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

I play a BL these days,have played 14 years straight. Im May I start a job every year and it ends in August so I play very little during that time. My beasty is lvl 100 ,cotf t1 mostly,2 t2 pieces of gear with em15,6400ish aa,95% of pet aas done. These changes have made it so I can no longer continue where I left off. I die repeatedly against even cons in Ew and Xorrbs moloing. I cant duo the DH ha with my 100 druid friend anymore,my pet just dies or mana on heals. I couldnt molo or duo any cotf named before or now ,so that hasnt changed. But,I cant kill Galrok in Ew anymore,and struggle moloing any SL named for that matter. This is very frustrating,I cant molo,groups are super rare unless its a pet group. These changes are goong to affect the lower 90% of EQ players,and just cater to a small group of raiders who are upset with pets tanking raids. The casual game i.e. moloing,soloing and the occasional duo or group is slowing going the way of the dinosaur if they continue with all the negative junk they are putting the majority of the player base through,

Beastlord parses.

Goal of parses: Evaluate impact of beastlord spell based pet defensives and impact of beastlord warder innate procs/reflects on tanking power.

Fight 1 Methods: Mob pulled with beastlord Incapacitate. This debuff was maintained for duration of fight. Mob was not slowed. Bst warder equipped with standard mage summoned gear along with standard beastlord buffs to include haste, spirit of Nak, and Plakt's protection. Mob was killed sole-ly by Beastlord. Low level dot used to make sure bst did some damage and thus parse was measurable. Since beastlord only has 2 spells (Aegis of Nefori and Auspice of Shadows) compared to 2 spells and 1 aa on the other two pet classes, I chose to heal this pet by myself without a mercenary helping. It was trivial. On parse 1 you will notice that Jaerol's mending was used excessively. I was spamming this spell as well as overhealing with Salvo of Blezon because I wanted to see just how high they could crit. The highest targetable heal crit I saw was 33k. The highest pet heal crit I saw was 92.3k, casts in 1 second. Promised and Heal over time were kept on pet.

Fight 2 Methods: Exactly as above, but I simply slowed it with Sha's reprisal. I did some overhealing, but as you will tell based on number of spells casts, I still was doing some over healing.

FIGHT ONE

RBR


Breakdown


DPS


Spell casts


FIGHT TWO

RBR


Breakdown


DPS


Spell casts


Incoming dps with just 2 support spells and pet innates: 3585
Incoming dps with both of the above + bst aa slow: 2720

Baseline avoidance for pet: ~25%
"Avoidance" with pet innates + spells: 51.2%
Impact of slow on total pet avoidance: 56.14%

No slow:
Mage Earth dps with mage support: 3981
Beastlord warder: 3585
Necro war pet: 2827
Group SK cycling all discs/spells/abilities: 4135

Discussion:

Here's the beastlord warder. Plakt's makes it take less damage per hit, accounting for the lower dps compared to mage earth pet despite the fact that beastlord does not have Aegis. Mage + slow would probably (maybe) pass the beastlord warrior due to innate mitigation and the added avoidance from aa Aegis of Kild. What the beastlord lacks in the aa ability, it makes up for in spades with healing power.

Spamming just salve of blezon every 5 seconds as it is up: 13k heals per second
Spamming salve of blezon + Jaerol's healing 1/2/1/2/1/2: 18k heals per second
Add in heal over time 3305 per tick is another 550 heals per second
Add in promised = delayed heal (decent) rolling in predictably

A beastlord healing his own pet is a sight to behold.

Interestingly enough, my last parse being only 438 seconds (7.3 minutes) was short enough that the BL warder never saw a max hit.



Total hits = 290
DI 1 = 156 = 53.7%
DI 19 = 1 = 0.3%
DI 20 didn't happen at all, so 0%

I'm sure if this parse had been extended the BST warder would have eventually seen a more evened out spread. Remember that in the first 10 minutes of my parse with earth warder 1 saw 1 DI20 hit, the second ten minutes saw another 5 which averaged out to a max hit every 3:20.

