Pet Mitigation: Parses and Discussion

There is no making up for spikes.

The OP is currently banned from these forums. Perhaps he'll have more information to share with us in two days.

Neat info. Interesting bit on the knight/warrior number differences. In a boxing situation where a tank might not get 100% attention to fire all of his skills, warrior is starting to look like quite a good option for overall reliability.

Agreed to an extent. You can utilize all the bells and whistles you want when tanking, what's left after a big hitter collides with you and how reliably you defend against this up front is the bottom line in the tank world. Resistance to spikes is also part of why pet tanking is so appealing in today's EQ.

Pets work most similarly to the way tanks did a decade ago (albeit with even less avoidance than we had).

At this point, there's a stark difference - pets work around the principle of steady and predictable DPS mitigation (through incredibly low avoidance AC, and uber mitigation AC). All PC tanks, when only relying on their passive mitigation (note: this is what this thread is about and its data is gathered from - other conclusions are outside the scope of what Daegun started here), are subject to high DI rounds exponentially more often; these spikes are, ultimately, what kills tanks and why AC > HP became dogma.

The data presented here follows a hunch that many of us (Daegun included, I believe) have had for awhile. It's nice to confirm our suspicions via parsing. I have a hunch that rangers and monks won't be too far behind knights' passive mitigation, but they lack the self-healing and active mitigation that won't show up in this sort of testing; in other words, rangers and monks will look better here than in real-world conditions (I suspect the opposite is true for knights, but I digress).

Liked a ton of posts.

Thanks, Daegun for putting together the resources and taking time to put real numbers behind this.

Need to start adding things to parse.

Start with new Warrior NTTB disc so we can start to get a idea how adding things shifts the numbers. Both pets and tanks have discs and other buffs the general view has always been tanks get more from those other things then pets do.

Aye, thanks for posting.

Great work! I love the data and being informed.

Oddly enough, it changes nothing for me other then I want to make sure there is a Magician in the group with a pet when I am running a tank.

Heck, free ride for my SK! I love the addition of mercs too because they give you a warning things are going south before a PC dies. NPCs, they don't seem to care so much. I don't mind being the back up tank at all. Much preferable to dying and a group wipe. I be the back up tank! I'll even chip in for the Mage to buy an extra piece of Malachite! I'll leave instructions with the Druid or Wizard "Pet goes down, you go evac!"

and this is still the bulk of how the warrior take and reduce dmg or just plain lives. dacade or not its still the very basis of how warriors operate. this is still the blulk of the power the warrior has.

Check the numbers again. Warriors don't mitigate like they used to - look at the DI numbers.

It isn't exactly Daegun's conditions but here is a graph with the distribution for a ranger against the same kind of mob. I used vie so all the hit numbers are 10% under his. Still the shape should be good. Level 100 ranger, all AAs, level 95 raid gear from Veil of Alaris, displayed AC 8704, no shield.

I am leaving out the avoidance table because it isn't comparable as I had a trophy in primary for no ripostes. The mobs have a way of dying otherwise. Maybe I can get one more comparable in stages blurring it off and letting it regen when it gets low.



The following is a level 100 tank merc with certitude and vie against the entry mobs from an In To The Hills HA. Different zone, different mobs and a bit sloppy as a combination of several similar but not identical mobs. I hope I can get one nice and clean on the Karana mob but I already have this. It shows the same basic theme, NPCs be they mercs or pets have amazing mitigation.

Another thing to remember about the merc is it likes to hit disciplines for the shear joy of it. The parse is long enough it may actually be a tolerable representation of cycling discs.

Poking through the thread, I didn't see an old warrior post. Here's one from a raid mob in Anguish - the final raid zone of Omens of War (note this is not a random blue group wandering mob - though back then, ATK numbers for mobs were similar, to where the DI spreads weren't so different between named and trash; I am unsure if this has changed since then).

Here's an old graph, over at The Steel Warrior. Note the DI spread.


Shamelessly stolen from http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum/showthread.php?t=16017

Note the small percentage of DI20 hits and the shape of the graph - DI1 is almost 50% of all incoming hits. It's similar to the way pets are parsing now. Note the difference from all the PC parses.

Can we change the parse mob to one of the named cyclops in WK.

The current parse target doesn't present a challenge to any pet, real tank, melee, are hybrid damage in regards to tanking. Tipping points do happen in EQ tanking wherea mob simply stops being relevant parse wise.

