Pet Tanking Raid Mobs

Can it still be pet tanked?

Ah, here he is the all years call for a nerf always done by those who

a.) cant solve a raid and claim others using "pets for exploit"
b.) want to have something changed and therefor boiling up the annual troll nerf call versus pets

Most probably your guild, who is not doing it like ALL the other guilds using a pet as tank does it simply wrong

Pet tanks are nice for eating the AoE which is the ONLY reason why some guilds do it. If you as a tank have less hp and ac than the best pet tank, then you are not good enough geared and for that reason not ready to accomplish this raid. Go back to where you belong, gear up and come back when your gear and AA are appropriate to solve the raid.

Pets dont need a nerf.

A warrior merc acts and functions as a (tank) merc.
Its job is to be an acceptable substitute for a tank (at a far lower gear level and no free will and no xp bonus), and takes up a group member slot like a real tank would.

Mercs were a game wide necessity, pet tanks arent.

I have an SK that I've been gearing up for a long time and with all this talk of how "op" pet tanks are has me thinking I should set him out. I already box two mages and have a necro on my SK's account that can take his place. If this turns out to be true, that pets can tank as good as my group geared tank, it will be a shame. Tanks should not be replaced by a pet, period! And especially not by anyone that only has to farm one peice of gear to do so (a ear ring). Compare that to a tank that needs every slot filled with ac augs, every slot filled with latest gear, and considerable more aa's. Although bringing in my necro will most definitely add allot more dps to my box team.

Another statement that exaggerates the truth. Mercs were never a game-wide necessity. We did fine for many years without them. I think the game would still be here even if they'd never been impleted.

Pet tanks, on the other hand, date to the beginning. They've been used as tanks since day 1 of the Magician class, so far as I know.

Pet tanks definitely have their usefulness, but it's situational. A live tank is preferred by far, that said, it's nice to have a pet on it if the main tank tips and is getting rezzed/buffed. On raids, I've seen similar things.

I do not know of a single magician that likes to tank raid named mobs. I do not know where the community got this impression. Magicians do it because their raid leaders ask them to do so, not because we want to. We care a LOT more about our raid DPS and where we stand on top 10 parses compared to other classes.

And has been mentioned many many times, magicians have pet tanked in the group game since 1999. We are a solo class with zero "get out of jail for free" cards that many other classes have. We need a competent pet to be able to handle tanking group content. If we do not have that, we are no longer a solo class which is what we have been defined as since 1999.

Ask developers to fix raid named mechanics to have them affect pets. Leave pets alone. They are not the issue, raid mechanics being bypassed are...

Why they could use one? What class do you play that you are so familiar with mage pets tanking? Calling for class nerf on SOE boards is not allowed if I remember correctly.

What Cicelee wrote is correct. Raid mechanics need to be changed.

Personal opinion , not calling anything, pet have became too beefy, but main grip is about how raid boss handle pets.

No one is asking for changes to pets. Pets should be able to tank group content and old raid content.

The problem that we all have is with pets tanking current expansion raid bosses. This problem is caused by the mechanics of the encounters. If something affects a player tank, then it should affect a pet tank. Mages can get as defensive as they like (seriously, we don't want to break your pets) but it's an issue of broken mechanics and fairness to our hard-working tanks. If they have to die because of an AE, why should your pets be invincible? Get over yourselves.

If a pet is not being affected by an ae, it is either a bug or by design. Are you claiming pet's are immune to all AE's? That is clearly not a fact. If you find an AE that pets are immune to, you should be doing a /bug or pm'ing a dev to find out if that's intentional.

And not all things that affect a tank should affect a pet. We can't make a pet do some do-si-do to avoid getting a viral dot, for instance. I'm pretty sure everyone at raid would appreciate that. Usually a pet is immune to certain mechanics, from what I can tell, because it would just be a deathfest to the pet and kill a magician's dps from chain summoning pets just to watch them be instagibbed on summoning.

So then we should compromise:

Your pet won't be affected by all of the mechanics until it reaches the top of the raid boss's hate list. Then you can have your pet doing its normal dps role, and a player can do his/her normal tank role.

PC tank always > NPC pet

Maybe part of the problem is raid mechanics being used for group content now.

The pet needs to survive the basic effects, otherwise a group pet (or merc) tank can't do it.

Anyway, I recently joined in some mid-teir raiding, (VoA T3/T4) and my VoA T4 group focused level 99 earth (with max pet related AA's...) ending up tanking at the end of the two encounters I participated in, after the regular tanks died... and it survived, and beat the events. I was surprised, but it had a 5 level advantage over the content.

I am still wondering how a mage pet tanking a raid mob cripples melee on a raid?

Of course melee cant fight in melee when the pet is tanking, unless or until they change it back closer to how pets used to work when they could compete for aggro with players.

If the strategy you use is to tank with a mage pet, then the strategy doesnt call for melee dps to do much but hang out and loot the corpse.

If you exclude all melee from the raid for some hyper efficient way of defeating a raid with a mage pet, you will prevent the melee from getting the gear they will need to be effective on the raids you DO need them on.

SS2 is still pet-tankable, fyi. Mayben ot as well as before but it is definitely still doable.

Dodging emotes is somethinga pet can't do, agree those shouldnt effect them, however things like viral dots that can be cured..should just be cured.

