Test Update 8/5/2014 - Pet Changes Round Two

The problem with that is, you can do the same in argin-hiz, because you have plenty of room to maneuver, and you just need to pick a better place to set up camp. those are player faults, not the pets faults.

I went on test for the 1st time and tryed my maxxed aa em20 necro war pet(with just merc buffs and full mage gear on) vs some trash mobs and 1 named in ewk. I was not impressed on how hard the merc had in keeping the pet up. There where fights that on live my merc would have no issues keeping my pet up that on test the merc almost lost the pet. Tried shoon, even with pet fort going and necro slowed, he ate my pet before he was at 80%. If the dervs want necro war pets to still tank current stuff they need a boost. If the dervs don't want necro pets to tank current stuff(ie be limited the the last exp and lower) then they need to come out and say it and do something with the rog pet so that it is worth it to have it out.

The ability to Fade on a 5-6 min cooldown is not and has never been a stable way to pull. Mob pathing doesn't result in you being able to single from a pack every time you Fade. This is the case even for classes that have the ability to Snare, which Mages do not.

I've pulled on practically every class in EQ and the only class that pulls worse than Mages is Warriors.

I did the whole first partisan on my mage and posted the results in one of these threads.

Check.

Those mobs in the buildings, with roamers, with statics, with instant repops on the Shop keepers... Check check and... check.

Just takes some adaptation, and a little more situational awareness than mages have had to have in recent years.

Still possible. Still able to have meaningful progression.

Sure, anything is doable with enough patience. Zone pulling works for every class.

Is it practical? No. In the same way soloing with a warrior is not practical even though it is fully doable.

Does anyone have a solid parse of RS pet HP before the Argin-Hiz patch?

I went back through my logs to look for fights where I A) Didn't get hit B) Cast 1 RS pet and C) It had greater than 110K HP.

Tanking summary for: Sancus`s pet --- Total damage: 159783 --- Avg hit: 5326 --- Swings: 43 --- Defended: 7 (16.3%) --- Hit: 30 (69.8%) --- Missed: 6 (14%) --- Accuracy: 83.3% --- Dodged: 1 (2.7%) --- Parried: 1 (2.5%) --- Blocked: 3 (7%) --- Riposted: 2 (5.1%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

A vegerog on 6/15/2014

Sancus - 11
--- Force of Elements - 2
--- Rain of Blistersteel Rk. II - 2
--- Rain of Scythes Rk. II - 2
--- Relentless Servant Rk. II - 1
--- Spear of Blistersteel Rk. II - 2
--- Spear of Molten Steel Rk. II - 2

Produced by GamParse v1.0.3

Tanking summary for: Sancus`s pet --- Total damage: 152935 --- Avg hit: 5461 --- Swings: 39 --- Defended: 9 (23.1%) --- Hit: 28 (71.8%) --- Missed: 2 (5.1%) --- Accuracy: 93.3% --- Dodged: 0 (0%) --- Parried: 0 (0%) --- Blocked: 1 (2.6%) --- Riposted: 8 (21.1%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

A vegerog on 6/15/2014

Sancus - 11
--- Force of Elements - 2
--- Malosinete - 1
--- Rain of Blistersteel Rk. II - 2
--- Rain of Scythes Rk. II - 2
--- Relentless Servant Rk. II - 1
--- Spear of Blistersteel Rk. II - 2
--- Spear of Molten Steel Rk. II - 1

Produced by GamParse v1.0.3

Tanking summary for: Sancus`s pet --- Total damage: 152646 --- Avg hit: 6360 --- Swings: 28 --- Defended: 4 (14.3%) --- Hit: 24 (85.7%) --- Missed: 0 (0%) --- Accuracy: 100% --- Dodged: 0 (0%) --- Parried: 2 (7.1%) --- Blocked: 0 (0%) --- Riposted: 2 (7.7%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

A failed attempt on 6/15/2014

Sancus - 12
--- Force of Elements - 2
--- Rain of Blistersteel Rk. II - 3
--- Rain of Scythes Rk. II - 2
--- Relentless Servant Rk. II - 1
--- Spear of Blistersteel Rk. II - 2
--- Spear of Molten Steel Rk. II - 2

Produced by GamParse v1.0.3


On Test I'm seeing ~110K HP with the same focus. Can anyone else confirm that RS pets previously had higher HP numbers? While I tried to go through a few parses (and made sure I wasn't hit so previous RS pets were definitely not tanking), I don't know the exact circumstances of the parse. Still, I'm not sure what would warrant the rather significant difference in numbers.

For a comparison, Here's 3 EM 20 RS pets on test currently (divide total damage by 3 for average HP):

Tanking summary for: Sancus`s pet --- Total damage: 347940 --- Avg hit: 9156 --- Swings: 57 --- Defended: 15 (26.3%) --- Hit: 38 (66.7%) --- Missed: 4 (7%) --- Accuracy: 90.5% --- Dodged: 1 (2.3%) --- Parried: 2 (4%) --- Blocked: 7 (12.3%) --- Riposted: 5 (10.4%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

347940/3=115980

Note that gamparse records damage, not HP. If you had 10 HP and a mob hit you for 10,000 damage in one swing, it would record 10,000 damage, so all of these numbers are slightly higher than the actual HP (but not 40K higher).

