A sad day it is when you get posts like this just hours after a campaign/game update is released. Absolutely terrible what has been done to the ENTIRE summoner class. From pet babysitting to wrecking the usefulness of Toxicity, I sure hope the people at DBG are happy and satisfied with what they have done but I can honestly say that playing a summoner now is one of the worst experiences I have had the displeasure of doing in this game. It is truly a shame.
keep giving your feedback about what you don't like now that you have a chance to test it on live. it's not like they can't fix and adjust things
It's not that bad, it does requires some time to get used to it. Also i would like a better pet swap mechanic because it's a bit of pain in the behind to swap pets without instant casting speed. IMO, make pets recast with flash cast up and make flash cast up all the time (so as reanimate so it won't drop when we swap pets). Also for ET dmg wise it's not that bad, although i would like to see reuse reduced to around 30s to make it useful also the most major issue i see with it, it's the nerf to deaggro.. it used to be a great tool for managing hate and now it's meh.. not enough to dump hate. Also about ET, grouping with troub reduce the duration of the debuff which is dumb.
Also probably a display bug, but the pet window was showing my pet has 10cc.. i would assume it's a bug because pet is over 1.1k cc lol
Not going to jump off the cliff yet... but my first reaction. Why in the world would this much time be spent messing with the class when in the end all it did was. 1. Slightly lower single target DPS. 2. Make no significant change to AOE dps. One of the other needed to be increased.. what I witnessed in raid tonight was futile an asinine. This needs to be tweaked significantly.
This pet switching mechanic is awful. If this is the route that's being taken, just make the pets insta cast, and get it over with. There's no reason to make 1 pet insta cast, then the second a timer, then the third another timer It's awkward... You have to click the Fast cast button, then kill the pet, then cast the new pet (3 clicks) to get an insta cast pet, then if you need to switch again, kill the pet, summon the new pet (with a short casting), and then if you need to cast again before the fast cast has refreshed, kill the pet, summon a new pet (with a long cast)... repeat. There's lots of fights where you're swapping between named, adds, named adds... and everytime you swap, you kill the reanimate of the pet. This is *not* a quality of life fix in any respect... it's just frustrating. Make the pet's insta-cast no other class has to baby sit their AE vs Single target ability like this. An.
I had a similar experience in raid tonight with my Necro. Also had a bug where I couldn't cast my mage pet for a while. Scout and tank were ok to cast, but mage was darkened out. Fixed after I zoned out. I had great hopes for these changes. Didn't see much of an increase in DPS using either Mage (when I had it) or scout. Maybe I just need more practice. Maybe I need better group buffs. Maybe I need to look at my Aa spec again. Agree that some tweaking is in order.
Raid was a nightmare..just make pet casting instacast and do away with the current clunky mechanics. Etox is down for so long that its useless. Probably will play some other class till this is fixed.
Completely agree with Sycla - ETOX's recast timer needs significant reduction - had to scroll down a long ways to even find it on my parse - at first, I thought ACT wasn't picking it up for some reason, then I saw the incredibly low damage numbers. Yikes, went way too far the other way after the initial implementation on test.
ETox: - Dmg is fine assuming you do 2 things below. In its current form it does about 2.5x more dmg than Bloodcloud (Necro no-thrills blue AE), but on 6x the reuse. This with assumption only about half of ticks finish before mobs die, which is what's happening in heroics with a decent group. ETox should be BETTER than Bloodcloud since it's a defining AA endline supposedly. To make it good all you need to do is: 1. Duration (20s) too long to be useful in most AE situations. Same ticks need to happen over 10s 2. Recast is way too long. Needs to be 45s-1m base. - AE Radius of 20m is unnecessarily large and frustrating in some situations. 15m is plenty. 10m is even better because it'll add an element of targeting strategy (picking the right target in middle gives better results than just any target engaged) - Resistibility is 17% Harder. This makes it by far the most resistable spell I have on my hotbars, next closest is 29%. You know what compares at 17% Harder? Apprentice Bloodcloud. Except I can't upgrade resistibility of ETox. 32% (to match Ancient Bloodcloud) or even unresistable would be way more appropriate imo, seeing that this is an AA ability and all my AA dmg abilities are unresistable. - Debuff: 4 Potency. Why even bother with 4 potency? There are raid jewerly pieces that procs 20 potency debuff and ETox is supposedly a class defining ability... We've tested the 20pot debuff jewerly and can see no appreciable differences in AE dmg from raid mobs. 1. Honestly just remove it if you want to throw something on the scale for my suggestions under Dmg section to be more palatable. Or, 2. the opposite, make the debuff noticeable and desirable by the RAID and then you can perhaps justify the long duration and reuse. A good example would be: make it debuff resists on par with Dispatch (cause on AE fights debuffs are a big problem to apply, so this would be our niche utility that we lost with old ETox) - Icon should change to be in line with background color-coding standards of AE spells - Enhance: Elemental Toxicity AA (Heroic tree). Under current implementation of ETox, this AA is near worthless. If you listen to my advice on making ETox debuff valuable, you can use these 10pts to ramp up how much it debuffs. If you instead listen to my advice on needing to have the dmg done faster (while nixing the debuff portion), you can use these 10pts to shorten the duration.
