Test Server Pet Mitigation Parse thread.

About that parse. I don't know who was making the "***" annotations (you or the person who did the parse), but "a lot of the healing..." is more likely due to Promised than it is weapons procs.

On the subject of healing, if I am reading the parse correctly the tank took a total damage of 2,740,165 and was healed for a total amount of 429,042. If this is true, then GameParse is: Over reporting damage taken by the tank; Under reporting healing on the tank; or both. There are any number of valid (that is to say, non-nefarious) reasons why GameParse (or any other parsing engine, for that matter) could be under reporting or over reporting. In any event, the parse is only a summary and really only says, "hey, we beat this thing."

and why does that impact you at all?

For example, the Beasts's Domain, Temple, Eastern Wastes, Plane of Shadows and Xorbb1 raids have all been much safer to do with pet tanking as compared to using a warrior.

Doing Eastern wastes for example with partially-geared warriors is a pure recipe for frustration. Throw in a few pets and it's very doable.

Once the warriors are geared past that content then you can do the events faster with warriors tanking of course.

I keep hearing this, but there's been no evidence, one because guilds in EQ are embarrassed whenever they pet tank, and second because this idyllic concept of pre-nerf earth pet > warriors existed only before warriors got stances and pet nerfs were pushed to live simultaneously. In the end, it's a question for which there is no answer, because the swing in tanking ability was so drastic in the last month that it's though we're talking about balance from ten years ago.

In addition, however, I want to observe a simple fallacy - the idea that one warrior is to tank a raid boss from 100% to 0%. Which guild even does this? The value of having several warriors in a raid, besides insurance, is so you're able to take advantage of the massive mitigation advantage warriors give you via defensive rotations.

Course after the patch, it's only a 20% advantage due to Shield Proficiency being so bad , but even so, this scenario of pets vs. warriors tanking a raid boss 100% to 0% simply does not exist. Every guild worth its salt knows how to use defensive rotations except when the encounter absolutely requires that you don't. Peak tanking is peak tanking; it isn't 'I blew all my CDs but the pet has no CDs therefore it has to be nerfed so that even when I'm AFK it's a worse tank.'

This doesn't help your point.

You didn't need to take advantage of defensive rotations with a pet. They just are a defensive rotation.

We'll see where things land when the tuning is done. But the more I read, the more mages are just showing that they don't care about balance, or fairness in the game.

They just want the proverbial "god mode" and anything you say, or show, is discarded and some PC ability is pointed out that the whole PC class is tuned around to deflect.

Come play on Test with me, I'll show you just how terrible mage pets are... well, I think they patched last night, so... the things I was doing before will be even easier now. I'll show you that too. I can copy over my rogue, my wizard, my ranger, we can look at all kinds of things.

Unless you only want to have your pocket pet compared to warriors, cause... Everyone should have an inexpensive highly inexhaustible supply of warriors hiding in their spell bar.

But if you don't want to be involved, test things yourselves, admit there's a problem, listen to reason... Once again, you're only looking to deflect and hold on to your over powered state and nothing at all that is said will bring you to reason.

No, I am not. See, what you all fail to understand is that DPS correctly captures the damage output of a mob, regardless of its DI to DB ratio. When a mob's DPS is 2x on a pet than it is on a player, that's not 'trivial'. DI was invented because players, especially raid tanks, cared about spike damage. But spike damage isn't the only risk of dying in EQ. A mob that outputs a steady stream of damage - with no spikes - is still capable of killing you when you're not being spammed healed by six clerics. But even though such mobs do not exist in EQ, it's also the case that when a mob's DPS is 2x on a pet than it is on a player, there is no way that the pet and the player are tanking equally.

It is, in fact, useless to even talk about DI distribution until you have enough HPS to out-heal a mob's incoming DPS. Only then does the situation become 'the only risk from dying comes from spikes.' When you don't have the HPS to out-heal a mob's DPS, it doesn't matter whether mob spikes - YOU'RE GOING TO DIE. Period.

DPS correctly captures the damage output of the mob on the tank (or pet) as long as the tank/pet is alive. You obviously have never seen a group tank go from 100% to 20%, 10%, 5% or negative in an instant. I have and I see it quite often, and I am here to tell you, it ain't DPS that is doing that.

Oddly, THAT is the reason that I am AGAINST this nerf (as I stated earlier), since a lot of groups use pets as a secondary tank.

"Adding another Mage is really helpful" is not a fair argument. Adding another ANYTHING with another J5 cleric merc to assist in healing, is really helpful. Like I said, if u believe a group focus pet on test could stay up with 1 cleric merc vs a t2 named then parse it. I bet I could pull it off on live now with my em20 pet and 1 cleric merc with good dps, but I don't mind the place pets are in with the first nerf on live, unlike other pet class players

Monks, rogues, berserkers, rangers, bards, and beastlords rely on melee for dps.

Wizards, mages, necromancers, druids, enchanters, and shamen rely on range for dps.

Pet tanking cuts out six damn classes from your group. It should never have been such a viable alternative that you could molo named.

