The raid vs group pet part is tough. I think most of us would be fine with out pets being based off of overall gear, but my guess is the devs aren't going to take the time to do that. Beyond that, I certainly don't want to hurt group pet owners at all. However, one of my favorite parts of the game previously (especially when leveling) was getting new pet foci. The week the PoW came out, I farmed 700K worth of plat to buy one of those bows for the quest, because I wanted the EM 18 pet ear inside (I was group geared with EM 15 at the time). Back then you could *feel* the difference between foci levels, and it was pretty darn awesome getting a higher level one. So I get it's a tricky balance point, but I really do hope each foci level can become a little bit more distinct. Nothing too huge, but somewhat bigger than it currently is.
Well the EM21 focus makes your pet even at lvl 100 so I would think it's every small benefit when gaining levels.
I'm assuming that a raw ~35% more ac/hp would be extreme overkill given how pets work, right? Prior to changes how much more hp did em20 have than 15? I know what you mean on focuses, I did necro as my freebie heroic and went and farmed sarith ear, SL ear and neriak ear beforehand so could equip them each time I hit that min level. The difference was quite noticable! Going to level a mage next and already snagged a tasty mistmoore wreath for future good times! The focus *should* mean something, sounds like with the changes they may have gone too far with the focus gap.
Pet AC vs player AC works differently, so even the same %age wise on gear would be radically different on pet vs player. Players get the soft-caps and +100 AC on a player isn't much to their AC overall vs +100 AC on a pet. So you need to expect things to not be equal gains. Realistically a small hp gain with higher EM makes some sense, but perhaps also dps gains too.
Figured it wouldn't be that simple, heh. I think his point is that it *should* make a noticable difference in tanking, just like raid gear does for say, a melee dps like a monk or ranger tanking things.
Yes, that's my point exactly I'm not looking for huge gains, but in my opinion right now the difference is a bit small in my opinion
Fire / Water pet need to do way more DPS than they do now. Water pet can't tank for crap now, and got a massive 300-400 dps bump for it... should have been at least 1-2k DPS. I don't care what the devs say, fire pet is still pretty much worthless... even when its in melee range its DPS is substandard. It needs to be doing far more DPS than it does now. Savil
Aristo did not increase pet DPS like it was outlined in the thread the devs created. Pet DPs increased, but not in the areas they specifically said they would increase. Seeing as I sent 2 different PMs a week apart outlining this I am sure these little table scraps are all we will get sadly for DPS. Fire pet should be removed since they are unwilling to work around pet code to actually make a Caster pet work. It will always play second fiddle to Water in 99% of situations raid or group. And pretty much the only time Fire wins is if the mob is melee immune, not because fire is good lmao. Pretty terrible that SOE was spot on with the nerfs, but when it comes to the boosts THEY said were coming they are not found.... And even some of them removed in the test notes patch
It is messed up that there is no tanking difference in foci, haven't see this proven however. 5% hp and 500 more dps or whatever is a joke, it is not significant and invalidates any need to spend the effort. That is a problem. But to people that say pets are gimped, as a Mage I'm not feeling that. To people who say its unfair for myself and others to be using box groups to demonstrate balance....you are getting to the fundamentals of EQ. EQ is a group game, and while Sony has been trying to make the classes be able to accomplish more with less players, it's still a group game, and GROUP tasks require GROUPS. Mages and necro's being historically a solo class (and they still are) does not invalidate the fact that GROUP tasks require GROUPS Saying this as a Mage, and as a necro
The problem was just how strong pets at all levels were tanking were. They all needed to be brought down but by how much at eash respective level. Where raid focus EM pets are is still very strong, but they opted to make pet tank scaling beyond EM15 weak from a mitigation standpoint. My only guess is because they didn't want to kill the casual pet owner who uses his pet to tank. Right or wrong, the balance issue at this point is within the pet classes themselves. Knowing just how good EM15 is (and thus all raid EMs are) the alternative was to scale group focus down even further and leave higher EMs where they are. I can't fault this approach ... it was damage control. Does that mean group focus pets out-class group tanks? Yep. The net result for all pet tanking is still extremely strong, but the raiding crowd now enjoys less or a relative advantage in this single aspect compared to their casual counterparts.