Magician's Aptitude AA (Summoner tree, bottom right) - Flavor text wasn't changed from the old. It still says: "Increases pet's combat arts and spell hit rates" - Effect text appears to be incorrect as well. Says: "Lasts 10mins", implying it's a re-castable buff on pet of some sort (which would be awful by the way for just 10potency on pet). The wording confused me for a while since the ability doesn't show up in my spellbook, nor is it an automatic buff on pet when I target it. It appears to be a passive buff to pet's stats, however, which is fine and appears to be working, so the wording just needs to be cleaned up.
Flash Cast - Duration 30s - why does it need a duration? Why not leave it until-cancelled / until-consumed? Currently if you want to optimize dps by popping mage pet mid-fight for the AE phase, if the adds don't die in under 30s, you're worse off than having stuck with single target pet... - Permanently insta-castable pets - what is so overpowered about it, as some have already asked before me? And just get rid of FlashCast altogether. I'm good with macros, so I can just slap FlashCast into my pet-summon buttons and for the most part have the benefits of insta-cast pets already, except when pet-changing back and forth mid fight. For others who aren't good with macros, for them this just introduces additional button clicks (de-summon old pet, flash cast) to properly take advantage of our pets' strengths based on the nature of the encounter and makes this change to pets, which was supposed to be a quality-of-life improvement, rather quite annoying instead...
Petamorph wands Even before this change to pets, where now ideally we're switching between pets constantly depending on encounter, there was no great reason for petamorph wands to have a cast-time. Nor any reason not to persist through death, altho at least for the latter one I'm understanding the issue is technical. Before it was a bearable annoyance because I only casted it once per wipe, which on normal days don't happen often. Now it makes petamorph wands lose a lot of their attractiveness for me. This hits your DaybreakCash bottom line for no good reason imo, if you would like a selling point to your project managers. Ideally, petamorph wands will somehow fit as options on the newly-created pet-alternative-appearance interface. It would just be clutch that way. If that's too difficult for technical reasons, alternative solution that would work would at least make the wands insta-castable + no-recovery and make it so that I can apply them from a macro. I would be interested in petamorph wands once again.
My DPS, strangely, seems to have increased a little bit. Need more time to get better data. Since I've only been running new content, I guess I don't really have control data. One annoyance, the Scout pet dies like a little girl ALL THE TIME. My Mage pet *never* died save for when it had aggro. This thing is dying every 30 seconds of every.single.fight. I'm not exactly sure what is killing it just yet, when I have more time I'll look into it. I *kinda* like ET. The damage is where it needs to be, its just the recast is way too long. It needs to be cut in half at a minimum for it to be truly effective. The Heroic Tree AA to enhance ET should really follow my original suggestion and *reduce* the duration of the spell (so the ticks happen twice as fast.) The debuff is bad, so extending the duration of it hurts the spell a lot. It's close, just needs a little tweaking. The changes to the AA's were done a bit....lazy. It was explicitly stated that pet auto-attack should be a non-factor, but the AA's are still littered with stuff that increases it. Even on spells that were changed with the patch. I understand that there is probably a lot on the plate, but if you are going to do something, might as well do it right. No need to put these changes on live if they aren't done right (or even completed, which it looks like they weren't.)
