Test Update 08/12/2014 - Pet Changes Round 4

gehein skirthtamer in west karana. This wasn't on a test server just plain ole EQ. His parse the beastlord was also in group gear I might add.

Phantasmal Ward main problem is that it has to be recast every 36 seconds. It can be maintained 100% of the time versus a slowed argin hiz mob and almost 100% of time versus unslowed mobs. I would increase counters on it to 250 and give it a two minute recast timer and remove the timer conflict with aegis.

How did I do it? Focused paragon on self right before fight. I pulled a mob with slow, cast the spells and abilities in that screenshot. Consumption canni right after fight over. Unlike you I did not melee at all, just stood close enough that I could fire my 'melee' abilities and aa.

I'm not sure what else you want me to say, there was no secret.

I'm not really a good beastlord but I do have all relevant aa, focus, and a hot bar macro that more or less makes it as simple as mashing 1 button. The only spells I manually cast were the dots since I rarely use them and the swarm pet.

You're right you are not a really good beastlord you are the best! You did slightly more total damage than me in 48 less seconds with group gear and not max aa!!! I also did not melee as you implied. That would make me do more damage...

Sorry I thought looking at your breakdown that I saw melee strikes.

Your post is quite sarcastic and passive aggressive. Is there a reason for this? I'm sorry that I out dps'd you if that's what you're upset about. Were you casting a spell or clicking an ability at every available opportunity? Were you front loading dots to get full damage? We're you triaging your most damaging spells per cast time? These are just the basics of being an adequate dps player. In a group you want to pace yourself but when soloing and moloing the faster you get it dead the faster you have ooc regen available.

Outside of be necromancers soloing you will bet more kills per unit lock of time by going balls-out dps until mana is out and then using ooc to regen.

I am still trying to wrap my head around how using runes and heals as part of a "safe" dps rotation against yellows or multiples, is really even a solid strategy at all. Just to generalize, assuming your pet is at half or less life, and is taking 10-15k or more average/dmg hits, is a heal or rune really worth the time to cast? Mage spell Renewal (forget the name) takes roughly 3.5 seconds to cast and hits for I believe ~28k non-crit, ~55k crit with a group focus. That is 3.5 seconds for, at most, 55k incoming damage taken healed. The opportunity cost of choosing this would be instead casting either a rain, spear, and/or Rumbling servant, depending on what was available. The downside to choosing a heal is that the fight is prolonged for at least another 3.5 seconds, which means that 3.5 seconds worth of extra damage will still be coming. The downside to choosing NOT to heal is, obviously, a potentially dead pet

I am not online to check exact times, but just off memory, you should have in 3.5 seconds enough time to cast either one rain + RS...or spear + RS. Again, i don't have the numbers in front of me, but the total damage dealt of any of these combinations should be in the 100k-300k range, depending on variables such as gear, RS uptime etc. With RS, there is the added benefit of taunting off a mob, so I imagine it would always be preferable to a heal if it is available.

So for 3.5 seconds, you have a choice. If you believe your healer is not going to be able to get your pet to a safe health level, you spend roughly 3.5 seconds and lose 100-300k potential damage dealt to heal, hopefully 55k-ish pet health. If your pet is pushed back down to 50% health again immediately after, you could be creating a situation where you are spamming heals, and losing *increasing* amounts of potential damage dealt, which is prolonging the fight no matter how much other dps is incoming, still not getting the pets health to safe level and still losing the pet (depending on the situation)

A dead mob deals no damage, and just looking at the numbers, the time spent vs damage-output (healing vs dps), is incredibly inefficient for a mage choosing to heal instead of dps. Choosing to dps is ending the mob's damage output sooner, at a far more efficient rate, in regards to the numbers anyway. Without proof that the heal ABSOLUTELY kept the pet from dying (which we wouldn't have), there would no way to know it was not actually bad choice of the mage's spell use, actually setting the mage and his group back and putting them at MORE risk, by choosing to heal his pet instead of dps

This is just in regards to the heal. Am I getting totally off base?

Heal with group focus and cleric merc buff takes exactly 2.6 seconds to cast for Mage and necro.

Whether or not you think it's worth the damage you give up to cast it - welcome to needing to make a choice. You can opt to continue dpsing and hope your healer will catch up. You can play it safe and heal your pet. Decision and resultant consequences are you to you.

