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

Yes they see those high DI's less often but when they get hit with the higher DI is it for more then a PC tank under his stuff? Do tanks have numerous tools totally negate the fact they take a wider DI spread when tanking? if the DI is all that matters as you claim then why do tanks see 3K dps on mobs pets see 10K and are going splat on single target non named stuff that was trival, you keep telling us spikes are what matters and yet PC's have little issue when geared and played yet raid pets go splat? why do pets take 20-30K incomming dps when tanking 2 or 3 mobs and PC tanks take less incoming damage with the three mobs then a pet sees with one? Because your entire premise that pets taking lower DI makes them superior to PC with a higher DI average is completely made up. Except when you when you highlight that one factor in an excel file, which should not be how the game is tuned unless something is truely borked and broken. Pets not taking DI 19 or 20 was broken but less so then where pets are currently. Or at least some pets as some classes still have 65K larger hp pools or still have 30% more mitigation compared to some pets or some now receive amazing healing support. Some pets are now just broken period despite never being an issue to begin with except on paper where some chart was off slightly.

We have had 3 changes so far and what we have seen mainly is raid focused mage tank pets will now be the only real standard to tank in the group game anymore. That swarm pets went from required dps support for some classes that served as offtanks to now being a joke for the mana cost both dps wise since they die so fast and as a offtank. We saw a valuable raid focus effect go from a nice boost to basically being no different then a group item. Unless we see necro tank pets boosted by 50K hps and a lot more mitigation or AC added, all swarm pets reverted back to pre nerf status, heals looked at for mages and necros, and the EM nerfs reverted one, two or even all three pet classes got whacked because you didn't like the DI chart and Aristo agreed.

Well the good news (I think?) is Earth Elemental Strength is now lasting until the Earth Pet procs it again.

Unfortunately the high ATK mobs generally aren't rootable, so it only helps on rootable (and generally weaker) targets. It still can't hold aggro over an RS pet with aggro swords unless it sits there and attacks the mob for a while, at which point I'm better off skipping the RS pet entirely and using spell DPS.

Edit: I'd echo the concern over swarm pet health on raids both due to RS pets being a large part of our DPS and Salvo requiring swarm pets to live on a mob in order to be affective (all classes' swarm pets).

V1.0 and 2.0 were pretty close to each other. The change from 2.0 to 3.0 was significant. It brought the necro up to closer where it needed to be but raised the earth and BL warder up well beyond where they were in 2.0.

Going from 44-45% to 49-50% di 1 may not seem like a big jump, but those were carved off the high dis. Getting hit for max and other high DIs less than 1% of the time is huge.

If at those DI ranges pets are found to be lacking (and I do not think they are), the fix should not be to just shift the DI spread down and down for incoming dps - that just moves us back to the root cause of the problem with pets playing a different game at tanking. Necro pet needed to come up a bit to remain balanced with other pets.

A more appropriate approach is to increase avoidance. Those high DI hits have to be not only present, but be present more than 0.8% of the time or else those bad rounds become so improbable as to never reasonably happen. Avoidance is a good way to tackle lowering incoming dps without eliminating spike threshold potential.

Pets currently actively defend or avoid about 22-25% of the time. If you want avoid future scaling issues it would be better to give them 10% more avoidance than 5% more DI 1s

As tanks have known for years, even small shifts in the DI spread yields exponential returns on ease and predictability of healing requirements.

If DI spread really is not that important, pet owners should have zero problem with this concept approach.

Most tanks I know or have known would trade 10% avoidance for 5% of upper DIs carved off and slapped on minimum hits. Average dps means nothing unless your healer can't maintain the heals per second to keep up. These days we play twitch-quest where success or failure hinges on smaller and smaller blocks of time with reactive and proactive defense and healing. Astronomical mitigation undermines this and smooths out incoming dps and this ease of healing and likelihood of survival.

And all the things he mentioned in the post you quoted is what would make a player tank with equal gear take much less damage and do much better overall tanking those two yellow mobs if the tank were using cooldowns. Flat mitigation and not some rune that would be eaten up in half a millisecond matters against multiples, and I'm pretty sure those aren't rootable for the earth pet's mitigation, like apparently nothing is in AH. A RoF T3 raid player tank popping everything and going down to 2 yellow cons w/ reactive healer merc? Pretty sure nobody would be getting anything done in cotf T2 if this were the idea of balance.

DI range is not "Tanking ability, but as a number". Maybe 5 years ago it might have been, maybe it did back when pets DI was completely borked. But I do like your idea regarding avoidance. Especially considering those shadowknight parses had, what, like 40% better avoidance with actives running? When does avoidance start to matter again? When mob accuracy approaches zero?

