EQ2 would not allow a testcopy says world is closed, but was able to get betacopy. SO went to beta because notes say its running the pet changes. Cant get a training dummy because there are no guilds. How are we supposed to look at this objectively without the training dummy system? Advanced solos arent good judge of this either because i dont know about you but even the named die in 4-6 nukes. Tl;DR -- No training dummies cant test objectively
One of the issues for the mage pet has always been that they don't seem to realize when their line of sight is blocked. This is probably a problem for all pets, but the scout and tank pet are usually much closer to the mob so is seldom a big problem.
Summoner pet AI and appearance changes feedback. 1. Pet info window: First thing i noticed right off the bat is that there is no way to see my pets abilities or stats. This can be remedied by putting a window similar to the mercenary window that would give us all the detail stats we need to know about our pets. 2. Ooze/hydro pet: The heal components from these pets abilities need to crit or else the healing will be way behind to be considered worth using. I did the calculations if allowed to crit it would only mean about 90k-150k(varies of course) effective heals per sec which is very well behind player heals and merc heals. I would also suggest that they should be made into secondary pets allowing us to summon two pets at once, this would allow us to have our primary role pet such as a tank,scout, or mage pet and a utility pet like the ooze/hydro pet. It will function similar to the ro pet(deity miracle pet) and would not gain the benefits of our pet buffs or temp pet buffs like consumption/blazing avatar and will not be able to soulburn. 3. Tank pet: First thing i can see is of course its now casting its abilities which is great however the tank pet still has issues holding aggro and its not much of a tank either(its rather squishy like my mage pet lol). The reason behind this is because our pets do not gain our resists/avoid/mitigation stats and nor do they get our melee stats(which is why it has aggro issues). The tank pet would also require higher base health points somewhere around 1.5mill to be an effective tank when certain circumstances call for it (like those nights where no tank is online to tank a heroic for your group?). 4. Mage pet: I see where your going with this and how all of its abilities are now AE encounter excluding the abilities granted through AA's but i think the AA abilities such as minion's soulstealing and wrath of the undead servant should also be made into AE encounter abilites. 5. Scout pet: Again nice to see it finally casting all of its abilities however this pet could use a bump in its auto attack which brings us back to allowing our melee stats(all of them flurry/dps mod/MA/AE auto/WDB) to share with our scout and tank pet which will completely solve this problem. 6. Pet appearence functionality: It's a nice addition for sure but it is clunky to use but it functions so i can't complain Could use a better form of selecting the appearence for our minions. 7. "All summoner pets(i assume this means dumbfire pets as well) now benefit from doublecast" Vampirism orb does not doublecast which it should. 8. Bug(s): Undead knight IX(lv97) does not gain the benefts from the AA: Enhance: Summoned Pets: "Grants your fighter pet 10% damage absorption" Test vs live pet dps testing: Between live and test the mage pet has lost about 200k~ dps single target(mage pet on test does around 800k-900k~ single target vs 1mill dps~ on live) which is reasonable considering the fact that the scout pet does about 300k-400k~ dps higher(on test does about 1.2mill~ dps) than the mage pet on test single target. I am unable to really test a AE encounter dps scenario for the mage pet to see where it stands on that.
That's not the first problem to occur with that pet. On live, it's not taking Wrath of the Undead Servant. The same goes for the conji version and the same endline spell on the shadow tree.
All maintained pets do magic damage now so sharing auto attack stats is a mute point. Pet appearance needs a better window. AA based pet spells should be left as is, making them AE also for caster/tank pet makes them OVERPOWERED. FYI if you are using your defense stance for tank pet it holds agro fine (anyways a tank pet should never be able to agro lock simply because that makes them OP). Not being able to possess minion now to see their stats is a negative. This needs to be fixed by simply adding a tab to the character window for pets ( like how the Beastlord has one for their Warder). I've observed all of this on the beta server (copied over my Conj today).
"All maintained pets do magic damage now so sharing auto attack stats is a mute point" - It's not a mute point because the auto attack damage is very lackluster and summoners need to have better scaling for our pets in general. "AA based pet spells should be left as is, making them AE also for caster/tank pet makes them OVERPOWERED". - Making them "AE encounter" won't be as overpowered as you think, considering what AE potential sorcerer's and assassin's have this expansion, and i would rather them make these AA abilities similar to Energy Clash; as a blue AE so it can hit targets that are not linked and we can time it depending the circumstances. "FYI if you are using your defense stance for tank pet it holds agro fine (anyways a tank pet should never be able to agro lock simply because that makes them OP)." - This may be true as a conjy since blazing avatar, and elemental blast are registered as damage coming from your pet. So your pet gets the aggro for the damage dealt from these abilities, however as a necromancer this is not so since stuff like consumption are registered as damage coming directly from the caster. Thus more aggro towards the caster and the tank pet looses aggro fast, even in defensive stance.
