Pet Tanking Raid Mobs

Tweelis:

Your first point:

Group content has been for the most part built so that a merc or a group of boxes are good enough. If there was more challenging content, than SoE made the mistake of not offering incentives to do it. IE: City of Bronze being box/merc friendly while Sep was not while offering the same reward as CoB. Thus CoB is always busy while Sep is rarely populated. Plus, it was not just that a player was unskilled. It was also the issue that with boxing and mercs you won't lose the roll for the item you have been camping for days to a group member who just got there an hour ago and will leave an hour later.There is also the fact that if group content was challenging enough to demand a group of nothing but real players, than would at least get clerics more engaged but tanks still need to be AAed and geared.

Your second point:

People get it that there is a pecking order or food chain or whatever and that there has to be winners and losers. No matter what people say, it will be fair enough to say that 95% of the players will never see the whole game in an expac and will continue to subsidize the efforts of those that do. The thing is, even the top endgamers have attrition. So they skim off the mid tier. RoI gets to skim off everyone. The mid tier than skims off...who? Casual/family guilds are firmly entrenched. They have accepted where they are. The group game is not producing many good recruits and who is to say they want to even move to raiding? So mid tier dies off. The endgame is safe until all the decent mid tier players are all siphoned off and will continue to stick to the "My problem is not your problem so why should I care?" routine until then. As long as someone wins the raids than the devs are appeased as well. Eventually the food chain will collapse and raiding will be no more. Nerfs and so forth will probably speed that process up. Getting more warriors and clerics in the game will slow it down. The thing is, the devs might be more keen to a collapse. It means they can reset the game as a new SKU and stop devoting attention to duct taping and super gluing EQ together to get it through another year and just have it serve as retrospective on what to not do with EQNext.

So amazing. I am not calling for a nerf but a pet should not do what it can currently do. Excuse me but that is the definition of a nerf. Changing any ability to something less then it currenly is, by defintion a nerf. So the thread should be closed as it is against the rules. So many here claim oh I don't want them nerf'd just changed. Nerf again. Change in a negative direction is a nerf, increasing an ability is an upgrade.

Calebe

A tank class should always outshine a pet. Fix tanks so that a pet would fail in comparison and the issue with pet power would go away.

They do. However, pets ignore raid mechanics because of coding limitations. The issue is not with tanks, it's with pets ignoring raid mechanics and DPS having ways to drop aggro, which allows raids to simply spam an endless supply of pets on the mob - ie it's not one pet tanking, it's a hundred pets.

That said, itemization is also at fault. EQ is the only game that has the same HME on tank gear that it has on caster gear. The result is that tanks gain HME slower than the content, and that includes pets, which gain HME at the rate content does. The hp on tank gear need to be buffed; otherwise content upper hits need to be dropped.

Lol no lock on this thread is funny.

We don't want to nerf pets, but take away something they can do currently. That is a nerf anyway you spin it, whether it would be justified or not it is calling for a nerf and not even trying to hide it.

I personally despise pet tanking raid mobs and believe it should be done away with. However there is really only 2 avenues to do this and the easier choice would be nerfing Magicians. I only want it removed so people will stop attempting to nerf my class.

Having raid mobs bypass pets decreases a Magicians chances at surviving until we get our self fade, it also will make it so SOE has to completely rework our aggro generation. Our deaggro ability is our pet.

Guilds resorting to this need better players. Plenty of other guilds do not need to use these methods, and I would venture to guess they are all not hacking to actually have a real tank, tank a raid boss.

Calling for nerfs is dumb. Ask for your class to be boosted, if SOE thinks this is a problem it will be fixed. Ellyra actually did this in Chapterhouse and it was a nightmare until tweeking was done. I also believe Elidroth said he wanted to make a raid where pets actually were the tank of choice (SS6 style caster tanks I would imagine). SS2 thread only got legs because pets were bypassing a mechanic that SOE did not want to be bypassed.

Removing pet tanking will make the end game even more exclusive, but keep trying to nerf the midtier....

Call it what you want but any class that sat there and said their class should be both a DPS (tell me you don't want to be in the same league as every dps class out there on a burn/sustained parse). As well as a substitute tank class (whether used in certain situations or as a replacement for when those actual tank classed are not available). And many will call you crazy... Half the class wants to be just dps, half the class wants to do both.... Having it both ways is just asking to get 1 or the other nerfed one day whether people call for it or not...

NOT one person is asking for mages/pets to be nerfed for group content, understanding that difference is key.

Changing the way current raids mobs react to pets is the only actual cure without nerfing both dimensions of the game.

You act like that same difference can be applied to the raid game while not changing how things work for the Magician working in that game. Understanding that difference is key. Which gets brushed under the rug, it is far from simple.

And that does not apply because tanks do very respectable DPS while also having the tank niche. They do not do top-teir burst, but their sustained is quite nice for Warriors atleast. Magicians are not top-tier sustained nor Burst either. It would work both ways.

