I do agree that summoners need a low-end balance pass. PVP balance is one thing.. it's meant to be a team sport, and as powerful as summoners are, they are squishy bullseyes. In PVE however, they are right behind (or ahead) of even the best geared rangers, annihilating everyone else.. on single target. On encounters, it's no contest. Classes like Warlock and Wizard should be pretty sour by now.
Well, probably at the heart of it is the developers replaced a pretty crappy pet AI with a new one that is very good. The lower level content is not well suited to the new mechanics. Not sure how they would fix it.
Rubick, you totally missed the point of my post. I played a broken class for 5 years and STILL got my kills in pvp solo with no help and topped parse in groups and in BGs. But you really made me laugh with your "easy mode" comment. I bet you will be dropping your class like a bad habit if you had to endure what summoners went through the past few years. Just tough it out and stop complaining and get back to enjoying the game. This "neft it for the sake of balance" excuse is getting old and is not getting any dev attention any more. The game is more balanced now than it has been in years. What remains are class advantages over others which are like I said before totally situational. If you want every class to be an exact replica of every other class and everyone hitting for exactly the same damage as everyone else in game then it'll be like a fist fight, why bother with spells and AAs and armor?
I am enjoying the game, quite a lot actually. However, the fact that you somehow think you're justified in saying your class is balanced has to be an effort to troll people. If not, your stupidity is beyond reproach. I don't care how you did when necros sucked. All I care about is that summoners in general are insanely imbalanced right now on the TLE server and you're trying to say it's okay because you played one for years when they weren't good. Fun fact; at launch they were considered to be t2 dps because they had more utility and all of a sudden they are the most OP class in the game, at least for the TLE content. I'm betting I could still outparse you because as much as you're campaigning for your class to not get a small nerf for the sake of balancing I'm assuming you're terrible, but the fact remains that nobody can take your opinion seriously if you think it's fair with the state they're in right now.
I play both summoners on Stormhold, I've never enjoyed summoners really but I play them here because I can do most grp content solo and get all the loot and masters. In fact I'm so spoiled with the OPness right now that I couldn't even solo as a Shadowknight. A Shadowknight!! I can't even imagine the situation on Deathtoll!
Worst post in the thread. The DPS pet classes should be doing in pvp is pretty much all on their pet now because their actual spells are garbage in PvP. DoF isn't changing anything. No changes came in DoF that tipped balance in the favor of anybody but scout players. Rangers will still be the king of PvP. Warden and Fury will still be the only healer worth playing in PvP. By EoF, Summoners will be in the trash can and we all know they never got out after that. You know what scouts didn't have in PvP back then? 200+ dps mod and haste giving them flurries and insanely high autoattacks. Fully capped resists across the board because stat consolidation didn't happen yet. Broken mitigation. +Weapon Skills so high it's impossible for a scout at any level to miss hitting anyone in PvP no matter how many levels above you they are. You know what's going to happen before then? Crits. Multi Attacks. More procs.
The reality is that FOTM classes have been around since they created computer gaming. The constant tweaking by devs and the consistent complaints by players after one class gets a problem fixed is a by-product. Most of you have been around enough to see the cycles and know exactly what I'm talking about. Last year's red-headed stepchild gets a fix and now they're the new golden-haired wonder. It's been an endless cycle and will continue to be a problem with so many mix and match possibilities the multiple classes, races, and intrinsic ways to do damage offer.