I did a quick test in ossuary AS. The first named in particular was always troublesome because the pet would just stand around when the Praetor teleported. Now, it actually chases properly. Threat seems to be generated more reliably by the pet. I think allowing our crit chance to be used (or just bumping it up directly) would improve the tanking ability. This can't and won't happen. For most fights, you want a tank that can actually move independently. Pets have some "cheats" where they're not affected by certain things (like curses) and they can happily warp across different areas with ease. I doubt the devs would be keen on letting something like that go on with heroic encounters. It would probably take a significant overhaul to the pet to make it a viable tank and we would probably lose something in the process.
Every curse can affect pets especially if the pet is tanking the name, and of course for those difficult heroic instances you would want to bring in a real tank. I am not asking for a super tank pet that can do every heroic but nor do i want a paper tank pet that can't even tank broken skull contested names or trash for that matter without its health going down by 40-50% in one hit lol. If you get the Pygmy paladin mercenary by chance that is how our tank pet should ideally be.
This is awesome ! Finally some Summoner love 1. Change appearance - Very very cool. Would prefer it to be in a special pet window in the character menu. 2. Flash cast - Seems cool I can imagine swapping between scout/mage pet for more dps... could become annoying to swap all the time in order to get max dps 3. New AI system - hard to test without training dummy and i couldn't figure out how to get act working on beta anyway ;P 4. Scout pet - very cool it now has comparable dps. not sure if only doing more single target dps is enough to be different from mage pat... maybe some buffs/debuffs/low hate gain.. something to make it seem more scout-y. 5. Mage pet - interesting...would like to test in a raid. Not so sure about swapping between scout and mage all the time. I think I would have prefered scout pet to do better in group content and mage pet to be better at raid content or the other way around. 6. Fighter pet - Went into x2 WoE at level 80 with my 80 progression conjuror (pretty badass i might add) and the fighter pet did pretty great. With raffik healer merc i killed the first two bosses pretty easy with tank pet keeping them taunted most the time. I'd say it could still be a bit stronger. probably higher level soloers matter more when testing it 7. Heal pet - Still crappy. It needs to have lots more health and be more tanky. Needs wayyyy better heals too. btw it wouldn't heal me while on passive. Make it as good as a healer merc for the big dps tradeoff. -- --- It really would help to have a pet window in the character menu that show stats/sharedstats/pet abilities. Just want to say thanks so much for working on them!
BTW, profit ui has a pet stat tab in the character window. It doesn't really show much that we haven't been made aware of. The pet is sharing things like int, sta, potency, crit bonus & ability mod, but lacks crit chance (outside of what AA can give it) and has its own mitigation/avoidance/resists. I don't think the abilities changed a great deal, aside from the few that were made encounter. The training dummy won't help with this. You need to interact with actual mobs.
It was fun to see the mage pet cast an ability similar to pandemic. Like seeing all those aoe numbers. I couldn't tell if grim wave was a blue or green aoe, it's bloody hard to really tell anything accurately on test server without a copy of my main character. The pet appearance changing was cool and all but I wish I could have the demonic looking tank pet appearance on my mage pet. Would really be cool is the ability to use any appearance of any undead that we have charmed previously as a pet appearance.
I'd like to see them to the appearance thing for lich, if they're not going to separate the appearance from the spell.
Thanks so much Caith/dev team for working on these changes! It inspired me to start running my summoners through the AoM sig quest. Overall I think the team took a reasonable approach to improve the pet AI and I'm re-energized to play these classes. I echo what others have said about the heal pet needing a large boost though. The idea of that pet is fun to me and it would be a shame to see it ignored for another handful of years.
Please just blank out the information that Possession used to show instead of taking away a fun, quirky summoner ability. Being able to embody your pet and run it around is the sort of extra touch that makes EQ more clever and enjoyable than run-of-the-mill MMOs. It's also occasionally useful to take pet autofollow off, then possess and plant him somewhere you want him to fight from. It'd be sad to lose a feature like this.
I don't understand if the appearance is based on what you unlocked why than is there no rambler on the list I love that look for my earth avatar
oh yeah, don't get rid of the old possession. make it a fun spell if you have to. it was always fun to plane shift the earth pet or water pet with a petamorph and then use possession to run the 80 ft. tall pet through a raid or lowbie zone. speaking of fun spells how about adding in the group illusions fire and water for conjurors while we have your attention? We have self-illusions for earth/fire/air/water but only air/earth for group-illusions. I like to use the group ones on my mercs sometimes. lastly, how about the level 80 mythical weapon pet (Elemental Manifestation)? Could you update the AI on it as well? If possible make it worthwhile to use in some way over the other pets at level 80? Or change it to something completely different? i guess this wouldn't be a priority but think of it this way - mystics get spirit tap for their active which is super cool and they keep using it forever - conjurors get a useless hunk of an elemental manifestation that is useless and bad and kind of ugly too. how about turning it into a temporary pet with a long cooldown? pleasee
Magepet makes a small amout of crunching autoaatack (3k dps) but spell double attack? far far away from my expected 60%... estimated around 15%... this seems to be unchanged pathing of magepet is much better and changing the appearance of the pets is great
For anyone needing to test with ACT on the beta forums I put our guild halls dummies set as visitor so maybe you can try to use them, the guild is Ancient Prophecy(Commonlands bell tier 4 gh) the training dummy box is near the front door.
