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

Why on earth would you take those percentages at face value when you're looking at mitigation? The pet isn't getting hit for for DI1 28.41% of the time he's getting hit. he's getting hit for DI1 28.41% of the time the mob even attempts to strike him, but 23.96% of the time the mob tries to hit him ... the mob is either missing or getting blocked, dodged, parried, or riposted.

23.96% of the total 100% never struck the target. In essence, the number you were using for the wasn't 781/2090 ... it was 781 out of the full 2935 attempts to strike. That's not mitigation, that is AVOIDANCE, and it has always been classified as such. A better way of looking at it is that this pet had an avoidance rate of 24%.

The point is that 2090 'mitigatable' blows landed on the tank and 37.4% of those blows landed for minimum DI. As I figured, you're just confused on how to actually look at the data appropriately.

Red = mitigation on a per hit basis
Green = Avoidance

Right now ... on this parse the necromancer rogue pet is being hit for minimum damage exactly 37.4% of the time on a normal (yellow con trash from cotf) creature. At the end of the day, it's not that I'm being dishonest ... you're just not understanding the most basic aspects of this conversation. That is why I have always screenshotted this aspect of GameParse and labeled it "avoidance" - because the most useful part of this page is to see how often the pet is getting missed or is actively dodge/block/parry/riposting.

I was not only honest, I was the one who was accurate and looking at the information correctly.

Class envy and dogmatic belief, you say? I agree. I'd say Bravo to you, Gnome, for maneuvering Daegun to finally admit this. (which I repeat from your post above.) But I cannot.

I can't because his weeks of mountainous posts and walls-of-text coupled with graphs that many (most?) people didn't understand gained enough momentum to convince a small group to say. "Nerf the OP Mages!"

This is to the tune of at least 4 threads in different sections of this forum being filled so that they burst the seams. This is despite an enormous outcry from an entire playerbase of Mages in all these threads, as well.

These Mages should be listened to by the Developers carefully, and Mage opinions should be weighted significantly because we are, after all, the players and caretakers of this class. There is a much bigger picture than bar graphs suggest.

We will ultimately bear the brunt of the changes being considered, and from the looks of things right now, the Mage community is so upset that I have been approached by a large number of Mages considering fleeing the class as a result.

No kidding.

These changes are causing that much outrage, anger, and more importantly, Fear. Fear that a playstyle of years on years is ending on the basis of obvious class envy.

The small contingent of "Nerf the OP Mages" has been extraordinarily successful in convincing Sony to spend an enormous amount of time "solving" the perceived problem and there has been an enormous amount of outcry by my community.

I haven't seen a crusade like this in 15 years of playing this game.

It is currently ruining our play, and that's only the Mages who are seeing the results on test. Wait until the rest of the community gets an up-close-and-personal look. It will have a disastrous effect.

"Nerf the OP Mages," is the drumbeat.

And nerfed we shall be, because of the fallacious precept that a PC tank should out-tank a pet in every conceivable situation, and a small number of players' decisions of how an entire class should play their game.

Was it worth all that? To gain some specious victory by using mountains of cherry-picked data out of context to promote the nerf of an entire class and succeeding when most of us in EQ were playing our respective classes with competence and even joy?

What an enormous waste of time.. And what a tornado of destruction that waste of time has produced.

This not only hurts my class. It hurts the entire game.

Baramos Brinstar
Mage Community Representative

Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but the mages who are screaming about these changes are the end-game players who have maxed their AAs and gear and have invested thousands of hours of time to do so. I can't speak for everyone, but I sure as **** am not going to make another character after all I've done to maximize my mage.

Perhaps this is an underhanded way for SOE to get more money from Heroic Characters. I hope people are smart enough not to fall for it.

Hear, hear, Baramos, the voice of reason.

FWIW, I have put my plans to buy a new gaming computer on hold specifically because I don't wish to make that large of an investment in something that I might find unneeded in the very near future. It makes me super sadsies, because getting a gaming computer that actually allows me to turn on parses for everyone, spell effects, and whatever else I want without lagging the F out (after playing for 7 years!) is something that I was really looking forward to. But I'm not spending $600 of my hard-earned money to play a game that has just killed my class and will, in the end, lead me to cancelling my accounts if it's not properly rectified.