100k plat any type of fix ends up nerfing pet classes in one way or another. It is simply the easier route.

There have been examples of how to fix it without effecting the group aspect. If it's so difficult then more is wrong with the issue then that can be addressed then the class itself becomes a problem. No one wants to see that.

Look how long it took for bigger bags or an aggro meter. Because you or any1 thinks it is easy does not mean it is. Examples on how to fix things are out there for numerous unfixed things. It takes time and there needs to be a very solid reason to invest all that time. People being upset over bad players is a bad reason.

Maybe the fix can be found at the start. Develop raids where tank classes are the tanks. Putting content out where pets are chosen over tanks is short sighted and only leads to less raid tanks in the long run. One does not need to fix what is not broken. Stop making broken, silly encounters, that isolate and divide the community.

I'd be amazed that ANY raid in recent history (SoD on) was designed to be pet tanked. Folks try to find a way to beat them, with minimum pain.

I hate to see any mechanic that hinders midtier guilds, but allowing pets to tank feels like cheating. (And yes, we used pets on Sep 3)

Afaik pets have never been the target audience. War have always and will probably always be the intended main tank for raids. Designing raids to be pet tanked makes little sense and should not be done. It alienates to big of an audience ( all tanks and melee DPS). Even if there was one though like SS6 guilds still warr tanked it vs caster.

If the fix was easy and proven to be needed it would be done. This is SOE here, if something is bugged and making things easier it generally gets fixed even w/o all of these threads.

Things trickle down, so any "fix" to pets in the raiding arena has a good probability of being multipled for the worse in the group arena. Not a single event in VoA required pets to tank, if they did it was for one of two reasons. One, the players of the guild suck and need to rethink how their toon is played/geared, or two, they are lazy. Yes, that is blunt but rings truer than most would probably like to admit. Fixing that issue would be better for the game than trying to set a class back years via a nerf.

This could be fixed easily by devs tuning content properly and not listening to the overgeared end game guilds saying the content is way too easy.

There a lot of raids mobs have really crazy max hits. Some of them cannot be pet tanked like Aaryonar but they exist and that is why people choose pet tanks for the ones that could be tanked by a mage pet without risk.

If raid content was tuned to be beaten by mid tiers or lower end raid guilds that can get full raids of non boxed players then this would not be a problem as these are the guilds that need to use pet tanks to begin with.
Instead raid content is not intended to be beaten by anyone but guilds that can have optimum builds for the most part. Sure they make some raids like BD(easy but still heavily pet tanked on my server), HoT Upper, Sarith, etc but most of it is the normal "only the best of the best will ever win this" type raids.

Eventually I can see all pet classes getting nerfed. I play one myself and I do not like that happening but imo it is more likely that devs will nerf pet classes eventually than tune raids so most raiding guilds can beat content when it is current.

Why should things be given away? Those "overgeared end game guilds" had to gear up the same way as everyone else--winning events. Those guilds generally have one or two advantages over the mid-tier guilds, player skill and/or play time to work events.

If raids were tuned to be beaten by players that have no idea how to push their chosen class then those that do would beat an expansion in a week.

Well there are actually 3 choices:

Nerf the pets.
Pros: Tanks are happy. Raids are done right.
Cons: Mages get the shaft (again)

Boost tanks.
Pros: Tanks are happy. Raids are done right. Mages dodge the nerf bat for now.
Cons: Tanks become OP. Might mean more nerfs or raids are tuned to be more difficult.

Remove the mechanics from raids that encourage people to use pets.
Pros: Fixes everything with the least amount of pain.
Cons: Endgame will probably cry that it is more easy mode raiding.

3 seems best. Raids can still be oppressively hard too without pet friendly mechanics but, that is like, my opinion, man.

Option 3 for me.

Would also like them to add upon option 3 and utilized hero's forge. Make hard mode raids that award nothing but appearance items. It gives challenge to those who have time to invest and also awards them with unique appearance items, while not furthering the gap between group gear and raid gear. Once the gap becomes widely noticeable you end up hurting the fine line that exist between the two.

Hard mode raids could be nothing more than taking current raids and leaving them as are, these would be hard mode raids that offer appearance items. Then tuning the raids towards other crowds, let say mid tier, these would offer the highest stat items available. Note highest stat items not "best" that is all in the eye of the beholder. The most hard core people will still have the carrot to chase in appearance items. Would be easy to expand it and make more tiers by tweaking the gear stats and the difficulty.

To make it clear. The developers would not need to make new zones, just tweak mechanics of the current raids and put them on separate lockouts.

You can be pretty sure that if anything is done, it will be option three and it will be implemented in future content, not existing. Fine by me.

None of the above.
D) change the way pet boss behave with pets, if more than 6 person are on aggro list, Npc ignores pets.

Would pet classes find that acceptable?

Whatever gets done, if anything, should not be about specific classes or an archetype of player characters being singled out for nerfs or boosts which may lead to more problems later on or in different areas of the game. If its a raid content issue than the raid content needs to be looked at as a priority.