Daegun, they said they want pets mitigating better and avoiding worse than pc tanks. You seem to think DI is the be all and end all of tanking. Total incoming dps is much more important. In the group game it's all about incoming dps. Nothing can one round a pet, so a bad spike isn't death like it is on a raid.

Can't they make the Earth pets proc, proc the rune, even if the root doesn't land?? Kinda need the rune more for the unrootable mobs, aka named.

Avoidance is very helpful when considering averages over time. It is a fickle mistress though, and with as hard as modern content is capable of hitting these days - it can leave you exposed. Mitigation in the non plate tank PC ranges likewise leaves you vulnerable. When 10% or more of any given hit is for max damage - dropping that to 8-9% is great but you're still going to expect nasty spikes to happen.

As one of the guys heavily entrenched in that ac vs hp debates from a decade ago, a select few of us understood the power of reaching mitigation levels such that those max hits almost never happen. I still have a few parses from deathknell and dreadspire where good gear plus full ac augs eliminated just di 20 on a 3 minute raid boss fight. This is not possible anymore as the devs decided it was too overpowering. Even then, the best DI ones I got were still generally below where earth per is existing.

I'm all for pets taking reasonable incoming dps, but getting there via mitigation near exclusively is not an ideal fix.

One of my earliest recommendations was set pet tank models to warrior mitigation and boost their avoidance to warriors. Warriors still have their strong discs but earth pet with group focus and only certitude still has 60,000+ more hit points than player group tanks with full buffs.

V2.0 had it about right minus swarm pets (didn't need to be touched) and necro pets being unacceptably weaker than the other pet tanks.

Even with pet test 1.0 change they WERE mitigating better than PC tanks and we're avoiding worse. They were also well within or above their quoted target goals. Necro pet was in target goal, earth pet was above it.

And no, for all the reasons that have already been mentioned a thousand times, average dps is anything BUT the most important .

Ironic indeed that the most important times for the rune to land is versus the mobs it will not land on. This ensures that pets will be taking the maximum amount of damage, roughly 3+ times as much incoming damage as a player, up to 40% more often than a player (with actives). One of the only benefits then of having a good DI spread, is you can somewhat accurately guess when your pet is going to die, due to massive insurmountable damage (almost none of which it can avoid) ensuring that the first inevitable damage spike is going to kill it. I won't have the uncertainty of not knowing when my pet is going to die, I can be assured that it is going to die right away. Keep the hand on that fade button

i noticed some of your grasp are with full aas used, is the mage supposed to watch TV while waiting for his aa timer to come back? The pet for a mage is a huge AA sink. Overall I was happy with 2.0, but raid guilds for some is a mystery.

But yes I generally agree with pets needing to be nerfed. back in hot, most raid gear tanked out tanked my pet. my pet tanked good enough to solo with. Tanking overall comes down to skill of the end user some people now what they are doing. The 100th level Sk's that can train 200 + mobs and kill them with epic I cant do anything close to that. I was even happy with how it worked in VOA, ROF was a lot more challenging than COTF so yes you broke the pets. But I think it was probably after voa you broke the pets, the 91 pet had maybe 90k then the 96 pet juiced upto 150k or so for me. With a level cap increase, overall I would like you to get pet right.

Tanking in VoA with group focus was a challenge but doable. Named without special problematic aoes or mechanics could be done with my bard box in tote and 2 cleric mercs was possible but I'd need to use fortify and twist in cascading rune line as well as aegis with my dots. As the initial formal response from devs indicated, pets also scaled better up into group focus. The difference between EM 12 and raid EM was pretty dramatic.

The new pets 96+ were beasts.

Back in HOT when pet da worked and mobs had low hit points, named fights were a lot less challenging not because pets were so nuts, but because fights ended so quickly.

Pets starting stats on summon was only a small piece of the problem though, as the deva have admitted. Linear response to each ac and unforeseen interactions with sturdy companion all exponentially saw pets take off into the stratosphere. I suspect it's also the reason spell based interventions for the pet defensively didn't keep up. For the same reason shadow knights missed out on power gains for fear of its impact on swarming, I'd wager these abilities were stagnated due to the bad problem of pet mitigation being as godly as it was.

Mitigation taking off insanely was the problem. Bringing mitigation down into reasonable ranges is the first step. If pets are found to be then lacking, pet owners need to given appropriate tools to handle situations the Devs feel to be within the scope of their intent.

I suspect the devs intend for a pet owner to handle 2 or 3 trash mobs. Previously they managed that by never really getting hit hard at all. While the net result vs a multiple pull was not bad, that raw per mob tanking power when applied to a raid boss or group named yielded a tank that took very steady, very safe, very predictable, and very unbalanced melee hits round after round. Paired with high hp pools - hard to compete with that. Especially when player health jumps around so unsafely that your only safe option is a plate tank burning all it's defensives. You end up with 10 out of 16 classes that can barely stand up to a trash mob much less a group named.