The vast majority of these posts could have been eliminated had we been given proper notification that there was a change coming. Kinda hard to prove our point when we don't have apples to apples comparisons.

It's also great how many people whose mains are NOT mages are telling us what we can and cannot do.

Why does anyone need to have a character as a main (what defines main? I play non-SK classes more than my SK now, I pretty much only raid on him, which is 3 hours a night, 4 nights a week max) to speak on a topic?

I daresay I play my mage more than my "main".

Regardless, if you know / can do something, you know it, and can do it. Even if I only played the class once a month, every other year.

/G Combined: A laborer in 1408s, 31290k @22223sdps -- Akilon + pets 31290k @22223sdps

That was start to finish, with no support at all, the first partisan in Argin Hiz. Is that unreasonable? 22k DPS with no support, finished an end zone progression quest molo?

I believe Brogett stated as a raid geared rogue he / she attempted the same thing and failed.

Pretty sure that's about as reasonable and practical as you can get.

** Will look up log stamps to see true duration of the quest, not just combat.

[Tue Aug 05 18:48:26 2014] Akirage tells you, 'Attacking a laborer Master.'

[Tue Aug 05 19:51:09 2014] You say, 'arius'
[Tue Aug 05 19:52:26 2014] You say, 'Hail, Vasser Fayeil'

So an hour, to knock out 1 of the 4 mission request missions for the zone, as a single class.

**** I should also mention, this was BEFORE the patch that gave back some of what was taken away. So, I did this with the pet that was supposedly so terrible it couldn't tank an easy con mob in WK.

It has been 2 players, yourself and Daegun who are trying to represent what player tanking is like in everquest. There has been no other tank willing or able to offer active mitigation parsing. Occasionally another player tank will step in and provide parses which show much better numbers, and they offer insights in how to improve yours. And thank goodness for that.

Because it was the same 2 players, Daegun and Denial who first made accusations. If this was any other system of evaluation, this would be a huge conflict of interest

Solo tasks - ie the partisan quest you just did - were designed to be molo'd, except obviously by classes ie rogues who have no molo-ability. And why are you using your EM 18 pet as a standard by which to measure the grouping game?

With pets like this though, there can be no meaningful progression by the mage class though, right? I have seen it peppered alllllllllllllllllll throughout this.

There's nothing that can be done by logging in for an hour nightly, even with EM20 and EM21, so... my EM18 is a far cry from the best of the best.

Also, I have seen that because of the nerf to EM focusing, there's not much difference between EM15 and EM21, and the EM focus needs reversed supposedly because of this harsh injustice.

The problem is no 2 players are alike. So you have to take the baseline and add what can be done to it. you have to allow for mistakes, but not give so much as to allow someone to afk and do almost the same as someone attentive. Their parses showed the baseline in which you can extrapolate the rest of the data from, therefore there was not a need for much other parsing from the tank community.

I always have my log on, I have 3 files in my backup folder of over 3gb each of logs from my SK alone. I could post parses from many different situations, but they would be exceedingly hard to pick out the real data from. You have to limit the variables to have a good baseline.

Strawmen galore.

Nobody has said that they aren't able to kill singles in COTF.

Practically every class is able to kill singles in COTF.

That's not the issue and has never been.

Read the thread for what the issues are, instead of trying to pretend your biased EM 18 parses stand show that pets are balanced. Balanced according to what standard? The standard where being able to do solo tasks is 'pets are fine have a nice day?'

I'm a pulling class, and singles are difficult in Argin Hiz because they're pretty much immune to everything in my playbook.

The issue never was about pets being overpowered in the group game because they have always been that way. People where able to use pets in the raid game and this is what is sparking the change.

The EM nerf is to cut back on the gear gap to help balance it without breaking either part of the game.

You want to be able to solo, that's all you're lobbying for-- not anything extreme, right?

We both just agreed that a magician can achieve solo game play under current circumstances.

I think we've found a decent point for them.

Necros still need some help in the pet department *IF* their pet is designed to be a 1 stop molo shop option.

If they're meant to be able to tank things with support, like I am sure a rogue could, then they're functioning properly too.

You cannot "add" what can be done to it. We are talking 10+ additional variables of various mathematical equations to reflect how each changes the data based on the type. Like I said before, even if every single class all had the same type of active mitigation, it would never be simply "adding" or "multiplying" some value to calculate their impact.

Then u factor in player skill, and the possibility of bias. This goes both ways. Thats why there absolutely needs to be as many sources of input as possible. Like I said before, I think a large part of the reason things played out the way they did is the bulk of player tank AND pet parsing has been from the same 2 people who originally brought the issue up. And that is sad, both in the skewing effect it has and on how indicative of an apathetic, shrinking population

No. I am 'lobbying' for being able to do the exact same group content that pet classes were able to do prior to the change. That's what 'keeping pet tanking viable' implies.

Being able to solo is the lowest common denominator. Had pet classes only wanted to be able to solo, there are a dozen other options they could have opted for. They chose pet classes for a reason, and it's not just to 'solo.'

Great, we're still in good shape. I was also able to manage 22k sustained DPS during that "solo". Looks like tanking, pulling, DPS, and progression were all covered.

Further agreement is good, we're getting somewhere.