Also for mages, you really don't even need an extra player to do well on most group content. U just need an extra merc slot. Not a lot of classes can say that. Come up with some combinations in your head, you'll find out that even though having an extra merc out would be amazing, it wouldn't mean you could do all group content: Druid + 2 mercs? Well, no, one would be a tank merc which would be a big bottleneck vs named Enchanter + 2 mercs? One healer and one tank merc with enchanter would still struggle vs named, adds wouldn't be a problem as CC would be good Rogue + tank merc + cleric merc? Lol, sucks Shadowknight + cleric merc + wizard merc? This could do really well if the sk had gear. This could possibly drop a lot of named Mage + 2 cleric mercs? This can do just about anything in the group game. Due to the power of mages, even post nerf THAT in my opinion is the definition of a "solo class". Even in the group-mandatory game, a solo class can still do the best with less
Still not right. Mage raid spell focuses are rather worthless since they don't affect rains which are more than 50% of Mage damage when they can be used. My necro became 10x as powerful with raid foci, Mage...meh. Once again, not a good idea to punish classes unequally
Is mage dps too low in groups? In raids? Too high in groups compared to raids? Are group mages over-strong or raid mages under-powered?
I don't have enough raid gear on Mage to say. I know that necro requires a LOT of foci, poison, disease, magic, fire, and corrupt. Assuming u can get RoF T3+ raid foci and rk3 spells, necro dps goes up a ton. Mage most necessary focus is fire, rains benefit more from spell damage but not to the extent of dps gains that foci boosts necro dps (but I'm not an authority on this, just going off feel)
From what I have seen neither group geared nor raid geared mages are suffering from lack of damage output.
And from what I've seen player tanks cry a lot that gearing is hard and hate pet classes. Unrelated issue though. Talking about the disparity between the benefits of group to raid gear between classes within the same archtype
I do wish that 'pet power' was an accumulated stat spread across gear, like Spell Damage/Heal Amount. Having all the power in one item is a blessing if it's easy to get, or a curse when it's hard (Gloves of Dark Summoning took 35ish clears of Vex Thal to get to drop once.) Pets already gains some stats from the casters gear, long ago pets resists were changed to use the masters if they were better. It would be interesting if they could inherit our mod2 stats/heroics.
I did parses for all of the pets when RoF was released. My Earth pet pre-nerf parsed at 2700 DPS taken from a yellow con 'a palace guard' in grelleth. He now parses at 4500 DPS taken vs. the same mob. A 66% increase in incoming damage. He also does MUCH less damage, I don't know why that was necessary, every other pet received an increase to their DPS, but Earths DPS was reduced. All other pets are taking about 20-25% more damage per second vs. pre-nerf. An EM 19 Earth pet now takes damage equivalent to an Earth pet with No enhanced minion pre-nerf. & equal to what Fire pets were taking pre-nerf... It's pretty bad. What was supposed to be our 'Tank' pet is now just a blob of hitpoints with crappy dps. Not that it ever did alot of dps ( none of the pets do ) but it is particularly pathetic now. & Raging servants are now inadequate for offtanking adds in any meaningful content.
Our DPS isn't particularly dependent on gear (it does help, but skill is paramount), but that isn't the point I was getting at. I guess I just don't see the problem with leaving group pets where they are and boosting raid pets a bit. I'm not asking to go back to where we were (or anything close), but 5 levels of EM should make the pet feel beefier. Not a huge difference, but enough to motivate me to want a higher focus level. At this point I can't see myself spending the DKP on EM 21, which was the only piece of T2 gear I was excited to get (T1 to T2 is bleh otherwise). If I was a grouper, I probably wouldn't be repeating AH1 over and over to get the named to spawn for the EM 16 ear. Again, I'm not asking for anything dramatic. I just wish the coolness factor of having a higher EM was still there, rather than being meh (for lack of a better term ) . If anyone wants the parses, I'm happy to PM them to you (probably in the morning). I think the point of this thread, and we are getting kinda off topic (my fault, sorry), was that we are still able to do a lot of what we were able to before. So I'd rather not turn it into another parsing thread.
