Test Update 8/08/2014 - Pet Changes Round 3

It seems to me that amidst all the garbage posts, the community is pretty much unanimously saying (regardless of class) that RS/swarm pets for mages need to remain as they were or get a significant boost back in that direction. Hopefully they adjust accordingly.

I dont know the intricacies ok SK disc stacking but why pre-click one disc to click it off?

It has a proc buff on bash with a lifetap that's pretty decent, that stays up if the disc is clicked off. That disc also doesn't stack with zombie (dps), so in a pure burst scenario his way is the best. But on a molo that will clearly last longer than a burst duration, it'd be foolish to give up 2 minutes of 36% mitigation.

Ok so this parse if critically important. (The video of the mage killing the two yellow con
keepers never had a parse included.

This is an EM20 pet, with the owner in full T1 CoTF raid gear with ONE merc at 56 merc aa's.
This was right after the test serverpatch on 8/11/14.

The mobs were 2 A Keeper of the Flame, both yellow cons.

The pet had Iceflame, Burnout XI, Aegis, Arcane Distillect, Velocity buffs and also
Host in the Shell, Companion's Blessing, and Fortify Companion aa's.

The fight started off ok with both mobs pulled and Hosts in the Shell and Companions Blessing cycled first
followed about 30 seconds later by Fortify.

I tired using the RS pet on the 2nd keeper (holding Fortify in reserve) but he would keep dying before the
spell gem would pop again. (So there is zero opportunity to off tank with RS pets on yellow con mobs now).

There were a few times when I had to cycle mage pet heal with aegis quickly and also a few times where pet's health got down to single digits,
one time it was at 1% but I hit our full heal aa (the one with the 9 minute reuse) and that saved me. It was a borderline fight and could go either way
for a raid mage.

Also if you look at the parse chart above, you will see there were a whole bunch of times where the pet never recovered from the hits it was getting
as the merc did heal, but never got it to full health. One hell of a choppy fight. Very touch and go.

IMHO, a slight boost in ac is needed for our regular pets.
The RS pet should be adjusted quite a bit more so that it lasts longer than it's recast timer when off tanking yellow con mobs. Please.

(at 76 seconds, the first mob died, and I fumbled the targeting to the 2nd mob, so it actually attacked my merc, till I got the pet on it again).
I know I know I should have attacked the 2nd mob first but it was a close fight.

Sounds like the main pet is tuned very nicely (maybe too high), and the real complaint is with the RS pets no longer having any real function as offtank anymore.

Actually the opposite is true. It shouldn't be an easy fight but it should not be borderline either.If my Fortify disc was down, it would have been all over.
The main pet still needs a bit of an AC boost as the fight was way way too close even with all discs up.

I don't think tuning around raid focused fully disced pets is appropriate. Ideally EM 15/16 should be the tuning point and raiders would simply get the bonus of a raid focus (just like every other class is/should be tuned around group gear).

But again I agree with the conclusions that RS needs a complete reversal, and we need a large bump in tanking multiples (making prism skin a defensive proc is a great idea). I also think our activated defenses need their damage caps revisited (along with earth elemental strike), or possibly moved to duration-based abilities.

(Also a faster casting heal that doesn't swap targets would be nice )

Strangely enough, the version of the RS pet (and other swarm pets) that is on Test right now actually has more base AC than it did before, but since the vast majority of its AC came from Sturdy Companion it took the biggest hit, proportionately. I'm running a parse right now with better mitigation values for it and if that looks good in the morning I'll try to get it on Test ASAP.

Since the spell changes with the Earth root are now on Test, is that pet handling high damage/high attack mobs noticeably better now? Is it holding aggro better?

Looking at your posted fights Danille, I'm not sure what you think the problem is. What is the max hit on those keepers? The max round your pet ever took was 37k and you only had 3 rounds over 30k total on the parse.

For anyone wondering, em20 should be the same as a player tank wearing full RoF T3-T4 raid gear, which is apparently supposed to almost die vs 2 current content trash mobs even tho the player tank is popping just about every active mitigation it can to survive?

Pets are underpowered still

Thanks for looking into this Aristo. The swarm pets were hit disproportionately hard with the changes. Given their duration spell cost and use .... Swarm pets were never a problem in my book. IMO they should remain as strong as they previously were.

No, with the upgrades in heals and the recent boosts in heals preparing for this patch, they're actually still a bit overpowered. The quoted goal was minimum hits 35-40% of the time. Earth pet is almost 50% and the weakest (necro) is above 43%.

I posted the parses on the version 2.0 thread I believe, but I'm 95% sure the RS pet had significantly more HP (around 40K) pre-Argin patch. I found 3 parses where one RS pet had ~155k HP. Now it's entirely possible there was some error in my parses, but whatever happened they have much less survivability even on live than they did pre-Argin.

I'll go check out the root changes now.

At least the Mage heals still suck, and I would hope they were being tuned around performance than a theoretical DI %

My main pet takes 50% more dps now, takes spikes more often for harder, swarm pets disintegrate, pet enrage is borked and your telling me a single heal increase balances that out?

Keep ignoring avoidance, activatables both long refresh and fast reuse, self healing, stuns or ac/rune buffs, bp clicks, various clickies and procs, that all pets are not equal and yes you can say pets were broken and had more survivability then PC tanks.

According to the quoted goal, they were balanced in test 1.0 patch. Clearly, they still kinda suck vs multiples. Good thing it's a situation tanks don't encounter much in grouping :/

Mage and necro pet heals need to be looked at either by spell base values or modifying aa to get closer to beastlord heals.

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

If that was the stated goal, and they did that, and pets sucked, and they've made 3 changes since, perhaps it's time to stop bringing that up? Obviously, that's not the balance point they're going for alone, so being fixated on it isn't doing any good.

Yes but keep in mind that your pet was taking insanely low dps prior. Never seeing the 3 highest DIs and only seeing di 14-17 once in a blue moon will do that for you. You're still seeing those high DIs a small fraction of the time compared to any player tank.

Can you also see the HP values for it when factoring in raid AEs?

That is a huge part of our DPS on raids, and with the limited raiding there is on test there is really no way to tell how poorly they will perform there. Considering they already start at like 65% of their max hit-points.

Them off-tanking is key, but they are a large portion of raid mage's DPS on any fight, those instantly dying because of these nerfs is seriously bad for raiding....