I also posted a parse of the weakest of the war pets that showed when using 3 abilities, with the abilitiy to still do very good dps, I could keep a under AA level 97 nec pet (owner was 99), em 12 pet to 4k dps with just 1 merc on reactive on a yellow con mob in EWK. The pet parses that are showing 10k for a pet are comparing apples to oranges because the pet owner was either trying to get a pure baseline (ie not using defensive stuff) or people are comparing baselines with full mitiagation posts, which should not be done.

https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/...1-2014-pet-changes.212564/page-8#post-3111609

There's no conspiracy, just an attempt by the developers to re-balance a aspect of some classes that has grown more powerful than they feel is appropriate.

Sorry you don't agree, but I as well feel that it's needed.

The hyperbole flowing from a handful of people claiming to be able to speak for a whole community is pretty appalling.

It's simple really if you cut thru all the posturing:

The Dev's have identified a problem with hit distribution on pets.

They are going to fix it.

They are seeking input (especially parses) from any player that is willing to put in the time

They will take final action and we will have to live with it.

Over the years we have seen many, many changes for balance purposes (some love the word nerf). Many classes have been impacted previously. This will not be the last time this will happen.

EQ is a dynamic, changing game. It's the dev's job to keep it rational.

Doing nothing will kill EQ faster than continuing to work on keeping the game balanced and rational.

The parses from Daegun and Sojero highlight the difficulty in balancing the Necro pets due to pet gear. That is one of the balancing issues I proposed in my post on page 12 of this thread. Necro pets do not come with gear, yet an EM 15 Pet with gear takes more than twice as many DI 1 rolls (and significantly less damage as a result) as an EM 20 pet without it. If they are balanced with gear they will be drastically under powered and borderline useless whenever they do not have it. Conversely they will be over powered if they are balanced without having gear when it is available.

That actually touches on the point of some of the others. If the mitigation and tanking ability of the pets is to compared to tanks without defensive abilities then the pets shouldn't be using them either. Apples to Apples would be cycles defensive abilities or no defensive abilities for both.

Any chance of a SOE dev to give us an update in regards to this thread? Have any decisions been made?

I would appreciate if somebody from SOE could fill us in on what has been decided thus far (if anything).

Thank you,
Sostenes

still no good, graphs are pointless. it doesn't show the whole picture.

good luck with this see your fixes in 2 weeks.
either step up with fd, snare, root or pacify or destroy the mage all together.

seriously wakeup

Test is coming down for 2 hours today with new pet data.

Thank you Denial, hope it's good news

At https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/...-update-8-08-2014-pet-changes-round-3.212775/

Will be interesting to see how big the HP and AC bumps are. Swarm pets definitely needed it.

Agreed. Hopefully it improves their OT functionality to be much closer to where it was.

And have they ever responded about the pet enrage being busted that Tearsin had pointed out?

Allow me to be absolutely clear on this: We are taking this action because we looked at the data and saw a significant problem.

• We did not undertake this action because we like a particular class more than we like a different class.
• We did not undertake this action because we read someone's post, took what they said at face value, and implemented their plan exactly.
• We did not undertake this action because we want players to quit/change mains/buy heroic characters/play some other game.
• We did not undertake this action because we decided we really needed to mess with someone.

We have been looking at this for months. We are trying to bring pets down to a level where it takes effort to keep them alive, but not so much effort that they're not worth the time to do so. This is a tricky balance point. Where we started was not where we will finish. Please stop yelling at each other over what you think our motives are and spend some time helping us get it right.

What pet types and focus levels are you guys thinking are appropriate for tanking current-expansion group named mobs?

Will the necro rogue pet's dps be adjusted more? It was about 200 dps difference from the warrior pet.

Please move to the Round 3 thread and post results of your testing there. Thanks!