Ongoing discussion:

All 3 pet "tanks" have now had their lesser abilities (those that are available every 18s to 1 min) interrogated along with those neato pet innate reflect block buffs to examine how it changes the nature of their damage. The results are fairly impressive, with the necro warrior winning the gold star for surprising me and actually leap-frogging the other two.

Observations:

Defensive activates:
1) Beastlord has the lowest potency activated abilities to increase their pets avoidance
2) Necros have the highest potency activated abilities to increase pet avoidance
3) Mages have the beefiest pet at baseline for raw ac, their activated abilities falls squarely in the middle.

Mage earth root recourse, however, has challenges. It will only fire on individual melee strikes of 15k or more. Outside of named mobs which are root immune, finding mobs that hit for over 15k is challenging and given base mitigation is such that these hits will be very rare, I'm not sure how often this recourse is going to effectively fire.

Healing:
1) Beastlord has undeniably the greatest healing potential - easily several times higher than the other two pet classes. With all attention/focus dedicated to this job, I'd wager they could rival a real PC cleric in focused healing on their pet (pet fast heal + their regular heal btw cooldowns, rolling promised and HoT). Part of this is the speed of the primary heal cast (with a 4 sec lockout) allowing for more casts per time as opposed to the other 2 just chaining it, and part of it being the hybrid aa trees for healing.
2) If you consider the reflective heal portion of Cascading line, necros actually come in second for healing and will have Reluctant Benevolence random fires to give uncontrolled splash healing, pet also lifetaps
3) Mages have have a direct heal and a promised line (necro does not have promised) but ... has the least healing power.

Effectiveness of "player input" on their pets survivability:

All 3 pets when properly supported boast impressive tanking prowess as of the 4.0 test change. Their respective communities, however, either do not seem to appreciate this or are intentionally downplaying this prowess.
-For the beastlord, those 2 supportive (non heal) spells have a ridiculously long recast time - like over 30-45+ seconds each. This free's up the beastlord to spend all but 3-4 spell casts per minute healing their pet and casting dps spells.
-For the necromancer, the fastest recasting one is cascading at 18 seconds, and it is definitely worth recasting on repop. Even chain casting these 3 spells, that leaves 70% of their time available to either assist in healing their pet or dps the mob down.
-For the magician, this one has medium in terms of recast speed (all 3 examined together), freeing up the mage to spend a good 75-80% of their total time not casting these 3 spells and dedicating it to either dps, or patch healing their pet.

I could draw parallels and examples with regards to player tanks, but I've already done that.

What is clear, is that pet owner intervention is NOT a waste of time, is NOT in any way lacking, and doesn't really take up a huge chunk of their time. This thought that we need to keep bumping their mitigation to deal with average dps is a farce. Effectively using their tools, all 3 of these pets at EM15 are taking fewer spikes and less average dps than a dedicated group geared shadowknight, and their owners still have available time to out-dps that shadowknight quite handily.

Thoughts Aristo?

Last parse for the night.

BL warder (not even the best mitigating mage earth pet)

What happens when you use a druid to attack debuff a mob and give the pet ac songs from a bard?

You get this:



20 minutes of fighting - notice what's missing?

DIs 19 and 20 are what's missing.

Pseudomonas`s warder - vs - An avenging treesoul
Attempts 2253 100%
Missed 207 9.19%
Dodged 50 2.22%
Parried 62 2.75%
Blocked 155 6.88%
Riposted 73 3.24%
Absorbed 74 3.28%
2118 964 42.79%
2650 52 2.31%
3183 46 2.04%
3715 47 2.09%
4248 46 2.04%
4779 60 2.66%
5312 39 1.73%
5844 47 2.09%
6377 39 1.73%
6909 52 2.31%
7442 59 2.62%
7974 41 1.82%
8506 57 2.53%
9038 31 1.38%
9571 15 0.67%
10103 24 1.07%
10636 9 0.4%
11168 4 0.18%
Total "hits": 1632
DI 1: 964 = 59%
DI 11: 59 = 3.6%
DI 12: 41 = 2.5%
DI 13: 57 = 3.5%
DI 14: 31 = 1.9%
DI 15: 15 = 0.9%
DI 16: 24 = 1.4%
DI 17: 9 = 0.5%
DI 18: 4 = 0.2%
DI 19: 0 = 0.0%
DI 20: 0 = 0.0%

