Test Update 06/11/2019 - Patch Notes and Discussions

Pretty sure they heal pretty quickly once they're blurred, and thus your 55% damage will quickly become less than half the damage done unless you also want to follow every mob around the zone and keep damaging it, in which case I don't see you being very successful.

Yeah devs would not have though of that.
Killcredit does not reset when it reaches 100% again ?

Did you even test this brilliant idea.

Quoted for truth. Not to disparage Yinla, as I think he was joking, but how many people complain about changes on test but never bother to go to test to test the changes? Its so easy - just /testcopy - and its usually an instant process. Login to test and there you are! I even have 2 Svann's there. Bard Magic!

Is there a minimum CotH distance before it breaks charm? If not, can there be? What I'm imagining is a grouped magician accidentally hitting their group CotH hotkey or using it instead of single target when a subset of the group needs to be moved. Even if the group member who has a charmed pet was already by the magician, their charm would drop without a minimum distance check.

Play with better magicians.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been in a group with someone charming and someone accidently hits invisibility on the charmer. You deal with it then. You can deal with accidental CotH (seriously … how many times has that ever happened to you?).

They can't even separate the live and beta servers!
Something that boggles the mind.

Translocation spells can no longer be activated or accepted while in combat.

For the love of god why? Why would you do this?

Apparently the TLP players are jacka*ses who make it so the rest of us can't have nice things. /shurg

1st they came for our illusion thru doors,
Then they came for our teleport in combat.
Next, they'll come for our levitation...........

have to agree. its almost if the TLPers want to drag the live servers down.

They come back and they want it to be "original" except none of them seem to remember what that was really like. Some even want "new" content that's geared around the low intensity play style of original. At least we know that is off the table

they should have set up TLP like test is. its own special log in form the patcher. so that stuff on it could be changed without effecting live.

Well the difference from TLP and live is often that the live players are anti social farming with a box crew having not seen another actual player for a week.

Did you set your toons to fully automated on a TLP server so you could type that slight towards players on Live?

Nice to see the leader of the FoH forum looking so good...

Been playing this game for 20 years man, still not an anti social bone in my body. I'd take a real player over a boxed toon any day of the week, twice on sunday.

Yes, us live server players are so anti-social that the devs are having to implement changes to keep us from KSing and griefing other players.... oh wait.

It looks like this patch includes a number of changes to how fire pets cast spells. I'm not sure if that was intended given the lack of a patch note, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to assume it is. I'm going to start off with some parses from live and test. These are all with EM 27, Burnout XIII Rk. III, Iceflame Keep Rk. III, and fire swords. The combat dummies were Malo'ed, were white cons, and had 2529 AC.

Water Pet (Sustained):
Combat Dummy Azia in 1202s, 33354k @27748 -- Puksu (Sancus) 33354k@(27748 in 1202s)

Fire Pet (Sustained) (Live):
Combat Dummy Neza II in 1324s, 30225k @22828 -- Puksu (Sancus) 30225k@(22828 in 1324s)
17.7% less DPS than a water pet

Fire Pet (Sustained) (Test):
Combat Dummy Azia in 1202s, 19001k @15808 -- Puksu (Sancus) 19001k@(15808 in 1202s)
30.7% less DPS than a live fire pet, 43.0% less DPS than a water pet

Air Pet (Sustained):
Combat Dummy Azia in 1216s, 20439k @16808 -- Puksu (Sancus) 20439k@(16808 in 1216s)
6.3% more DPS than a test fire pet (it's FBO DPS is less, but nonetheless I thought this was worth including)

Water Pet (Frenzied Burnout):
Combat Dummy Azia in 1211s, 96543k @79721 -- Puksu (Sancus) 96543k@(79721 in 1211s)

Fire Pet (Frenzied Burnout) (Live):
Combat Dummy Neza II in 1202s, 54918k @45689 -- Puksu (Sancus) 54918k@(45689 in 1202s)
42.7% less DPS than a water pet

Fire Pet (Frenzied Burnout) (Test):
Combat Dummy Azia in 1253s, 67828k @54132 -- Puksu (Sancus) 67828k@(54132 in 1253s)
18.5% more DPS than a live fire pet, 32% less DPS than a water pet

Right now, on live, fire pets summoned by Embodiment of Fire cast Fire Elemental Bolt XII (47313 damage). They appear hard coded to cast that spell approximately every 4 seconds. During Frenzied Burnout, they cast their normal bolt at about the same rate (every ~4.1 seconds vs every 4.0). Additionally, they have a chance to cast Frenzied Elemental Bolt LXV (115259 damage) every ~11 seconds, on average.

On test, fire pets now the spell they cast based on their focus. An unfocused pet casts the same spell as the live pet, an EM 21 pet casts Fire Elemental Bolt XII Rk. IV (51975 damage), and an EM 27 pet casts Fire Elemental Bolt XII Rk. VII (56637 damage). On paper that's a great change, as it creates some scaling with focus levels. Unfortunately, fire pets also lost the hard coded 4 second cast rate on the spell; instead it's respecting its 5 second minimum recast and averaging a cast every 9.77 seconds. During Frenzied Burnout, it appears that cast rate is supplemented by two additional casts of the same Fire Elemental Bolt spell every 5 seconds (leading to an average rate of ~2 casts per second).

The net result is that fire pets do notably less sustained damage, but do marginally more damage for the duration of Frenzied Burnout. This has pushed their overall damage output farther away from water pets, and their DPS without Frenzied Burnout is lower than that of air pets. I don't know what the general intentions are for fire pets, but my impression is that they should be a comparable alternative to water pets in the absence of buffs/adps (water pets scale better with buffs/adps). They were too weak to fill that role prior to these changes, and now they're even worse. The scaling with focus rank is great, and I like the FBO changes.

If they retained that 4s hardcoded cast rate, that'd bring their sustained DPS up to ~24170 ((56637 / 4) - (56637 / 9.77) + 15808 = 24170), which would at least keep them in the same ballpark as water. Their FBO DPS would then go up to ~62494. That's quite a bit lower than water's FBO DPS, but it's better than it was. There are very few scenarios where I'd use fire either way, since it has no advantage over water even without ADPS. It will get closer on higher AC targets, but water is going to have significantly more buffs (and Theft of Essence) in a raid. If devs are interested in suggestions to make fire pets useful, I'm happy to write up some suggestions for that, but my goal is at the very least to not see them get worse.

You forgot they took our updated NPC graphics too!

And they wonder why there is conflict between live and tlp players.

The difference is Live server players have respect for other players, respecting camps and not griefing to get what they want. TLP players have no respect for anyone about anything.

I get a bit giddy any time Sancus breaks out the hard maths, and thanks for your thorough analysis.

But I have to ask--is anyone even using fire pets?