Test Update 02/13/2024 - Patch Notes and Discussions

People move to places they shouldn't be in raids all the time, I can't control that people are doing what they should be doing and that an AE with limited targets lands on who needs it instead of landing on targets that don't need it. All of the healing can easily be wasted on melee, pets, and swarm pets that don't need it while the melee who do need it miss out on those heals.

Limit it to 54 and exclude pets and swarm pets.

To be fair I can see main pets receiving the heal but swarm pets are just the devil. They are graphic vomit.

I can see excluding swarm pets but excluding pets would be a nerf for the group game where a shaman might need to heal a pet if they are the group tank.

If they just exclude swarm pets they will likely see a decent drop in healing done.

They must legit think Druid are perfect because other than correcting a spelling error on a Druid spell or ability, there is legit NEVER anything for a Druid ever in the patch notes. Ya'll forget we exist? I mean I would take a reduction in the cast time on heal spells or mana cost on DOTs or an actual new pet for the first time in 70 levels!

This is perfect. This is what they should be doing instead of ruining small guilds raids.

I probably missed it, did the February Tower event/rewards go live or nothing as of yet?

I'm confused. If the spell no longer targets swarm pets, how does that make it bad for healing players? Or are we talking about different things? No one said to have X number of heals, but to exclude swarm pets from what can be healed.
As well, wouldn't exlcuding swarm pets reduce lag as thats alot of stuff that doesn't need to happen?

How does people being stupid make a spell bad?

Memory.ini file correction has been updated today (Feb 16th).

The quote I am referring to suggests reducing the target count on the heal

If the spell was limited to how many targets it would hit and it wasn't possible to hit all the players in a raid in a given area that would make it up to luck if the people who need heals got them.

I did agree that excluding swarm pets from the heal would be a good thing as it would reduce the amount of calculations for heals and it would show more accurate numbers of healing provided.

"- Year of Darkpaw Heroic Adventures now have the standard 6-hour lock-out timer."

This should be 5 hours like was previously done to every 6 hour quest in the game since the timer now actually begins on completion

At a minimum. But maybe even half that since heroic adventures have 2 hour, 30 minute lockouts.

I guess the question is do they consider these tower tasks to be missions or HAs?

I would say HA because there's no chest/loot associated with them (at least with the first one), so they should have the same lockout timers as an actual HA.

patch day feb 21

They might not, but at least the first one seems to behave like HAs. The first 2 steps are always to kill 2 mobs each, but which mob types they are varies. I also think I read that if you're not in the zone when a step is completed, you don't get the alt currency associated with that step.

Feb 21 = Launch day for the FF14 Xbox open beta. Just saying.

I stopped using gift over a year ago. If you have a few clerics and more then 2 Shaman on a raid there is absolutely no need to twin cast splash. I have never used it for the group game and I have no problem keeping a group up. I know it sounds scary to some of you, but you really will survive without it.

Pets are pretty opaque, so I wanted to give some context to what I believe to be the impetus for the changes in the patch. To be very clear, I am neither advocating for the changes (unless I explicitly state so) nor expressing any actual knowledge of the devs' intentions; I just think by looking at the progression of changes, we can surmise what very likely happened.

116-120 EM Retuning
First, only the 116-120 pets were changed. This did not affect the scaling of non-ToL pets.

Starting in Rain of Fear, scaling between Enhanced Minion ranks was A) meaningfully reduced and B) made linear. In Ring of Scale, for example, a water pet's max hit increased ~133 each EM rank. In Terror of Luclin, this scaling was changed to be exponential and the average scaling was generally made larger (7% for HP, 4% for max hit per rank). This led to extreme increases in pet statistics as focus ranks increased and was pretty clearly unsustainable.

In Laurion's Song, this was reversed, and the scaling was changed to what I'm going to refer to as "regressive" scaling. Now, higher EM ranks confer a lower absolute benefit than lower EM ranks. For example, upgrading from EM 31 to EM 32 increases an LS water pet's max hit by 121, less than the absolute amount conferred by a Ring of Scale focus ten levels prior. This is also less than the benefit conferred to an LS water pet by upgrading from EM 25 to EM 26 (+164 to max hit).

This patch changes ToL pets to scale like LS pets. In tabular form, here's what the scaling looks like now RoS onwards:



This is what a chart of water pet max hit scaling looks like (blue = before patch, orange = after patch):



To me, the basic premise of this change makes sense. The scaling, particularly in HP values, was too high for the ToL pets. That said, I really think the scaling of top EM tier ToL/LS pet damage is too low. An EM focus is the only gear upgrade that pets receive between expansions. 1.2/1.3% is just not enough to feel meaningful, and it really makes no sense that the absolute benefit of EM foci for hit damage is lower than it was 15 levels ago. This is what contributes to, on live, EM 32 LS RS pets being a measly 1% upgrade from the ToL versions.

