So I have been playing my necro a lot - I suppose you could say it is my main (altoholic so that is hard to say). Well, I have been using the mage pet because, like many others here, that is the best info I got. All I saw was "scout pet is broken, don't bother using tank pet either". Wellll, curiosity got the better of me, and I dusted off my scout pet. Granted, this was only in the GH on dummies... but even that is still an indicator of how they perform. I only used heroic dummies... but that is good enough for things like advanced solos for me. So.. mage pet by itself with no help from me did 220k on the dummy in 1 minute that it took to solo the heroic dummy. Next up... the scout pet... he started 4 minutes ago and is still going at it... and so slowly that ACT is reading each attack as a seperate encounter. How has this fallen to the wayside? We have 2 pets to use while grouping, yet are forced into using just one pet because the other is so horrible it shouldn't even be on our hotbars let alone in our book. I would like us to be able to use whichever pet we wish for grouping and it be effective. I realise the scout is a bard pet and thus cannot put out the numbers of the mage pet, but the difference is quite staggering. OO! scout pet killed the dummy finally - 47 encounters for one dummy, 4 minutes to kill. It seems so wrong. Another thing I noticed after doing a few dummies each alternating between scout and mage is the swing rate. Mage pet averaged 20 swings per dummy, scout pet 9. If we can get swing rates increased on the scout pet (auto attack timing, better use of CAs) i think it would be comparable and possibly worth using should the caster feel like using that instead of the mage pet. Personally not everyone always has access to a bard, so the little bit we can get fromt he scout pet in terms of buffs would be useful if the pet itself were of any value in combat.
The scout pet and tank pets for both summoner classes have been broken for a long time. The mage pet is a better tank pet, and can actually hold agro. The AI scripts have been broken on the scout and fighter pets for over 5 years and SOE has clearly not cared about it. Summoners still can't share those melee stats with their pets. Why? Resources would be my guess. The testing department is too small, and don't know how to play summoners. So they don't deal with it.
Yeah i'd guess it's just not a trivial fix. The last game update had improvements for all the classes and if this was out of scope for that i'm not sure when it would EVER be in scope... It's a shame though.
Sad part is the scout pet parses more than the mage if you use possess minion and play it for the AI :\ I really wish they'd fix it so scout pet was for single targets and mage pet was for aoe.
I can understand that is is not a trivial fix.. however had it been attended to when it was brought up I doubt it still would have taken 5 years lol. I know the mage pet is the best, that is part of my complaint. I want the option of using one of my other pets without sacrificing damage to do so. The tank pet should be worth something when soloing, and the scout/mage pets should be interchangable depending on the mood of the caster at the time. It just seems like people voice these concerns and the devs just hide in the corner hoping we will go away if we think noone is home.
The reason we have a choice of pets is that it gives you a 1 in 3 chance of one of them being worth casting. Seriously, the mage pet may be king right now, but there was a time when the scout pet was the best and you'd be an idiot to cast anything else, and there was even a time when the tank pet was the most beneficial to have up during raids. It's good that we have a choice, because it means that no matter what changes, nerfs or updates happen to the game, you have a fairly good chance of them being good for at least one of your pets.. You are just one developer's crazy new idea away from having the mage pet become useless, and the scout pet becoming amazing.
Just an hypothesis : your gear is mage gyear : 100+ casting speed, 100 reuse, high ability mode, high potency. So your melee stats are likely to be low : wdb, % aoe (irrelevant on single target dummy but in group it is), dps mode, haste, multi attack, flurry. If those stats are shared it means that your scout wears mage gear and your mage pet mage items. That may explains why your scout pet performs badly. It would be rather complicated to cast your mage stats into shared scout stats. Someone with lot of etymons and extra armor could test the scout after getting geared as a scout class ;-) then may be the scout will outperform the mage.
every mage should have 200 haste, 600 dps, 114 MA, etc. anyone that is anyone knows the Fabled Arcane is best gear you can get (outside of mystical gear)
No, Kalika, just no. First, it's easy to get melee stats as a mage, without sacrificing your casting stats. Second, scout pet is BROKEN. It's not just parsing poorly, it literally does not cast it's CA's with any reliability. The mage pet works, that's why it's the best. Scout and fighter pets don't use their abilities when they should, so it's mostly auto attack damage.
First, melee stats don't share. It takes less than 3 seconds to confirm this. Second, scout/tank pets just don't cast anything. Scout pet has 9 abilities, 3 of which are from AAs. Those are the 3 it casts. I let it smack a dummy for 10:25 and this was the cast breakdown. (my necro doesn't have capped reuse apparently~) Minion's Mark - 59 casts - 7.7s recast Minion's Soulstealing - 29 casts - 10.2s recast Wrath of the Undead Servant - 21 casts - 25.2s recast pierce - 226 swings, 168 hits, 74% hit rate...on a training dummy...though this could be due to my necro's low piercing if weapon skills share (after playing beastlord, 99% sure they don't) Now for the non-aa skills: Shadowy Garrote - 6 casts - 15.4s recast Poisoned Spike - 4 casts - 5.6s recast Unseen Blade - 3 casts - 11.2s recast Shadestrike - 2 casts - 33.6s recast Throat Gash - 2 casts - 8.4s recast Acidity - 1 cast - 46.1s recast 00:26 of playing my scout pet with possess minion blindly pressing buttons I had almost as many casts on those non-aa abilities, and more in the case of throat gash
The Fabled Arcane gear has no Stamina, and last time I checked, HP is rather important for a necro's most damaging abilities.
Admittedly the idea of a scout pet being viable would be cool. It would require a lot of mechanic changes, and considering they can't get our mage pets right, a scout pet that could out dps our mage pet in any situation is a pipe dream. I wish people would let it go already, it's not gonna happen this year, next year, or ever. I have posted 100's of things about what they need to do to fix mage pets, yet that always gets less attention than threads like this which accomplish nothing! .
the scout pet comes with extra buffs... I'm not asking for them to do more damage than the mage pet, just to be worth using period lol
I haven't used my scout pet in years, i miss her. Buffrat is spot on with his analysis as to the root of the problem and this absolutely does need fixing. Once upon a time Scout pet was better in short fights vs single targets with the trade off being in melee range (AE's had to be jousted sooner on raids which was just enough to lower overall damage pre-mythical in RoK), the mage was better vs grouped encounters and was easier to keep in the bubble for the Ae's which meant it could fight for longer between AEs. The scout has not been working as intended since then and has actually even gotten worse. With epic repercussions the "other" pets should have come back into the fold. These are not meant to be appearance pets, each pet is intended to do different things besides DPS and i for one would love to be able to use a scout pet in BGs especially for their abilities without sacrificing an insurmountable amount of damage. On that part i also would like my summoner tree "any pet" pet taunt back as well. As that was once a good situational tool for kiting mobs and player characters.(new age summoners- think monkey in the middle- heavily skill based with pet anchor, minion trans location, pet tuant, WoV/Root/Stun ect.)