But isn't that the point? If you want to be tanking you need to expect to have to support your pet to some degree. Time lost supporting pet is damage potential lost. From a balance standpoint - that's a good thing.

Welcome to not being so sarcastic. There were choices to be made before, believe it or not even when pets were OP, I was still using "oh crap" pet defensives as much as I will be post-nerf, it's just that I took on riskier pulls at a faster kill-rate when I had a stronger pet. The only difference is that heals sucked before.

What I'm wondering is, how much less do they suck now. 2.6 cast time for 25-50k damage, still a terrible rate of return. Like I said, I think there are still fewer situations where heals are "worth it" than you believe.

Mage's heal's REAL cost is the potential lost damage dealt from the mage. The amount healed is not really removed, it is simply delayed, as the mob will still die that much slower and be dealing that damage regardless. Unless mage heals are brought to be better than the potential lost damage dealt (aka on par with beastlord's) I can't see them being that functional. Mages will use them for a while, until the math proves them to be near-useless even when pets are critical, and useless in every other situation. You cannot call a heal 'useful' just based on the fact it heals. Mage's older version of heals still, technically, delayed pet death. A heal of +10 hp technically delays pet death. They are just not useful

Since when is a 55k heal not worth it?

Assuming you don't get a crit, not at all. If you're lucky enough to get a crit...not that often, considering you could do more than double the amount of damage in that time, and the heal is just moving that mob's damage back a few seconds?

Oh really?

Let's look at the round by rounds again shall we? Here are the two pet classes have 70% or more of their time available casting spells other then runes - assuming they cast the runes whenever they are up.

Necromancer (with necro slow):


Magician (no slow):


Please note that the necro fight lasted 321 seconds and the mage fight lasted 643 seconds. The mage pet is taking melee rounds more frequently, but if the lines look closer together, a big part of that is the fight being twice as long and being squished into the same size graph. Pet alone did the entire damage to drop the mob to zero for the mage. The necromancer pet did about half the damage. Mage sat around twiddling his thumbs > 70% of the time to gather this parse just to get a good sampling of what those 3 buffs did for his pet. With a mage spending that remaining 70% of his time working in rains and swarm pets (efficiency in a solo situation), this fight would have been over pretty quickly.

Each individual spike represents a moment in time when the monster connected a single round of melee.

Mage:
As you will notice, the highest round received for the mage pet was 33,000. Keep in mind that the individual max hit for these monsters is about 13.5k - which means the highest damage possible is 54k - and there were a total 4 rounds in 10 minutes that passed the 30k mark. Less than half of the rounds received total'd 20k or more.

Necromancer:
As you will notice, the highest round received in was 27k. There were a total of 5 rounds in 5:20 that even broke 20k. The max hit for these monsters is about 13.5k - which means the highest damage possible is 54k. Many of the rounds never even broke 10k. This monster was slowed with necro innate abilities.

Now what's the base heal on your pet heal? Without a crit a good 25k? With a crit 55k? What's the base hit points on your earth pet? What is a mercenary capable of healing for?

Since when is a heal that at worst is stronger than your average melee round (even for the mage half the melee rounds were under 20k) and at best close to double your highest expected melee round well more than twice what any given melee round is expected to be ... since when is that heal ...

Unless your goal is to be the sole healer for your pet, your pet heals exist simply to supplement your healer and give them a chance to catch up, much like the knight supplements his healer with his or her own innate self healing power. This is assuming that you get incredibly unlucky with a few bad rounds in close proximity - but as parses have extensively shown, this is beyond rare given pet baseline mitigation. The goal is to play a quick catch up, and your pet healing capability is actually nothing to sneeze at even as is. Regardless, if you were to search my posts you'd also see that I have more than once casually hinted that maybe ... just maybe ... the necromancer and mage community should consider petitioning for expansion of their healing aa lines to bring them closer to beastlord capabilities.

Assuming you are trying to "go it alone" and molo content, the necro who has superior spell based intervention and a slow at their disposal is clearly in better shape. But a group focused EM15 earth pet has 185,000hp - that's a big pool to work with. If your healer mercenary is unable to keep up with incoming damage with occasional patch healing from you - perhaps you aren't intended to straight up molo that content. Grab a partner (preferably a slower though any 2nd person will do for another healer merc) or learn how to pick your battles and pull more carefully.