Back to release time in my experience best solo was class was coercer, warlock was doing well but not as well as coercer and necro was very slow grinder durable but slow. In EQ1 it was all opposite thou ... necro was ultimate king of solo and top of the food chain in any endurance fights where DOTs had time to run their course
Pets aren't the problem. The absence of spell stats is. At least pet classes do damage closer to what they should be doing for a mage (PvP and PvE)
Its questionable ... In EQ1 back in time during PoP era balance were look like that - Wizards - best in game burst DPS, in longer fight they fall to the T2 with mages (that use by semi utility class), In any endurance fight (bosses/raids) necro were coming on top due to DOTs/mana efficiency and pets were not really much of the damage (unless you solo or unless at very rare occasion you can charm decent undead pet .. like in Plane of War Rallos Zek fight) other champs of endurance fights were rogues. I don't want by any mean spark discussion about nerfing sommoners pets thou. I have very limited experience in nowdays efficiency of the pets but judging from my limited test of necro on TLE (level 15, pet is apprentice buffs are Adept and spells are mostly at Adept) - Apprentice Pet when buffed easy solo orange cons and yellow heroic w/o any help of necro, more over my pet actually kill a lot faster then my necro same mob. And I can concur that yes necro can AFK level by just staying on the spot with fast respawn of white-yellow mobs
Based on parses I've been gathering from some top guilds and players on Stormhold I'd say the current top parsing mages should go like this. Conj on top, Necro behind by 100-200, Wizard behind by about 300-400, Illy behind 400-500, beyond that I'm not sure, haven't seen any parses from guilds with Warlocks or Coercers worth anything. As for PvP server issues, I don't care, if you're playing EQ2 to PvP you're wrong. Seeing this breakdown though pets need to be tuned back a tad, however I do know that right now Rangers are competitive with pet classes due to the amount of haste they can get.
Our rangers do some insane damage. My opinion on summoners is biased, so I mean I can't really say anything other than I've always loved conjurors and I could always do things with them that I couldn't on other classes. I think once AA's come out on Stormhold and we're a few expansions in things will be a lot different. Knee-jerking over dps in classic is kind of silly imo. Things will iron themselves out as expansions open up. How quick that happens, is up to the community. I'd hate to see the devs waste time trying to fix something that will eventually work itself out.
Rangers and summoners go back and forth. Summoners just do it using 2 buttons and no gear. Summoner wins on AOE also. And in PVP, usually. Pet balance is just a little off.
2 buttons is a bit of a stretch, since the trash summoners still lose to Wizards and Rangers on 100% of parses. If you're not using a proper spell rotation you will lose parses.
Come play a real pvp game. Stop pretending eq2 will ever have good/balanced pvp. Hi. You should still have vent info. Hop on.
I don't really agree with the OP in regard to summoners. They are pretty strong on TLE, but they aren't too difficult to fight if you understand how to play your own class and how to fight theirs. A lot of summoners feel like some others here that "all you need as a summoner is to turn on pet" which generally means they are just bad at their class since there is a lot more to it than that. Just be better than they are and they aren't all that difficult to beat. Now if they understand what they are doing, then it does get tougher but they still are beatable. There are a couple reasons why calling for other classes to get the nerf bat is bad for TLE. First off, the classes are all going to be balanced a little bit in DoF with the 3-4 new abilities and will be balanced even more thoroughly with the release of aa in KoS and EoF. They would just have to rebalance the classes you want to nerf in a month or two as new expansions start coming out. Secondly, calls for nerf bats just bring us closer to being carbon copy classes with few differences. The massive differences between the classes and lack of perfect balance (especially 1v1) makes eq2 interesting. A lot of games, in an attempt to make things "balanced" either create classes that are hardly different from each other, or nerf away the differences. We can see this already in eq2. Many classes have had their abilities nerfed or taken away that helped to differentiate thei class from others. For example, people cried about flurry on guardians being "unfair" and had it nerfed to just being double attack. This took away one of the things that made guardians special and helped to differentiate guards from other classes. It was pretty much the only way to get flurry until SF and gave guardians a special ability, something to showcase our difference from other classes. Having those rare auto attacks that would hit 3, 4 and (theoretically) 8 times in one swing was nearly exclusively a guardian thing. Replacing it with DA brings the class closer to what the other classes have, which is fair bit of double attack. This process of "shave off this bit, cut that part back" eventually just makes us all bald. Don't go down this road of crying for nerfs of classes you have a little trouble beating solo. Just learn to play your class, learn to itemize for your weaknesses and find some friends to compliment what you lack (ie finding a healer friend as a guardian) rather than cry for someone else to be nerfed. It isn't going to end well for anyone.
With all this dps mod and haste on TLE, ppl will be crying for a swash nerf when they get Hurricane with DoF, now wouldn't that be something? Lol
