For reference, here is the only parse I could find with active mitigation used (parser: Makavien). from April, 2014
Define viable? When I came back to the game, and before I had started raiding, I was tanking heroic adventures when I still needed plenty of gear upgrades from them. I had several monk friends in the same boat back then. I was able to tank--merc heals were a bit dicey, but it was doable--and often did. When I went and camped augs, I was able to tank most of that content. Those were upgrades. It's better to have a plate tank, but rangers and monks in group gear can handle most group stuff. Even in raid gear, I have trouble tanking big Tier2 nameds for more than a handful of rounds (I had tanks go down on both Master Sage and Magma Guardian, and I've pulled aggro on Burn Out and The Journey Home), but Tier1 was absolutely doable at least in doses (DH2 and Neriak1 missions I was able to tank in group gear). That said, there's a chasm in between the 3 tanks and everyone else. While I can run heroic adventures tanking two no problem (if I can keep aggro!), three definitely becomes an issue with one merc healer; real tanks, on the other hand, laugh when I pull singles or anything less than a handful. Warriors and knights are certainly more capable, but I've felt viable in most content.
For tanks, yes, easy if it is %-based mitigation. But how to superimpose the AC buffs from frienzied burnout and fortify companion on mage pets? You'd have to do separate parses for those individually, one at a time, until you had a parse for every combination. But it wouldn't do any good unless you compared it to disc/vie's, technically. So if I am getting this right, to be as accurate as possible to how pet tanks vs player tanks are doing in group play, you'd have to have a parse of every single individual vie/disc and pet activateable defensive AA, each cumulatively until you had a parse of all at once for each. Then do comparisons of each "tier" of active defensives (meaning just 1 vie vs frienzied, etc) as best you could match it to the other class's version. It would be very muddled, but then again, so is just paper tanking comparisons. I mean, considering how differently each class active mitigation affects each, how long they last, how well they stack, and how fast they refresh.
Well people need to recheck group geared player tanking because it seems the excess amount of player DI 20 hits has been fixed along with Pets DI 1 hits.
Self-healing is also a key part of tanking. While this is often thought of as a knight thing, it's an important part of the bigger picture for beastlords, rangers, and monks, too (as well as any pet class using their pet heals). Warriors are the undisputed kings of player tanks if only mitigation and avoidance are concerned. Self-healing, however, plays an important role in what it means for most other classes to tank and be effective. Defensive abilities also scale differently based on the DI to DB ratio and how big the numbers are. Defensive is incredibly powerful, but under some circumstances it's advantageous to have a knight's self-healing instead, or at other times enchanter runes might be the best defensive ability. Defensive comparisons are incredibly tough, they are "very muddled" as you say, and it'd be a never-ending project because there are always more scenarios and more things to consider. Baseline round-by-round is just one piece of a very big puzzle. It's the one that happens to be the easiest to parse, no questions of "skill," and everything that gets added from this point is largely class-specific gains that are often short-term.
Do you have any data to share? When was the excess amount of player DI20 hits changed? I'm curious what they might have changed. I doubt they upended softcap AC returns, player AC hasn't changed (in any significant fashion) - could they have tweaked the formula a bit? I haven't done anything in-game since this patch on my monk. I'd love to see substantive mitigation boosts for traditional non-tanks (I advocated for this in the last thread, too) so I'm curious what might be going on.
I think this is why the developers are asking for more parses. Because the more "stuff" you have available to use, be it runes or self-heals, and the longer you can keep it going, the further you get from passive mitigation having a strong correlation to tanking ability. Class specific gains might be short-term individually, yes, but strung together there might be one up roughly half the time, or one functioning constantly in the background in normal group play And it is undeniable, and unfortunate, in my opinion, that the easiest method of parsing tanking (passive mitigation) is, by definition, intended to make pets look powerful, according to the devs. since they have the least amount of "stuff" to use otherwise, or least effective
Yup. A lot of it comes down to ability bloat, where 10 years of new abilities have taken over. There are so many hotkeys and "stuff" that we all have available in order to perform our most basic duties (what sort of DPS class can do decent with just autoattack these days?). Comparing passive mitigation hyperinflates the ability of pets if we assume that passive mitigation = tanking ability. Hopefully we all know better and don't jump to conclusions. The parses provided make pets look like they're still in a good position. And when I say that, I'm thinking more broadly about how pets compare to rangers and monks, who spend the vast majority of their time tanking without defensive discs (although the new Ranger vie spell changes this in some respects, but vies are easy to superimpose and monks don't have the same sort of thing, and most other DPS classes are in a similar boat). An EM15 pet is still tanking head and shoulders better than a raid-geared ranger with a shield.* At the very least, pet classes still look to have better tanking capabilities than any other DPS class, which in my opinion is a rather strong position. *Assuming PC mitigation has not changed drastically since the last thread. Siddar has suggested things may have been tweaked here, so this assumption may be wrong! I'm going off the old data from the last big round of parses. At the end of the day, more people providing more parses is better. More people joining in on the discussion and constructively adding to what the graphs and providing analysis and creating arguments is fantastic. I hope Bedavir isn't the only one making parses publicly available, and I look forward to seeing how meaningful EM will be in terms of pet tanking.