Evidence? I've yet to see ONE parse of pets tanking vs. players tanking during the 3-4 minutes interval in which player defensives are active aka the practical scenario of peak tanking.

Instead, you and others have provided an endless litany of parses showing passive mitigation and average mitigation over 20-45 minutes while rotating defensives. Oh, and 'I'm still able to molo Shoon!' parses which are completely irrelevant.

Both passive mitigation and average mitigation over 20-45 minutes are invalid gauges of practical tanking. The former utterly ignores actives. The latter tries to capture a continuous tanking session in which one tank has to stand up to a mob for 20-45 minutes, which simply ends up averaging stretches of passive mitigation with stretches of active mitigation. Both fail to show that pets are equivalent to a 'defensive rotation.'

The one parse from a warrior who actually did a 3-4 minute interval using defensives showed the following:

The first graph is that of a warrior using his actives. The second graph is of an EM 20 earth pet. Unfortunately, he did not mention whether he was using all that he's able to use on the pet and he didn't mention what he used on the warrior. Fortunately, we DO have parses from people who were using all that they're able to use on the pet, which showed that pets take roughly 5000 DPS from T1 COTF mobs.

That's still a long shot from the warrior's 2500 DPS on T2 COTF mobs. Bottom line? Pets aren't remotely at the level of warrior mitigation when the latter's using actives.

Bravo Gnomeland. Your statement is exactly the point of the parses we posted. Pulling th wool over the developers eyes is not going to happen on our watch. The pet nerf proponents may have gotten the early lead but the fat lady has not stopped singing yet.

As an FYI I am Fluffy's owner on the parses posted and the buffs the pet had on it were all merc cleric buffs as well as Maloseniac Eminence, Burnout XI, Arcane Disillect, Groundswell Stance and Velocity; Mage epic 2.0 clicky, Suppressed Etheric Flameweaver Robe (CoTF T1) clicky, Virluent Talon and Frenzied Burnout AAs. All my spells are Rank 3 and my aa's are maxed.

Since Aristo started a new "round 2" pets thread, should there be a new thread created now with current/future parses included on it?

Or some sort of asterisk.

There are pros and cons of making a new thread. I'd suspect that if a new thread were made for Round 2, some parses would be posted in the place and might lead to more confusion.

The simplest solution might be posters making note of the dates of their parses, from this point on.

Hopefully they will lock this thread and redirect everyone to here given the fact that they now made additional pet changes:

https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/...14-pet-changes-round-two.212698/#post-3111692

Why do you think that your pet should even remotely compare to a defensive warrior?

Give me a good response on that, and I too will bravo you.

3-4 minutes is the sweet spot for warriors where they'll look the best.

It seems the desire of the devs is to keep pets head and shoulders ahead of the more tankier types of DPS (i.e., rangers and monks). Magicians, beastlords, and yes necromancers are traditionally DPS classes (they're certainly balanced that way, too, at least from what I've noticed parsing our guild raids); in addition to being in a good place compared to other DPS classes, these 3 classes can also conjure up a pet that is, at worst, third fiddle in tanking ability after knights.

If rangers or monks were tanking as well as pets are, there would be outrage. Pets have become so strong over the years to where tanking at near-knight levels is considered a ludicrous nerf.

Regardless of where we, as players want to see pets (e.g., in line with a defensive warrior, or perhaps close to a ranger using a shield, or any other number of alternatives), the devs have their own Vision(tm).

My opinion is that if everything is going well on a raid (no player screw-ups causing a penalty to occur), tank switches on the named should occur when the tank runs out of endurance, not hit points. I would straight up give tank classes an ability to take damage directly from endurance, like Enchanters 'Mind over Matter' ability.

Pets should be disposable.

Because the former is bad data and the latter is good data.

You want 2500-5000 hits before you can start to model damage distribution for a given ATK/AC value. You could probably find the min/max hit, and DB/DI in 3 minutes, but what we're looking to accurately predict is the percentage of hits which are attributed to each DI value.

Also, and more importantly - any buffs/discs/AA/cooldowns that don't last the entire duration of the parse will actually invalidate it. The right way is to create longer "clean" parses for baseline data, from which we can easily extrapolate the impact of defensive abilities.

Yup. A recent post over in the "Tank" subforum comes to mind:

The thread is https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/warrior-stances.212117/

Because short parses and random number generator, DW outperformed S&B. It'd be quite funny if warriors abandoned their superior S&B setup for DW based on this parse.

Not invalid, just short. It's hard to parse defensives that are short, because you get results like the above.

So what do warriors think of their new defensive stance? Let us see...

Warrior stances were terribly implemented. Our one setup worth using was changed to god mode. Dual wield is now deader than dead. 2hand is nice but comes at a bad price.

Defensive boosts should have been stance neutral.

Quoted the complete post. I can understand you getting heated because people are calling into question your motives and methodology for testing. But that is no reason to stoop to their level and if you are going to use a term God Mode, just remember what you are comparing them too. The quote is form the warrior forum on stances, Daegun I believe. It has made that much of a difference in how warriors take damage. And yes, I understand I am pointing out some PC ability, but its not what the class is tuned around as it is new.