Probability of a max hit? 0%
Probability of the two highest hits 0%
Probability of a DI 16-20 hit (most lethal DI spectrum)? 2.1%
Probability that any given hit will even be over DI10 (DIs 11-20)?? 14.5%

This isn't even a parse of the mage earth pet (highest mitigation), it's the beastlord warder.

Aristo, this it the problem with trying to balance incoming dps on pets with simply boosting their ac. On being summoned and not equipped they might look ok to you (they certainly don't look ok to me even on summoning), but if you fail to take into account how each piece of gear, each buff, and each debuff dramatically impact the outcome ... what was the point of these changes again? Over the last few test "updates", you've bumped these pets to the point unacceptably close to where we have started. They are so very close to that drop off that, as you can see above), you can quite easily push them over the edge.

I would hope you guys go back to the drawing board and find a more creative way to balance pets.

Says who?

There is a trade-off. You produce entirely too much damage to be a tank. If you think you should be able to tank that well, you should be brought down in DPS. Class interdependency is the foundation of multiplayer in this game, and mages are in violation of the give and take.

The argument that "we have always done this" is fallacious. Before they nerfed complete heal, changed the pace of damage incoming, and buffed all burst heals across the priests, clerics had "always been the only good healers". So by that reasoning shamans and druids should be terrible healers to this day. But your statement isn't even true. Epic Mages, for a short time in Kunark/Velious/Luclin, had fantastic tanks, but it wasn't until pet focus became very common since SoF/SoD that mages have been getting to where we are now. That's not "always". It's also not new, but it's not good either.

Raid boss mobs should not be the only ground you can't tread. There are plenty of non-raiding tanks in this game with full group gear that are inferior to these pets in mitigation and inferior to their mages in damage. How is that balanced? You cast a spell and replace a player.

I have a pretty simple fix for all of this. Make the non-earth pets poor tanks, make the earth pets great tanks, remove all mage nukes, and buff the damage of the non-earth pets. Now you're a switch hitter. Summon earth pet, and you're a tank. Summon anything else, and you're not. You get to tank and damage, but not simultaneously.

Daegun...

As you said yourself, these abilities have relatively long refresh, so it leaves plenty of time between being able to use them for the same incoming DPS of a mob to wipe a pet out.

And your parses, of course, again is only versus a SINGLE mob...

You are fully aware versus 2, 3, or more mobs, the rune abilities become practically meaningless.

96 air/monk pet with RoF T1 focus and attack off was passively mitigating and took incoming DPS on par with me with the 2.0 AC levels. Keep in mind this is a Tier 1 non-tank pet cast by a level 96 mage missing a lot of AA vs a level 100 Tier 4 geared warrior. This was against Tier3 trash mobs

The untold story is that I died making the first parses while the air pet never dropped below 50%. Pet HP advantages don't make it into parse data.

On a higher level, it's looking like is that pets have a much more narrow range of effectiveness vs player tanks. It would be great if someone with max pet AA could do an EM20 vs EM15 vs EM12 pet focus comparison. Group tanks vs raid tanks are night and day, but it doesn't appear to be the same story with pets.

Zoran, I think you have a great idea there.

Take away half of my self DPS.

I am not a great magician, only average (2 out of 4 other guild magicians generally beat me on parse). I generally sustain about 90-95k dps vs a single mob raid event, burst to only 150-160k.

So, as an average magician, take half of that, and give it to DPS pets. So, my water pet, with normal raid buffs, will now sustain 47k and burst to 77k DPS...

And I get that much DPS just for siccing pet on a mob.