It's probably not what warriors want to hear (they'd like to be like pets!), but it looks like the pets all have way too much AC. They shouldn't be getting DI 1 rolls for the majority of their hits. A *rogue* mage pet matching a raid warrior is just daft.

Either that or as a real rogue I'm going to start asking to mage pet AC and mitigation levels.

I doubt many mages care very much about rogue pet AC. Just like necromancers don't care about there rogue pets AC. AC is for pets made to tank not DPS pets. Most likely the AC increase from EM focus for all types of pets for a given class is standard across all types and is based on the number deemed right for the tank pets.

Only a very rough comparison but I wouldn't expect the overall shape to change. Yellow con version of the tree as no way of knowing what was used for previous parses. Fought down to 10% and then blurred a few times.

Level 100 Ranger, Cleric merc and self buffs plus Beastlord haste, all AAs, normal dual wield setup so no shield. Displayed AC approximately 10170, clicked vie off each time the merc re-cast it.

Schadenfreude - vs - An avenging treesoul
2035 7.1%
2626 26.45%
3217 1.94%
3809 5.16%
4400 1.94%
4992 5.81%
5583 3.23%
6175 1.94%
6766 5.16%
7358 1.94%
7949 1.94%
8541 3.87%
9132 2.58%
9724 3.87%
10315 3.23%
10907 5.16%
11498 3.87%
12090 2.58%
13273 3.87%
13864 8.39%

Armor of Reverence/Carapace, Protective Dedication, Reprove, Grelleth's Skin

Grelleth's Skin per counter eats 4000dmgx3 counters on average single targets procs it atleast 2 or 3 times a fight. (thats roughly 24,000 damage eaten)

Protective Dedication gives 5% more mitigation then vie

Reprove every 15 seconds eats upto 2 hits (3 for Rk3) and can eat 26kish damage (So even on trash you can pop this atleast on average once per mob)

Cycling of discs (Which warriors can't do in the same way we can), so yeh there's making up for spikes or prevention of them. Your seeing an inactive knight taking alot more DPS, it doesn't mean a knight is actually taking those spikes in a real tanking situation.

Sure as a knight Id like more tankability: But i think where the OP is going with this is Warrior focused, but ill let him speak for himself.

While many can appreciate all this data ( I don't because of the intent of the OP), this thread is still another "Its a new month, lets see if we can get mages nerfed" thread by a warrior with an axe to grind. You picked to use a pet as a comparison to a warrior, when you could have picked a monk, or other tanking classes. People forget that the pets were designed to be healed by their master, and that the masters are no greats at healing or using mana efficiently to heal their pets. Thus their apparent HP and AC with the trade off of proximity aggro in order to allow a mage to solo some group content. Granted with mercs, this situation is alleviated some what. Still, if this OP succeeds in getting mage pets knocked down several pegs to being somewhat less than what a tanking class can do or even a monk, it represents the end of the road for mages as being a class that could solo to a degree. If all classes end up balanced around content where no one can solo or even molo, then what a mage ends up being is tanking class where no melee can interact otherwise and in some cases...a weak wizard with nothing else to offer. PoW has demonstrated that desire to some degree. The attributes of the pet matter little if a pet's target gets smart and decides the master is a better punching bag.

If tanking classes need to be boosted (Or reminded that they need to hit some buttons, just like anyone else who wants to maximize their role) than boost tank classes...if they really need to be. Enough of this vitriol toward mages already.

Looking at the data though you do have to think that maybe he has a point.

There is one solution - make pets healable (well) only by their masters. Now I don't happen to think that is a good solution, but it does fit your logic (the bit I bolded). If the intention is ONLY that pets should be good at tanking purely because mages are meant to be the top solo class (and I suspect that was pure accident rather than by design) then clearly they wouldn't mind that change... but we all know otherwise!

Or second potential solution - greatly strengthen mage pet heals while weaking the pet. This makes them capable, but it doesn't scale up well once you get more and more classes healing it. Again though I don't see this flying with the mage community as they like the added power that using merc healers gives to their pet.

So we're back to the same issue again - what possible justification is there for a pet being able to outtank a raid warrior? It's illogical. Please someone try to justify it so we all have a good laugh ;-)

Maybe the warriors, paladins and SKs all need a mammoth mitigation boost so they're balanced against pets, but frankly I suspect it'll cause more problems than it solves. Or...

Lots of Interesting Data here good Topic and Information