Pet Issues

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Sancus
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Pet Issues

Post by Sancus »

So for most of TDS, I've observed (and I believe others have as well) pets doing extremely poorly DPS-wise on raids relative to how the 105 pets perform in, say CotF, and even relative to how the 100 pets perform in CotF. Now unfortunately it's impossible to get long parses in raids to iron out the RNG, but I consistently see much lower numbers than I would expect. First, it's important to look at what I am seeing when parsing on combat dummies. Pets have much lower average hits and much lower accuracy on Arx raid mobs relative to combat dummies due to higher defenses/levels, but the other areas should remain relatively consistent. Here is some data that I have from recent parses on beta (though they're consistent with what I've seen in the past on live, and we did not receive any new passive pet AAs on beta) (PSA: If you don't feel like reading through the parses/numbers, I have a relatively short conclusion paragraph at the bottom; this post is much longer than I intended, but even still I'm concerned it does not provide sufficient numerical evidence):

Over the course of 11347 seconds, I used Virulent Talon and Zeal of the Elements VI every time they refreshed. My pet was buffed with Burnout XII Rk. III, Second Spire of Elements IV, Frenzied Burnout IX, and Iceflame Armaments Rk. III.

/tell Sancus Puksu -vs- Test One Hundred Three: -- DMG: 355690900 -- DPS: 31347 -- Scaled: 31347 -- Slash: 209193985 -- Backstab: 63673084 -- DirDmg: 56659887 -- Rampage: 26161027 -- WildRamp: 2917 -- % dmg as normal: 100% -- Non-crit rate: 100% -- Attempts: 43882 -- Hits: 36745 -- Missed: 7137 -- Accuracy: 83.7% -- Avg Hit: 9679 -- Max hit: 50491 -- DMG to PC: 0

Puksu (Sancus) - 4093
--- Companion's Strike XXV - 320
--- Iceflame Strike III - 1368
--- Second Spire of Elements Strike IV - 574
--- Virulent Talon Strike III - 560
--- Water Elemental Strike XI - 1271

Sancus - 33
--- