The nerf thread closed

[deadman1204]

There are other threads now. Like rangers looking for tanking improvements and certain people are taking things into there.

I've noticed you need to be careful of certain posters. Like Dre - who will report any post counter to what he says.
Sadly, its an effective way to control discussions. Gets all contrary voices removed.

[dreneth]

deadman1204-
Like Dre - who will report any post counter to what he says.

I guess I should report anyone who proposes pet nerfs then....

Dre-
I think the best option is to leave both pets and tanks they way they are in terms of mitigation.

I understand that Magicians are worried about knee-jerk nerfs to pets. On the record, I do not support these nerfs, nor do I support the beaming nerf. My 3box setup is Warrior Bard Mage.

You know what nerf I did support? Warrior AA - Improved Shield Specialist back in House of Thule. Some things are just broken.

There are a few things crystal clear right now:
1. NPC's have significantly better defensive hit distribution than players
2. Many players *still* do not understand how mitigation and player tanking works
3. SOE mods would rather lock threads than deal with problematic posters

While I understand #2 is often outside of the focus of people who do not play tanks, I'd like to offer is that we should all be a lot more cordial with each other. Humans are particularly adept at choosing sides or declaring anyone who isn't on your side of a line in the sand to be your enemy. Discussions about race, religion and politics are forbidden in many professional circles because of this behavior. Class Balance is just another example.

That said, the the currrent PC vs NPC mitigation model is not acceptable. Here are a couple of options:

A. Work together to get this addressed.
B. Keep slinging mud and screaming louder.

I'd prefer option A. Olive branch extended.

bristle.dreneth

[Bedavir]

Option B was already chosen by the Mage community.

[Voragath]

Option B was already chosen by the Mage community.

We tried option A over and over and over. We get nerfed anyway. I even stated that nerfing pets leads to zero improvements. I even offered other suggestions. Our class was doing bad back in UF and then HoT. We worked together as a community to find a community rep, determine a direction, and provide evidence for why we wanted certain improvements. Not once did this community become better by asking for a nerf nor did this community employ such a strategy.

We extend an olive branch and it gets smacked out of our hands. Pure and simple: people are misinformed and think the mage class is just a /pet attack class when NOTHING can be farther from the truth.

This is an old argument anyway. The mage class has been hated by warriors from day one. The warrior class is a bit delusional as well; evidenced by their SoD/UF era requests to be dps. There were eras before that but those were before my time. The devs have stated many times that everyone asks for DPS. The reason is that DPS numbers are easy to see and no one really knows how to look beyond the math.

[dreneth]

Option B was already chosen by the Mage community.

The mage class has been hated by warriors from day one. The warrior class is a bit delusional as well

Probably best if we all avoided blanket statements like this.

[Bedavir]

Unfortunately, the bigger problem hers is that you guys (the collective you) don't seem to have a good understanding about the nature of tanking, the relative danger, and the importance of DI spread. This is not a new discussion or debate in the tanking community, it has been well hashed out multiple times over the last decade or more. It was this understanding that finally pushed tanks out of the dark ages of chasing hit points, and it is the power of mitigation that forced SoE's hand and started the slow decline in available armor class for PC characters compared to attack values of NPCs. Simply put, being able to do what is shown below in these graphs makes tanking trivial. Trivial enough that tanks don't even need discs, and in these cases trivial enough that having this degree of mitigation will end up comparatively make you a stronger tank than those with far inferior baseline mitigation and a huge repertoire of activated discs and tanking abilities.

I ran a very long string of parses to see just how long it would take for an NPC tank to even take a max hit (DI20). I was wrong in my posts on SoE live - I assumed the furthest right was DI20 but if you count them up it was not. This was a naked pet - no buffs - only the gear it came summoned with at EM15.

>50,000 hits:





Now what does this mean? If we define a dangerous time period as a string of 6 high hits (DI15+).

