Named mobs are a lot harder than they used to be. 15 years ago, your average named mob was really not any harder than trash mobs, it just happened to drop loot. Maybe they were snare immune or summoned to dissuade them from being kited down by a soloer. There of course were always exceptions, but they were just that - exceptions.. i.e. Ambassador DVinn, Umbral Plains spirits, Kyv Heartstriker Jhiru, Shadowhunter, etc... Somewhere along the way, the frequency went up for named getting abilities that players had to actually contend with. Your average UF/HoT named were wrecking balls that made you pop your cooldowns. Then in VoA they were given massive boosts to HP.
Except most forum lurkers, players and apparently the devs don't understand this. They see DI highly favored for pets, which did need fixes but not like this, and scream OMG pets are better. Totally ignoring or not realizing the other half the equation is what you can do with that DI spead and incomming damage with no time to bleed, fortitude, self healing, stuns, mantles, carapaces, renouces, field guardian and on and on and on. Compared to most pets having one activated ability for named use only, mage pets being the exception. Pets need small live change now and a stagnation during the next wave of focus effects and pets. Instead they gut most all pets in a drastic fashion not considering this or drastic gap between different classes pets. I wish Aristo was handling rogue AA balance and AE melee abilities. We would see 50% reduction of those abilities power and duration by the end of the week and tell you fixed.
Using a 15 year old precedent to validate an imbalance among a cooperative game isn't exactly going to get you anywhere. The posts read a lot like I should be able to do by myself what it takes everyone else a full group to do. Soloing a single red con is a luxury. Soloing multiple red cons an imbalance and soloing named while most everyone else requires a group a downright absurdity. This isn't a console game. If you can do it at all because you progressed your character to a place of power that affords you the opportunity to try and likewise be rewarded by high end loot be satisfied. It isn't a right inherent to a class because they excel at soloing, and especially not because they could do it 15 years ago. If the power curve is decreased and it becomes a bit more challenging to restore balance don't cry about it. Until a dev comes out and says we intend mages to solo all content without a group with little to no effort we can surmise it isn't intended. And they will balance the class accordingly.
^^ This. If a class has an active defensive ability that can be available more than 50% of the time, there should be separate parses with it on. This goes for pets too. In my opinion, it is a cop-out to say "well you can just superimpose it on the data"...no you can't. Not for many activated abilities, and not for the ones of the class you are comparing it to. I understand that passive mitigation affects the base numbers, but like many player tanks in this thread have said, this game is 15 years old, it is not as simple as it was years ago, these active defensives are on all the time! I wish I could say that the player tanks bringing up the issue, especially Daegun were simply too lazy to go get parses with active mitigation for both players AND pets, maybe that's the case. Like I mentioned before, they got 1 single parse from 1 single warrior to compare active defensive mitigation, even recently claiming there was some trove of this data when there wasn't, it was 1 parse. It looks like they were purposefully using just passive mitigation samples to make pets look more extreme (they didn't really need to, we know pets were overly strong) to help their argument along
These arguments have all gone on before and gone nowhere. What named mobs from Temple of Rot can mages solo? Mages can solo old content currently
People are confusing the intent or purpose of the parses and what they represent. The original parses were a baseline. A baseline that presented the di distributions of players and pets. The questioned raised after they were presented was the intended effect of pet ac and whether their raw mitigation was intended. Apparently the devs decided it was not. These current parses show the after change results. The parses are not to represent active mitigation. If people want those parses I'm sure the community will welcome them.
They'll welcome them, but it won't be tank player mains getting them, because there is a divide in the community. That will fall to the hands of pet classes, hopefully ones with tank alts
Would it have been more acceptable if it was a well known healer who posted the parses? Just because he was a tank has nothing to do with it. A class that got changed is mad because it got changed and wants someone to blame. Anyone is welcome to post the parses. People would rather whine than put in the investment of time that daegun did. The results were staggering. The parses were not biased. The interpretations of them were.
I am kind of curious why it is left up to a tank class to do parses that the pet classes should be doing on their own pets. Shouldn't pet classes be taking the lead on this instead of griping at other classes that have to do it for them?
I agree, it takes a monumental amount of time to level up and gear a tank just for the basis of parse comparison, I certainly am not going to do it. I'm not blaming, I'm saying the original parses were posted by players who have tanks (or healers) and pet class alts. They posted one kind of parse, one that favors pets. It now falls to the hands of pet classes, who hopefully have tank alts, to "defend" their position by posting parses that favor player tanks by their setup (active mitigation). Passive mitigation was too high for pets, now the question is, are pets going to underperform with the changes when benchmarked to tanks when both are using active mitigation? That leaves to be seen, but player tanks are going to be nowhere to be found when it comes to benchmarking this
The problem is that tanks aren't benchmarked to eachother, they're benchmarked to content. Ultimately, pets need to be able to tank whatever they're supposed to tank. How they tank in comparison to PCs is mostly irrelevant.
Not at all. If you read the thread about the nerfs, the devs have said the tank classes are in a balanced position when it comes to current content. Therefore, how they do vs current content IS the standard, it is the end-all-be-all benchmark actually
Right, how they do vs. content, not necessarily eachother. Using another class as a goalpost would be like trying to figure out if pets are doing enough DPS by comparing them to rogues. They need to do what they ought to do, regardless of other classes.
What we see is pet class players flatten named mobs with nothing but their pet and merc, named mobs the rest of us need a group to fight. It is still true on Test today with these changes.
Parsing activated abilities is much more complicated. Did the parser use the right abilities and in the right order or combination? Knight tanking for example uses healing to offset inferior mitigation. As the above poster indicates the parse of active abilities is more to the point of a flow chart. Did I win the encounter? That is the ultimate parse. The ease of the win is the only thing most people look at before and after changes. Beyond the win It gets into categories of player v dev v player perception of what is an acceptable power of the classes. The real question is can mages still solo. What do the devs intend them to solo? And where does that leave the class. The fact that it is now more challenging may be upsetting but it is obvious that the devs intend this outcome I player power.
This is because pet class' ability to do these things isn't really because of messed up pet AC scaling. They've been doing it far longer than pet AC has been messed up, after all.
Lol, just read the post. I'm not going to argue it, it is plain as day. "We understand that pets have fewer active defenses than player tanks, so they will continue to mitigate on a per-hit basis better than players can, but they will also continue to be hit more often than a player tank would" -- They are benchmarking to player tanks. I have to go atm, but there are other developer quotes mentioning that these are comparisons to tanks
On the contrary, they are not benchmarking. "Pets need to be able to X just like players need to do X, but players function differently so pets will do X in a different way" is not the same as benchmarking. They're explaining the differences in tank function, but the comparison in both cases is against content.
They are comparing how a pet does vs content to how a tank does vs content. I am just simplifying it as pets vs tanks. Lol, it's not like I meant pets fighting tanks, pvp style!