Yep, melee DPS toons won't have an issue with that at all... Have a feeling the hatred being felt from tanks over pets (which is IMO unjustified, good tanks DO tank better than pets 99% of the time) is nothing that would compare to melee DPS hatred over 'AFK dps' pets.

Except they would be justified, IMO... A rogue cannot sustain 47k DPS just autoattacking a single target, pretty sure not even close.

Also, don't try and say a DPS pet should die easily either. In fact, if anything, they should get some of the 'lifesaving' abilities of DPS classes, to ensure their survival during raids. Mend, weaponshield, agro deflection stuff, whatever.

Refresh timers:

Beastlord:
Aegis of Nefori - 36 seconds
Auspice of Shadows - 48 seconds
Salve of Blezon - 4 seconds (40k-92k heal)
Promised Amelioration - 20 seconds to fire
Huaene's Melioration - lasts 2 minutes
Jaerol's Mending - instant refresh (should you really - and i mean REALLY) need something
Replenish Companion - emergency

Necromancer:
Aegis of Kildrukuan - 27 seconds (by the time it finishes casting)
Phantasmal ward - 36 seconds (lasts for 70 attacks so it's up for most of those 36 seconds)
Cascading boneshield - 18 seconds
Algid Mending - instant refresh (2.6 sec cast focused) - Crits upwards to 58k group focus
Replenish Companion - emergency

Magician:
Aegis of Kildrukuan - 27 seconds (by the time it finishes casting)
Aegis of Nefori - 36 seconds
Auspice of Shadows - 48 seconds
Promised Amelioration - 20 seconds to fire
Renewal of Hererra - instant refresh (2.6 sec cast focused) - Crits upwards of 58k group focus
Replenish Companion - emergency

If you'll notice, there is never a moment in time that there isn't something you can do for your pet defensively. Yes the rune/block abilities have longer refreshes. There's no recast time on your heal - so no, there's never "plenty of time" when there's not something you can be doing to help your pet not wipe out. The beastlord has a refresh on his primary heal, but it casts 1.6 seconds faster and he's got a single target regular heal that's nothing to scoff at if he absolutely needed it (ie his big bad heal didn't already more or less complete heal his pet).

But, as the DI spread shows - pet mitigation results in very steady predictable incoming damage. Getting caught with your pants down is far less likely with a pet tanking than a PC tanking. The spikes come far less frequently.

Earth pet also has 185 thousand hit points (higher than any raid tank) with just certitude. That paired with less frequent spikes - really should not be getting caught with pants down around your ankles ever. Being caught thus is nobody's fault but your own. And if your healer really can't keep up with the damage while you are spamming your instant refresh heals - well sir, you bit off way more than you could chew in the first place.

Please refrain from exaggeration.

They will block the same raw total damage against 2 or 3 targets as they will vs 1 target. That raw amount blocked will just amount to a smaller proportion of the total incoming damage - because that just doubled or tripled. They are every bit as valuable and worth using - arguably more so because now your healer is dealing with much higher total dps to heal through. Do paladin self heals and sk lifetaps magically increase by 200-300% when they are confronted with 2 or 3 mobs?

Perhaps if 2's and 3's are that dangerous, you should pull more carefully? If a ranger's tanking and accidentally pulls 3 .... fine pink mist the moment weaponshield wears off.

Or are you just trying to compare it directly to their *big 3*?

"all 3 of these pets at EM15 are taking fewer spikes and less average dps than a dedicated group geared shadowknight, and their owners still have available time to out-dps that shadowknight quite handily."

Please post the data that confirms that a beastlord with a pet tank and range fighting can out dps a SK. I highly doubt you can. I know for a fact that tanks in my guild will smoke me in dps if I am range dpsing.

Beastlords shouldn't be in this discussion period. We don't even come close to the dps of a Mage or necro range fighting. Even if my pet can survive tanking 3 mobs with a merc healer and myself patch healing, do you have any clue how long and inefficient it would be to get those dead?? Any tank with similar raid gear and max aa would have them dead way before me. Again my pet to me and many other beasts I would assume is a temporary form of CC.

