What should a pet be allowed to do in Everquest?

Sometimes nerfs are justified Pie. The solution isn't always to bump up everyone else. A few years ago when that bug where melee were hitting for 65k every swing came out the best solution wasn't to massively bump up casters to compensate. Now, granted that is an extreme example and deals with an accidental bug, the point remains the same. Sometimes the best solution is to adjust the outlier, not the average. Your pets are still going to be above average tanks in the group game, even on named mobs.

The second nerf serves no real purpose, I agree with you, but I think the rune one is completely justified, and in a rare case I think they actually were more than fair in the values they set for it. It could have been a lot worse. Frankly I think you should have to be making a choice between tanking and dps, not having the best (or nearly the best) of both worlds. I think your choice should be a tank pet that reduces your damage output and requires you to be casting defensive abilities instead of dps, a melee damage pet that takes reduced damage to melee but extra to spells, a spell damage pet that takes reduced damage to spells but extra to melee, and a middle-of-the-road pet that is average across the board. I think -that- would be balanced, but I doubt you would agree.

The event we tested that hit for 70k was a fail mechanic. Surely you don't think that your pet should be able to withstand fail mechanics designed to wipe the group?

On a non-named group mob your pet is going to take a barely noticeable fraction more melee damage than before. On a named group mob it will take a little bit more melee damage. When it comes to their spells yes they will take a decent amount of damage more, but, and this is a big but,...many of them don't even affect the tank. I'm guessing you haven't even thought about that have you, that many AEs ignore the tank?

Why I wanted one for a group and couldn't find one therefore they are rare. Who are you to suggest otherwise? If a mage can justify taking tank spots from tanks given that there are Warriors, Paladins, SK's, and mercs all capable of filling that role my position is quite reasonable.

Much more reasonable than a mage who'd question a fighter why they can fight. I suggest that particular argument gets dropped along with admitting the some members of early finishing guilds brought up pet tanking 4 expansions in a row in hopes that changes would impede other guilds.

So can our pets now at least hold aggro again against melee??

The problem with this is no one is trying to take tanks roles. You assume this just because my pet can tank that I want to be a tank. Screw that. I want to DPS and If i want to solo, I have the option of tanking since mages have no other viable way of getting XP other than having their pet tank...

The point doesn't remain the same though, the nerfs to our aegis line, and our pets hp/ac, are nerfs to long term things that have been in game for quite some time now, it's not like there was a patch and all of a sudden our pets got better, this has been gradual each level increase. When aegis came in its description was to block X amount of either spell or melee hits before dissapating, they had to of known at the time they made it, that mobs would not still be hitting for the same amount in the years to come, they knew well what they made.

I have a feeling this won't be the last pet nerf to come, as the current nerf will do next to nothing for its intended target, which is raid pet tanking, and again the group game will suffer.

I spend my fair share of EQ time raiding, but I also spend a fair amount doing normal group type activities, which is why I take this change to heart, because when in the normal environment, you don't have the backup you have while raiding, often times you're out by yourself with an ignorant merc healer, or you're with a friend or two. And when people come back to complain that earth pets are STILL tanking raid mobs.. guess what.. the group game is going to take yet another hit. And that 20% that gotten taken away from my pet, could be the matter of another heal landing or him dying.

It wasn't necro pets, or even beastlord pets that were the culprit for this all happening, so why on earth are our 2 classes being dragged into this? My EM18, raid buffed, mage gear equipped necro tank pet still only stands up to raid mobs for a few seconds, sometimes I think.. O wait, enrage will save him long enough for a heal... NOPE I was wrong.

I really don't think nerfing every single pet in the game is the answer, there has to be a way to implement a mechanic, that when a pet is on a raid mobs target for more than X amount of seconds, they flat out get executed or something. I can GUARANTEE there will still be pets tanking raid mobs, the amount of healing they receive is far greater than a 10-20% loss of total hp.. So I ask what the next step is, we might as well avoid another debocle and get it over with now, because we all know we will still hear about this in the near future.

"Could changing the group composition have done more to help your pet?"
Why would anyone want to play a game where you are forced to have certain classes for every different encounter? Have you ever played this game and tried to find just the right classes to do content? It is not easy to find a enchanter thats LFG, and the a tank, and then a cleric. And please don't try and say a merc tank is anything more than a speed bump.

Merc tanks are actually pretty decent. Dumb as rocks, but they do their job fairly well.

"If it isn't broke, don't fix it",

People keep saying this is to fix a broken aspect of pets tanking raid mobs so why do we need to do anything to the pets themselves? Why not fix the real problem which has been pointed out two dozen times now as being a problem with the raid mechanics? If the problem isn't what a pet can do in the group aspect of the game then don't change that change the raid.

Analogy(a bad one I admit but no worse than this "fix"): Ohhh the top 10% of the company make too much money, ohh ok, Why don't we slash everyones pay by 20%

What I asked for was actual impact, not theorycrafting. Parses are meaningless. The real question is can a mage, necro, or beastlord kill the same mobs. I logged on to test this, I killed names in the group game, I killed multiple trash mobs at once while moloing. And I didn't need to use my garg as an offtank. It takes me forever since I'm lazy, but I can still do it. I've actually gone out and seen first hand the impact of these changes. They don't impact the group game in a meaningful sense that I've seen.

In general if folks want to make real impact with their feedback, they need some sort of evidence. What is evidence to prove their point? It doesn't matter if a pet takes more damage, what matters is if the damage is meaningful. Meaningless changes in how much damage they take are still meaningless.

Are there a few mobs in the group game that will be impacted by this change? Probably yes. Are there a few missions that might be harder? Probably yes. Those are outliers (less than 5% of all content in RoF), and aren't meaningful to the discussion at hand. There have been other threads on should those particular pieces of content be retuned, that's the appropriate place to discuss those pieces of content. They have nothing to do with this.

I'll go ahead and lock this thread again, because the discussion is getting acrimonious and it's not productive. While we're happy to take productive feedback, people arguing with each other isn't helpful to you or to us.