-Chance for DI15+ round any given hit is about 1.3%.
-Probability of taking 6 such hits in a row is 0.000000000007213% (0.013 ^6)
-Chance is basically 1 in 138,638,569250 (138.6 billion)
-At average rate of hit 4.8 hits per second - this will occur every 8,023,065 hours

Earth pet on trash mob will take a string of DI15+ hits every 915.9 years tanking nonstop 24 hours a day.

If you run the math on Raid geared warrior, you will see this phenomenon approximately every 40 minute. A group geared warrior, every 28.5 minutes. A group geared knight every 20 minutes or less. A monk or a ranger? A lot more frequently.



^ 327 minutes afk so far 26,407 hits (5.5 hours)

Rounds > 30k in 5.5 hours = 8
Max roundin 5.5 hours = 38388 damage


Raid geared warrior with certitude and shield:



30 minutes of fighting
Rounds > 30k in 30 minutes = 6
Max round in 30 minutes = 43k


Group geared shadowknight with certitude and shield:



30 minutes of fighting
Rounds > 30k in 30 minutes = 50
Max round in 30 minutes = 53k

Here you can see how this DI spread plays out in real time - even factoring in the superior avoidance of PC tanks. In 5.5 hours of tanking, the earth pet barely took more rounds > 30k than a raid geared warrior took in 30 minutes. A group geared SK took 50 such rounds in 30 minutes (almost 2 a minute) - whereas the pet takes less than 2 per hour. The max round in 30 minutes for both the raid warrior and group sk was significantly higher than the max round a pet saw over 5.5 hours.


Now the counter argument is that naked afk parsing means nothing. For absolute comparison purposes you are correct, but the baseline is what allows us to then add in known variables. We know exactly how defensive works, how knight discs work, how activated abilities work. We know what stacks and what does not. Knowing the raw baseline damage distribution and avoidance (players beat out pets in this regard), we can extrapolate pretty much anything.

The point is simple, from a tanking standpoint NPC tanks and PC tanks are playing completely different games. From looking at how ac is calculated for NPCs, how much mitigation aa boosts these pets, and how NPCs do not have softcaps with diminished returns - this is the why. In looking at how taking 450 attack away from mobs (basically a raw 450 real ac without any softcap diminishing returns) impacts the DI spread on various tanks - a player tank would need a displayed armor class somewhere far north of 30,000ac (maybe north of 50k ac) to take hits like a pet.

Yes, we all know the limitation of using a pet to tank - they needn't be repeated. Those limitations should be, at best, be the only difference in a dedicated player tank and a pet tank beefed out. In short, in a pet tanking scenario, at best the pet should be no easier to heal than a real tank - preferably it should be a little worse in raw damage intake at baseline with a tank oriented pet being preferable to a ranger or monk. As it stands, in any scenario where a pet is used to tank - from a damage intake and safety to heal standpoint, it actually represents the safest tank out there. For those brief periods where a knight or warrior blows everything, for that brief time period the tank will take less - but averaged over time cycling these abilities - pet wins out. At baseline, there is no comparison.

Now, in the case of knights it gets even trickier. My favorite HA group setup to run with my knights is knight + 5 other dps (one or 2 with some measure of support). This comparison gets tricky as the knight doesn't even need a healer - but neither would the pet need a healer in a ranged group - the owner can provide the requisite healing power for their pet that will be comparable to the knight.


-------------
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The goal here is not a nerf call driven by class hatred, it's a request for some measure of balance to be restored. Looking at the variables, it is quite clear that this represents an oversight - a bug of sorts. Any target that is going to function as a tank in a group or raid needs to be on the same playing field. We need to mitigate comparably to each other and avoid comparably to each other. Average dps still favors the pet, but if you look at average dps alone the numbers don't look that bad. My suggestion has been (and I suspect it will actually be taken seriously by those in charge) to bring pet mitigation down to the ranges that player tanks experience while at the same time increasing their avoidance to the same ranges that player tanks experience. There will or would not be a big change in average incoming dps, but the nature of that damage - just like for the player tank - would have those same moments of spike.

You might consider this a nerf, I would consider it a necessary balance.

[Voragath]

Option B was already chosen by the Mage community.