An another bit of data, albeit a short parse as I only had the one account and so one merc, vs a lvl 100 group mob in ethermere. This time it is my raid rog, with approx 9.4k hp (primary weapon swapped out for a trophy). Vie was blocked, I had a shaman unity on still and merc buffs. It's not long so it's rather variable (I died), but as you can see that's a very different DI skew. Imagine this now vs rampage bosses in raids and you get the picture as to what melee dps have to endure (and our poor healers!). It's just 119secs long, but in that I had 53 rounds of 20k+, 10 at 30k+ and 1 at 40k+. Average incoming dps was 7628, but the mercs are pretty shoddy and despite it having full mana it just didn't do a good job of healing me. /GU Tanking summary for: Brogett --- Total damage: 3066339 --- Avg hit: 7114 --- Swings: 752 --- Defended: 221 (29.4%) --- Hit: 431 (57.3%) --- Missed: 100 (13.3%) --- Accuracy: 81.2% --- Dodged: 78 (12.8%) --- Parried: 124 (16.5%) --- Blocked: 0 (0%) --- Riposted: 19 (3%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%) Now before you get me wrong, I'm not expecting rogues to be tanking. However if you want to have realistic differences between earth pets acting like tanks and water pets acting like rogues, then you need to understand how the real player classes compare in order to be able to appropriately tune the pets to simulate their classes. The obvious two differences are: 1) Player rogues have much higher avoidance (parry and dodge primarily) than the pets. 2) Rogue rets have much better mitigation than player rogues. Incoming dps wise, the pet was reported as 8139, vs 7628 on me. Remember I have full raid gear, but not the best set of augs out there (especially for tanking of course). Therefore I'd expect group rogues to be much closer or probably higher than the pet for incoming dps. The main differences come from the nature of how the damage occurs.
I remember when we did magma behemoth, and i was like "you tank the named, while i burn the add" and lols were had, but you survived!
Level 100 mage, all pet aa's done. EM15 focus with swords. Pet spell hold set to on. Buffed with burnout rank 2 and certitude rank 2. This was with an earth pet.
One thing I think a lot of people are missing with these DI parses: These parses are to determine DI, they are not realistic DPS parses, and the parsers have already noted that they aren't using standard "passive" pet defensive buffs like the earth pet's self-cast buff and the Iceflame line. Incoming DPS is *not* representative, just how often they're getting hit within certain DI. Furthermore, Daegun didn't mention using active pet defensive AAs and spells. So if you're upset that they're being compared to warrior who aren't using defensive, consider that the pets aren't operating at maximum strength either. Stop looking at the DPS numbers, they're not representative and not what the parses are intended to display.
I will say again. Th Yes, because again, these parses are highly biased, because Active Tank use abilities far outweigh Pet Abilities. For example, No Warrior Parse should be without Shield Specialist. It's up 24-7 now. Any parse not including an abilitiy that is 24-7 is highly suspect to the point of useless. In fact, I'd say completely useless for balance purposes and not including it shows that the poster is attempting to make a biased arguement. Other abilities need to be factored in as well in context of the percentage of time they are available. No time to bleed is up 60% of the time. So on and so on. Any parse, posted in this matter without context of real world play, is really misleading. This thread is like DPS parses which are constantly used out of context to make an arguement. For nerfing or boosting a class.
These pet parses aren't meant to determine DPS though. They're meant to determine how the change in pet base AC has affected their DI distribution (the main issue cited in the dev posts). Mixing in all the other factors is going to make that determination more difficult.
Except that abilities, especially ones up 24-7 do effect the DI Distribution as does anything that effects net damage. If you look at Brogarts Parse above the DI distribution is about 580 damage per roll. Anything that lowers the damage of the mob by 580 a hit, has the same net effect of moving the Curve Left 1 spot, even if it doesn't move the curve. The problem is there is no difference between moving the distribution curve by changing the roll factor and changing modifiers of incoming damage.
I don't think there's really an argument on that point. Magicians have been able to solo named since the start of EQ. With mercenaries, many classes can molo named. Of course they should be able to, and these changes aren't drastic enough to make that no longer possible. If people soloing/moloing named is an issue, you're about fifteen years too late to stop it.
For a magician you pretty much just leave out #1. Pet staying alive is highest priority, which means blockers/heals/buffs/AAs, followed by maximizing DPS so the mob gets down as fast as possible. If something is particularly nasty, you can also switch-hit pets by memblurring the mob and other advanced tactics.
There is; danger. Skewing the distribution can lower the average dps, as can removing the top couple of damage intervals. However they're only the same if you have sufficient hp to be able to take any round that may come your way and heal in time. Having the possibility for larger hits means that sooner or later you'll get an unlucky round and have to deal with it. This is why mitigation was more important than avoidance for smooth tanking. Your point is still valid though that the various skills do change the distributions and various scaling factors too. I don't think this post was ever intended to be a full analysis of actual dps, but to understand the shapes of the distributions so people can get a handle on risk.
