it)? Better be leveling up a real tank for your box group.
Pets have agro issues, huge agro issues, and the 'improved' agro decreasing weapons still stink. If they actually did what they said, a pet that was dpsing vs a raid mob, after 3 min, would be at like 1% agro vs a tank if duel wielding deagro weapons. This is far from the case. It's not a problem for a magician that constantly hits 'summon companion' while raiding. For those that don't, pet agro is still a huge issue. As far as heals go, if you're only killing solo mobs, then you don't need to heal pet at all while killing, just open with promised and dps the mob faster and heal pet after fight. If you pull 2, with no healer merc, you're pet's probably dead if you're trying to heal it and you're not doing something else. Even with the improved heal, there's no way you're going to keep up healing pet vs 2 yellow mobs. As has been said, cast time is the issue. We need the cast time reduced to make it really viable. You can cast a 1.0s cast time RS pet and then summon companion (fading main pet), increasing your dps, and letting the RS pet eat the mob's damage, or you can take 2.5 times that long, and barely heal your pet for slightly more damage than it's receiving (averaging crit heal rate).
Yep, and i'll gladly quit the game if pets get nerfed so greatly I cannot complete group content without getting a real tank (POWAR excluded from this statement)
Box a cleric is my suggestion. Their heals are so OP'd in group content that I can face tank Judicator myself, as a magician, with cleric plus cleric merc healing me. There's no way, with a real cleric, that healing a pet vs group content will ever be an issue, and exactly why there will continue to be "OMG pets are so OP'd" threads. A good priest can keep even the worst tank healed in group content. Worst case scenario, I can keep a tank merc alive, healing with my cleric, vs any named I've come across outside PoWar, if they do decide to nerf pet tanking abilities. I wouldn't mind at all if they made my pet tank worse than a group geared wizard with 0 AA... long as it would dps like one too Just my opinion though, heh.
They have changed the heal spell twice since VoA. Our PR was supposed to be released in SoF but wasn't and was forgotten for a time. Mages have been asking for a bumped up heal since SoD at least. We asked in UF beta, HoT beta, and VoA beta, and...well, every beta after. It's usually asked for during beta because we've asked for so long, and were told no for so long, many just stopped openly asking.