If you're just expecting to waltz into the highest level endgame grouping zone and pull 2-3 mobs willy-nilly and faceroll your way through it - ever stop to think that maybe ... just maybe ... that zone was not intended for you to faceroll it all by yourself?

If you cast a heal and it doesn't crit then average mob damage can exceed the amount of the non crit heal. The non crit heal will average 25k healed while mob will average 35k damage in the same period if mob is averaging 10k dps in the 3.5 seconds it took you to cast the heal.

If your pet was in trouble in the first place as you suggest because heal is being used to supplement cleric mercs heals then the pet may well be dead if a heal doesn't crit. You're better off using cascading are aegis that you know will give your cleric merc time to respond. Spamming heal every 3.5 second is only good for doing exactly that. That being chain casting it non stop.. It's only useful if you need to heal more then once every 12 seconds otherwise cascading and Aegis will heal / prevent damage more reliably then heal will. If you do nothing but spam the heal it will out heal every other choice because of low recast time.

The mobs you are parsing against do not do enough damage for a single mob to out DPS a cleric mercs ability to out put heals as such the spikes you show also will barely exceed average non crit necro heal.

Form a balance standpoint everything was fine.

Tanks where ment to be able to take a lot of damage and not die. In a trade off they where not ment to do as much dps. At lest for a war isn't like 90% of your disk are 1. aggro of some sort, or 2 stuff to help you take less damage.

Pet classes where ment to dish out the damage but our pet are not ment to take a hit as well as a tank. Our aa/spells are 90% made to burn down the mob so that we don't need very many deff aa/spells for our pets.


The object in any fight is to get the mob dead before the cleric ether 1. runs out of mana or 2 can't keep up with the spike damage a mob can do.

So how is a molo fight of 1v1 trash mob not fair.

A tank dose this fight by using disc/aa to alow his merc to keep him alive without burning all its mana and dealing with the spike damage.

A pet class dose this fight by burning down the mob asap(with a pet rune done now and then) before the merc can run out of mana or there is to much spike damage.

Now depending on the trash mob there are different levels of what you are going have to do. For example the difference between a db con in Rof t1 vs a yellow con in cotf t2.

On live a db con in Rof t1 I expect to barley if ever cast any runes and just do dps. Just as would think that a war could just use his/her light deff disc/aa on it. The yellow con in cotf t2 I would expect to have to cast more runes to do the same thing. Just as I would expect to a war to have to burn his/her bigger deff disc/aa.

On test for both fights nothing has changed for the war. For pet classes we now have to do more work to get the same job done. If anything its no longer balanced anymore.

Most necros/mages I know setup their spell lineups to do as much damage as they can while still having the spells need to deal with adds and anything else that might come up.

But I have not loaded a pet heal in forever. Pet rune yes. Pet heal no. That is what I pay the merc for.

Choice!
It's the best part of being a real person, but if used incorrectly can also be the most dangerous.
Making choices on a regular basis is the best part to a healthy decision making process. Most medical professionals reccommend making at least 8 choices per day. Do you make more than 8? Less?

Yay stanley parable.

And most of the feedback from the pet haters displays they made the wrong choice a character select.

And most of the feedback from the pet loving side is that it's perfectly "balanced" to let a merc keep a pet alive with impunity in the hardest if content against 1-3 mobs. Mainly because they don't want to play an active role of keeping the pet alive because it's a distraction from their real job of dps.

Look, I can make snide, non constructive comments too?

No, it wasn't. The devs don't think so and neither does a lot of the community.

But they're just a conspiracy hating on other people's play style, right? No validity to anything they say because they're just jealous of pet users and blinded by that jealousy. And pet classes are the pinnacle of impartiality in this discussion because their ability to molo the vast majority of the game vs. having to group with at least 1 other person/friend/box like everyone else to accomplish something remotely similar is up in the air.

When swarming or headshot were out of hand, people should have just rolled sks or rangers for easy mode exp, god forbid the devs change something that they feel and the stats showed to be a bit out of whack.

They're not going to destroy pet tanking, but it's not unreasonable that people should have to play a more active role in keeping their pet-that-fills-in-for-the-tank-archetype alive through active abilities instead of just all out burning things dead. If those active abilities are insufficient to the task, then they need further beef ups. But I'm guessing the response will be: we don't want to be a pet cleric.