Hence that raid geared zerker who turned into a fine pink mist in under 15 seconds trying to do what was easily done by a group focused pet tank.

The answer to the problem isn't to go back to stratosphere mitigation. It's to give the class the tools to get the job done while still operating within the same rule set as every other player class out there.

My goal is not and has never been to make pet tanking not viable, it's to get rid of this very lopsided issue. I was talking with Pie on test the other day and I flat out told him that pet tanks should actually have a meaningful quick or instant casting discipline of sorts on a shorter reuse time and without a hit/dmg limit that will make it fall off prematurely. If you're supposed to tank, you need the tools to do so.

If you insist on just passively mitigating like gods, you don't deserve those abilities.

If avoidance is used to get the insanely high dps against numbers, in multiple mob encounters lower, that works fine. Further mitigation increases would have ramifications to raid tanking. Whereby 99 percent or similar large percentage of mage mains haven't tanked in raid, aren't interested in that topic and where never going to do it with of without these changes. But we can't have 17k a sec against a pet while a merc on reactive only covers 7k, in the case of 2 mobs. And no, blowing every aa once every 18 mins doesn't equal a solution. So in short it's fine if avoidance is used as part of the solution.

Since we have over 100 posts and it's only been mentioned briefly 3 times before:

The primary nuke for the mage class, in a raid, relies on raid wide pets surviving for it to work. If we resolve everything else and don't address the impact of this project towards that item we will have unnecessary and unintended impact to raid dps. It could be in the 10k per second range so it's not a small item (varies per event). Post these changes it's extremely likely lesser pets don't survive as they did. Dropping the requirement for the last line of damage from requiring 15 to 12 pets on the hate list would be a proactive way to counter the exposure. It's going to take only a few nights of raid events to verify that change is appropriate. If I'm wrong and some how those lesser pets do hang in better than anticipated I have no issue with it returning to 15. But, what you don't want from a receptivity stand point is a dps reduction coupled with this type of project.

I honestly don't care how but my pet needs to get back to reliable. As a necro I have a max AA pet, em 19, j5 merc with healing adept and my pet consistently dies to yellow con mobs unless I stop everything else and do nothing but support it. Thats not ok for trash mobs I should not have to use 15 minute reuse discs, 10 minute reuse heals and dedicate 50% of my spell bar just to survive a single trash mob. Swarm pets don't work anymore, runes and pet activatables drop almost instantly. I don't think stripping the power of EM helps the situation as base pets just do everything out of the box. I don't think stripping the power of maxing out pet AA helps the situation as the base pets just do everything out of the box. But at this point I don't care how its done. 100% more avoidance, paired with totally revamped pet runes and activated pet AA, drastic boosts to pet healing AA lines, drastic boosts to base pet models including hp, ac and raw mitigation for non mage pets would be a start.

Stop tuning off of a mages earth pet with raid focus or the rest of us lose our pets role. Mage pets should be better then what you intend for the weaker pets so tune it so a necro pet can once again handle a yellow trash mob without issue, 2 requires owner attention, named requires fully attention and multiple healers to even have a chance. If this means mage pets don't have issue then so be it, its better then necros and possibly beasts being sol.

Aa far as EM not having as big of an effect on the pets defense/hps, couldn't it effect it's offense more to compensate? Getting a raid level Em should mean a lot. I understand you can't ramp up the defensive side too much or group level pets will be to weak, but offensively is where the big difference could be. Just add a higher increase to the pets offense, which would give more value to the raid focus.

YOU ARE MESSING UP THE PET CLASSES 100% This will not help the game at all I play the game every day from 10 AM to about 8 PM and it is very very hard to find others to play with. and not the pets cannot tank very well at all. When you played with other classes it was wrong, but you did give them some help by making it possible to head shot, de-cap, higher mobs but with the pet classes what just to hell with them.

I agree with Krag. Trying to balance pets with PCs is very difficult because of the different ways they take damage. My suggestion would be to change pets to take damage like PCs so it is easier to balance AC/HP with PC tanks. Change the EM so it only affects damage/offense EM10 = 10% more damage, EM20 = 20% more damage.

Keep it simple. Why make it harder then it needs to be? As long as EM is still a way to improve your pet and helps get you on the parse, they will still be desirable focus items.

Maybe if they were changing something other than just AC.

Taking that statement on it's face....really an EM 20 is supposed to make a pet the same as a fully raid geared ROF t3 player tank? Even if that were true, take a full RoF t3/4 tank with no augs vs best aug setup. Are the pets supposed to tank like a fully raid geared t3 rof tank with full augs or no augs? If the bolded is true (maybe I haven't seen it officially stated) that is news to me.