Pets having more hps (idk for sure how many as i don't play one) that makes ae nukes effect them less, does impact their desirability vs a real tank in ae-heavy events. Immunity to adds because of how pets aggro and don't aggro their surroundings, makes a big difference, immunity to other effects like charm or mez (though i see swarmpets charmed all the time, go figure) These things combined is why many will use a pet instead of a real tank, because all tehse mechanics on top of each other are so much harder to keep a tank up through even if they're the best geared/aa'd on their given server, vs a pet taht is effected by nearly nothing but the mob's melee and maybe a couple nukes. The more mechanic-heavy an event is, the more likely it is easier to pet-tank than PC-tank, and that is an issue related to current raid-design moreso than just pets. If they made a simple script that ignored ANYONE that is currently tanking the boss, with these mechanics (and theyve done it in the past many times but only with isolated things not everything that pets avoid) then there would never be a reason to use the pet over teh PC, while still allowing guilds to use pets during battlerezzing of tanks or shortages of tanks etc. There shouldnt be somethign that makes them incaapble, just don't ever ever make them MORE capable because of the event, and that includes the group game. You don't see melee-based solo classes soloing the things you see mages and necros solo, even if taht solo class (since everyone thinks sk's can do anything and are considered mainly solo now) is also a tank. Missions and nameds get downed all the time by solitary pet-classes with a toon pet and merc while using a real tank requires more people. This particular imbalance is game-wide, not jsut in raids. Everyone has their solo strengths, generally a solo class should have their own niche in soloing xp, and they do, but those whose niches are soloing current-content for xp, shouldnt also be able to solo nameds and missions that would otherwise require a group, and this is because of the same thing: pets ignoring mechanics, and in part being overpowered due to the constant influx of bigger and better enhanced minions. People keep birnging up "in the old days pets tanked" but they didnt have 3-4 more levels of EM every year, they all used the same 1 or 2 and got new pet spells for their power boosts, now they get both.

Enhanced Minion doesn't work like that, it gets outdated and obsolete like any other caster focus; for any given pet, there is only a few effective levels of focus possible; anything less than EM7 should have no effect on RoF pets.

but yet one can have EM18, so you ahve EM7-18 (raid) available. What was a raid focus in HoT (EM12) is now trash drops in RoF. So now a trash drop, bought in the baz, Makes your pet a raid tank. A HoT max raid-geared tank is stronger than a t1 rof group-geared tank despite similar hp levels, thus an EM12 rof pet is stronger than the comparable group-geared tank. Pets have their drawbacks, but their advantages outnumber those drawbacks.

EM 7 or 8 was intended for t1 HoT grouping, EM 12 was t3 raid in HoT. Then, EM12 was a group drop but later in VoA, thus again making your group pet as strong as a 1yearold raid tank, and 1year old raid-tanks are still better than current-content group tanks, why are pets stronger from the same content than group tanks? To make raid pets worth it, raid pets are then given even higher EM levels, further knocking the balance out for the next year.

i know EM focii have level-ranges, but because of the sheer number available each year and then that those are carried over the next year into group focii etc, the spread is enormous. Power is no longer coming from 1 or 2 higher EM and new spells, it's coming from 3 4 5 6 and more higher EM PLUS the new spells.

does anyone have teh base NONfocused hp/ac of these pets? say a 99 earth pet since taht seems to be the one i nquestion. The range of EM's for this same pet goes from 85 (minimum group EM taht effects pets this level) to 150 (max raid available), so i would be curious exactly WHAT EM focus level actually matches that of group geared and raid-geared tanks.

Wait what? A raid focus in House of Thule becomes.... a raid focus pet in Rain of Fear because the focus is now on a groupable item???

Yeah. Ummm no. It was a raid pet in HoT. It is now a group pet in RoF.

A mage's 'niche' was never 'solo content for xp.' Every class in the game is able to do that, and the bulk of them better than mages.

Yes, we know pet classes are better at moloing content than other classes. Is there a problem with that? Isn't that why pet class players play pet classes in the first place? I've seen plenty of other classes do the same with slightly better gear. The issue you're looking at here is not pets, it's RoF being a very easy expansion - level 100 content being of the same difficulty as VoA T2 / T3, which with all due respect, OUGHT to be molo'd at level 100.

So removing a strategy that helps guilds progress is the best solution people have come up with? I don't see you tanks advocating that because you can tank you shouldn't be able to kill a mob without a DPS toon in your group. Afterall your taking away a job that isn't yours by your logic. If your in a guild that uses this strategy and you don't like it than why do you stay in your guild? Who cares if a guild used a pet to tank the mob? The only logical reason people on the outside are complaining is because the guild that used this method passed you up on the food chain or are getting to close to you on the food chain so because you deem it cheesy they should suffer so you can keep your precious spot on the food chain. If your on the inside complaining maybe its time to look for a guild that fits your playstyle more or have your tanks and heal team play better so your not wasting all that DPS you have just sitting there ranging the mob. Guilds adapted to figure out ways to beat the event with what they have and instead of being happy for them you want to cry foul or unfair because you don't agree with it? Get over yourselves. Who cares that a guild used this method, it just hurts themselves in the long run when you come across an event you can't use this for.

Amorcen