The mage class has been hated by warriors from day one. The warrior class is a bit delusional as well

Probably best if we all avoided blanket statements like this.

My statements are fact. I even backed up the delusional part. If they stuck to just tanking, or just dps, then fine. The class was originally designed to be beefy and to draw the hits in. That was mainly it. Over time it got more and more complex and more tools were added to do this. So, why on earth would a class ask for something it never had?

As to hating us from day one, I found some old threads from the original mage forum by accident and a LOT of digging one day. Same old arguments we are having now were had back then: including how pets were replacing them, they were asked to sit while the pet tanked, etc. Eventually, that led to our pets dying when a mob sneezed. That was a bad time for everyone and the mage community all but dried up. I joined right at the tail end of that era so I saw how dead the community was. It was rare to see a post newer than 5 or 6 months prior. I had to rely on their posted knowledge to learn to play a mage. As time went on and the community no longer updated info, I had to learn my mage and what things did on my own or by the few passing mages in game.

So, not a blanket statement and I won't be avoiding them because I don't want to see that happen to this class...ever...again. We all fought a long road to get to where we are and we'll put up one hell of a fight to stay here. I also won't watch it happen to another which is why I've been trying to figure out help for warriors since I joined the CRT program. That thread came up and my first action wasn't to defend pets or mages; rather, I was asking what was wrong with warriors and putting forth ideas to help. I've complained over and over that warriors should never play whack-a-mole and hoping for some lucky RNG just to live. Complaining about how another class is better than you is never the way to fix a problem: you have to show you have a problem and propose ways to fix it. If you don't believe me, look at how well mages are now and all we did was say, "here's our problem, and here's how to fix it...." Whenever I brought about a change for our class, that's exactly how I did it.

[Voragath]

Unfortunately, the bigger problem hers is that you guys (the collective you) don't seem to have a good understanding about the nature of tanking, the relative danger, and the importance of DI spread. ....

The goal here is not a nerf call driven by class hatred, it's a request for some measure of balance to be restored. Looking at the variables, it is quite clear that this represents an oversight - a bug of sorts. Any target that is going to function as a tank in a group or raid needs to be on the same playing field. We need to mitigate comparably to each other and avoid comparably to each other. Average dps still favors the pet, but if you look at average dps alone the numbers don't look that bad. My suggestion has been (and I suspect it will actually be taken seriously by those in charge) to bring pet mitigation down to the ranges that player tanks experience while at the same time increasing their avoidance to the same ranges that player tanks experience. There will or would not be a big change in average incoming dps, but the nature of that damage - just like for the player tank - would have those same moments of spike.

You might consider this a nerf, I would consider it a necessary balance.

We do understand. What you fail to grasp is that the pet is part of the mage. The mage is nothing without the pet. In the beginning we couldn't heal our pet. In fact, other than one quick aa heal, we can't effectively heal our pet. Pets did originally take horribly spiky damage and could bite the dust in an instant. We also can't make our pet do anything to avoid damage; players CAN. Mitigation for pets has always been high because they needed to slowly die for us to even have a chance. Eventually, pets were kept weak, mobs gained power, and mitigation was worthless to the pet. They gave us heals and runes that did jack squat. You can still watch runes drop in a blink after casting them on pets; that's laughable. Our one direct heal is a cruel joke. Our PR is a hail mary attempt to save the pet; and you'll be saying many hoping it goes off before the pet dies.

In the end, bringing pet mitigation down doesn't help anyone. It just hurts. If pets could do some things PC's could, then pets could take spiky damage. We are also constantly getting locked in with casting issues. Our spells are some of the slowest in game which creates a hole that you can drive a nekhon through in which our pets can eat it. So, you bring mitigation down on pets and you still suck at mitigation, you still will be difficult to heal, and the game will be worse because now everybody sucks. That's asking for a nerf plain and simple.