I would change the LS pet scaling back to being linear and target a ~3% increase per EM rank (somewhere in between RoS & ToV scaling). This could be done in conjunction with reducing the number of EM ranks between group and raid items, as I'm not trying to widen the power gap between the two. What I do care about is pet scaling in between expansions from gear, and an EM upgrade should confer more than a ~1% pet DPS increase IMO.

Necro/Beast Swarm Pets
Historically, there have been a number of differences between the power of Magician, Necromancer, and Beastlord swarm pet spells unrelated to statistics of the pets summoned. These include:

• RS pets have a 0.75s (with haste) cast time, vs 1.5s (with haste) for Necro and Beast swarm pets.
• RS pets have a 10s cool down (with Type 3 + Hastened AA), vs 18s for Necro and Beast swarm pets.
• At Rk. 3/with Extended Swarm, RS pets have a 42 second duration, vs 38s for Beast swarm pets and 34s for Necro swarm pets.
• RS pets cost 81% more mana than Necro swarm pets and 196% more mana than Beast swarm pets.
• Magicians have two auras - Arcane Distillect and Theft of Essence - that increase pet damage. These can be applied to Necro/Beast swarm pets, but require a Mage in group.
• Magicians/Necros have 50% pet crit chance from Companion's Fury, while Beastlords have 40% pet crit chance.
• RS procs Conjurer's Synergy. This was an option brought up in EoK Beta for Defiler's Synergy, but at the time Necros were opposed because swarm pets (inclusive of RS) were not performing well in raids due to low ATK values. Primalist's Synergy comes from a combat ability (and thus has no opportunity cost to use).
• RS only ever summons one pet, while Beast swarm pets averaged 1.36 pets per cast (12% chance to spawn 4 pets) and Necro swarms summoned 3 pets per cast. This was changed last summer so that the Beast swarm summons an average of 1.12 pets per cast (12% chance to proc 2 pets) and the Necro swarm always summons 1 pet.

Prior to the pet consolidations, RS pets were the strongest on a per pet basis (which is a bit of a meaningless metric) both in terms of HP and average hit, while Necro pets were the strongest on a per cast basis when factoring in number of pets summoned (even with the shorter duration). Beasts had a slight advantage over RS HP-wise on a per cast basis, but did much less damage. After the pet consolidations, the Necro pet per cast performance was unchanged, while Beast pets saw a significant upgrade:



I think it's fair to say that the Beast swarm pet boosts probably were a function of someone looking at just the "Shrieking at the Moon" component of the spell, resulting in 1/2 the pets summoned (4 to 2) but about twice the damage/HP. This led to a very substantial boost in the overall power of the spell, given most of the time it only summoned one pet both before and after the patch. The Necro swarm pet, however, was just as powerful as it had always been, just spread over fewer pets.

This patch nerfs Necro/Beast pets so that Mage RS pets are the strongest pets both on a per pet and (except for Beast pet HP) per cast basis:



My personal opinion is that while the relative values of swarm pets (particularly post-consolidation) were questionable, whether or not a change was warranted, this patch went too far. There's no reason for a 30+% gap in damage output between the pets, particularly given the other advantages (cast/recast/auras) Mage swarm pets have. I do personally think the RS pet should have the highest damage per cast given the traditional pet power hierarchy, its high mana cost, and unique position as a "core" spammed DPS spell, but that doesn't mean there needs to be a large difference between classes.

I also think something that has gone unaddressed for far too long is the reliance of Necros/Beasts on Magicians for Theft of Essence, which is necessary to provide pets with the ATK values they need just to come to parity with raid boss AC. There really should be some kind of supplemental aura in raid zones, perhaps from the Empowered Banner (acknowledging this wouldn't work for open raid teams), that provides all swam pets with an ATK boost (or, alternatively, provides SPA 494 to pet owners).

TL;DR
It's not too hard to find potential rationale for these changes, but they miss the mark in a few key ways:

• The damage scaling between EM ranks for ToL and particularly LS pets is too low.
• The gap in output per cast between Bst/Nec and Mag swarm pets is too high (specifically, Bst/Nec swarm pets need to be brought up closer to Mage swarm levels).
• Bst/Nec swarm pets need a better solution for ATK in raid zones.

I was reading the comments, and saw this, and I had to log in to add my voice. NO ONE USES THE STUPID SPELL. Any new spell you come up with for Paladins tends to have no agro and no dps. Although Paladins are not a dps class, heals wont get the mob dead. You seem to have no problem giving SK's some defensive and healing abilities, why not give Paladins some dps/dps updates?

Frankly I think Sancus should be directly consulted on any conceptual change to pets every single time and given a commission.
The amount of detail, data and thoughtfulness in these responses is unmatched.