Necro tank pet needs further changes upwards. I do not care to know all the magic behind the curtain I only care if after everything at the end of the day that my pet can handle tanking so both incoming dps and spikes are what matter from my point of view. If my pet does 3 of 10 things better then players but all 10 come into play when tanking then I don't see the issue. As long as player tanks are better as a whole how they get there doesn't matter outside of someone having a complex. It appears there is little to no difference among EM types anymore.

Parses for necro warrior pets with all factors the same between each parse, the only changes were EM. I would evacuate after 5 minutes and repeat parse on same mob with different EM pet. All pets had certitude with phantasmal, kildrukaun AA, cascading spam casted as they refreshed which is the most effort we can put into our pet, healed by a journeyman 5 merc healer with 2 ranks of healing adept. All mobs were slowed by necro as well. I have max pet AA and raid spells. So this is about the absolute best case scenario for a necro pet and with me doing nothing but supporting him non stop ie not something we should have to do or be tuned around outside of a named or rare quest mob.

300's
EM15 vs a bandit dark blue con from Tower of Rot - 4777 incoming dps spikes as high as 60K
EM19 vs a bandit dark blue con from Tower of Rot - 4895 incoming dps spikes as high as 40K

300's
EM15 vs a murkweb spider blue con from Argin - 4933 incoming dps spikes as high as 38K
EM19 vs a murkweb spider blue con from Argin - 5224 incoming dps spikes as high as 71K

320's
EM15 vs a keeper of flame yellow con from Argin - 7410 incoming dps spikes as high as 44K
EM19 vs a keeper of flame yellow con from Argin - 7076 incoming dps spikes as high as 44K

EM15 vs 2 dark blue mobs or 2 yellow con mobs from ToR or Argin disintegrated almost instantly.
EM19 vs 2 dark blue mobs or 2 yellow con mobs from ToR or Argin disintegrated almost instantly.


I am not sure why but necro DI's seem to fall as DI 3 most frequently then lots of lower hits with the next highest % being DI 20 its like that for every fight. Why would DI 20 be the second most consistent DI round we see?

I remember when Daegun's thread was to get tanks a boost, because he felt current content was too hard. I remember calling him out in that thread for what it really was, a call for a nerf on pet classes because an unskilled Warrior ( or afk ) couldn't out do what a pet can. Even though using ANY SINGLE DISC would solve that problem, he felt that wasn't enough.

I'm not sure why so many people are against a cleric being able to heal a pet, they have massive HP/AC and even a ton of pet AA's to make them able to tank.

I've always had to help my pet out during a named, with runes and heals, prior to these changes. The changes just make it even more support intensive. Which then effects DPS. Choices of healing or DPS should be when soloing, not Moloing..I pay a merc to heal for a reason.

It's nice to see the tank community getting along for once, but this is really just a lynch mob attacking pet classes.

I was a Warrior for a long time, I never had a problem with pets, I knew I could out tank them any freaking day, do you have problems doing that? Maybe it's time to switch classes because you obviously aren't very good at your current position.

I'd like people to start naming their mains and their guilds if they're putting their 2 cents into the discussion, that way your guild leaders can see which of their tank team feels a pet would out tank them.

Now, do I feel a pet should be able to tank a raid mob? No.

Do I think a pet should tank better than an AFK tank? Yes. Why? Because tanks get so many discs that it's not a problem when they're active, pets can't even come close.

Do I want to have to support my pet against simple mobs? No. Why? Because our line AA's/spells aren't nearly as extensive as a tanks nor nearly as effective.

What do tanks say about that when it comes into the conversation? Oh, well you should petition to have that looked at..LOL that's just funny to me.


Devs, RS pets are still to weak in their current state, they die too quickly. Please either give them another boost of AC/HP OR adjust salvo.

And the Mages who want half their DPS to come from their pets. Please re roll.

Also, making the enhanced minion effect scale down for raids, making it 2%-3% more effective then a group version is the suck.

Ok. So as a shadowknight when I whip out a cleric merc against a hard mob, I should only have to devote a very small amount of my attention to self healing? After all I'm paying that merc precious platinum to be the healer! Then I can go full dps mode with the dps we don't have to burn that named dead and collect the loots. Sounds good.