If you honestly wanted to fix your class, you'd be looking to see how this happened. Asking to get your mitigation brought up. Asking for a passive aa or an activated ability or new stat to fix the problem. Maybe asking to unlink some discs, some aa's, etc. And tanking is no longer just "taking lots of hits." It's all about positioning, aggro, mechanics, etc. The big picture shows your class to be just fine overall. Mitigation isn't the end all be all of tanking; it is broken for your class, sure. The fix is not to break another class so you can be happy that's it broken for everyone; you ask to have it made better.

[edited to remove some letters in very odd places]

[Bedavir]

Yes, the pet is part of the mage, and that part of the mage should not so easily out-class a dedicated player tank under any circumstances. I don't care if it's a single pull or an ideal group or the perfect situation ... "PART" of a ranged caster dps class should not outperform a dedicated player tank in any spectrum ... under any circumstances. Unfortunately, we are not talking a small part of the game - rather a huge wedge of it. Pet tanks should be capable and viable, but no superior.

As to whether or not bringing pet mitigation down from the stratosphere helps anyone, I will agree that individually it helps nobody. What it does help is this game ... it's balance .. and it's ongoing existence.

I'm glad you acknowledge that we suck at mitigation and are difficult to heal. I furthermore hope that you will realize that we only "suck" at mitigation in comparison to NPCs (your pet and everyone else's) by comparison. In actuality, we are the best at mitigation amongst all players - and the parses back that up. By fixing pets that are broken, content will again be balanced vs the best passive mitigators (warriors). I appreciate that you might consider this a bad thing - but you are one class out of how many?

I have asked <repeatedly> that our mitigation be brought to sufficient levels to counterbalance the self healing that knights bring to the table. Has that happened? Not yet. Will it happen? Hopefully. In the meantime, the degree our class's mitigation needs to be boosted is beneath the level of mitigation that your (part of your) class brings to the table as is. It is broken, and the release of how a PC's actual armor class is calculated by Dzarn has only highlighted this. Your pet is an NPC, not subject to diminishing returns. This is balanced from the game standpoint by setting raw ac and attack levels on our targets at set levels - balanced against players who are subject to diminishing returns. Unfortunately, your pets are coded as <NPCs> and the amount they benefit from gear, aa, and otherwise completely break this balance. You can see this easily with mercs who's ac we know is low - coded well beneath current PCs yet they mitigate better. By comparison they are lackluster because they have half the hp of pet tanks and bad, buggy AI.

Is this asking for a nerf? In your eyes, I suppose the answer is yes. From the standpoint of the entire playerbase? The answer is ----- it's a balance fix. Even if your pets <only> tanked passively as good as current PC tanks, that would be a nerf to pet owners who pet tank as it's a big step back.

That alone should scream "broken" more than anything else.

In closing, I'm glad you acknowledge that PC tanks suck at mitigation and are difficult to heal. Content is balanced against our power - not that of your pet's mitigation. Content and player tank mitigation are balanced - your pet is not.

Cheers.

[Falore]

Some tanks are saying that balance is broken and pets need to be tuned down to preserve the balance because based on the charts a few players have submitted tank classes have inferior mitigation to pets...

Thing is though mitigation is only one aspect of eq combat, things ARE currently balanced. The warrior I group with in the plane of war tanks named mobs in the zone such as the heart of narikor, slave driver thokk, the blade, the barb, kijarl, etc better than my pet tanks trash mobs in the field. Granted he is raid geared BUT it still goes to show that there is more to this all that simple mitigation.

Warriors actually tank everything in eq really well, even if they potentially do not have number 1 mitigation in the game does not mean things are unbalanced. They remain the number 1 tanks overall due to other tools and abilities as well as numerous situational limitations of mage pets. I don't care if warriors get boosts, in fact more power to them if they do but I don't want to see that power gained at the expense of another class, and to be honest if warriors had pet mitigation on top of all the other tricks they have and a handful of the advantages they have over mage pets they'd be essentially jt buffed tanks.

Mage pets are tuned in a way so that they dont get destroyed by AE's and AE ramp Hence their HP and mitigation, they are prevented from being better tanks than warriors and knights due to numerous limitations listed on these forums in the past as well as several others.