How much of a beastlord's damage comes from nukes, swarm pet, dots (lol I know dots for BLs are a joke) and "melee" aa's that can be fired while just outside of the mob's hit box?

I appreciate that you are capable of less dps at range than a magician or necromancer. I'm also aware that your spell based is not a small portion of your damage potential. Yes, you give up a lot dps by letting your pet tank - but bear in mind that this crutch is also your only line of defense should you ever need to defend the "why" behind you being able to heal your pet literally several times better than the other pet classes. As I've already said - chaining your 1 sec pet heal with a single target heal waiting for refresh is a good 14k heals per second, not counting the promised line or the heal over time. Given that beastlords can also heal their group mates, with a bit of careful planning and pulling - there's a lot of content that you can play tank and cleric ... not just tank and dps.

Now go parse verse a yellow feaster in ToR (single yellow con trash mob) with the same setup.

You will see that with em 19, phantasmal rk 3, algid rk 3, cascading boneshield rk 3, aegis AA, AA slow, max pet AA, j5 merc with healing adept and with owner spamming heals between runes that the pet dies. So a raid focused pet with 2 dedicated healers, using all his fast reuse defensive stuff on a slowed single trash mob and its splat city every time.

Stupid question but how does one get gamparse to pick up pet tanking stuff to link my own data if I get the chance?

I am fully aware that beastlords can heal their warder well. What I am wondering is why this bothers you so much?? No beast can pet tank and do insane dps like a mag or a necro. This seems to be what is pissing you off. A class that can tank very well and dps very well... A beastlord is not that class. Period....

But since you asked nicely:





I actually wasn't bringing my A game with that one.

And I just realized that I didn't spend all the nearly 5000 of my aa from my /reset aa earlier today (Test server).

Yet without capped aa and without breaking a sweat me and fluffy and swarm fluffies put out 16,659dps

No burns or long cooldowns were used.

I'm about to spend the 5k i have unspent (many of my nuke aas) and repeat this parse.

Please notice that the monster did a whopping 3397dps to my pet.

So, what I get from this is that necro war pets are better than mage earth pets, and Daegun won't parse against 2 mobs because it would negate his entire argument. Since no one has argued that pet classes aren't good tanks against single mobs, continually posting parses of them against solo mobs doesn't accomplish much. I'm pretty sure the devs are skilled at single mob parses by now.

Ah, that's more like it:





I'm sure I could do better with practice.

19,840dps without using any major discs/burns

Pet took 3775 dps

Cleric merc almost fell asleep healing my pet.

You were saying you wanted parses of a beastlord covering tanking duties while out-dpsing a shadowknight from ranged? Bear in mind that my beastlord is in group gear only. Show me a shadowknight who without support will put out that kind of damage - and I don't think I was even doing it at my best - and I am certainly nowhere near proficient with the beastlord ... I'll admit that I'm probably pretty terrible. Would I have done more meleeing? You betcha.

You don't need to parse against two mobs to see what the impacts of those abilities would be. Simple arithmetic, using the raw numbers he provided, will do it.

Double incoming hits. Halve the improvement gained by active playing of the character (runes, blocks, whatever).

It doesn't matter though, since everybody hurts more against two mobs - pet classes should as well.

I am soooo sorry you are right.... You should be able to keep that pace all day.... Dude I bet you blew thru a quarter of your mana pool for 1 fight to post those numbers . Feralgia costs 1871 mana alone. You cast it 5 times in a 2 min fight... It last 2 min. So if you just wanna blow thru mana to make basically a "full burn" range parse to prove a point go ahead. People don't play beastlords like that.

I look forward to your full burn SK parse.. Although I somehow suspect your SK parse will somehow fall short of that uber beastlord range dps.

You also showed that a beast chain casting his or her best 5 dots and 3 best nukes can do 11.5k dps.. Better nerf us quick with that kind of power.... Seriously laughable that you feel this is overpowered.....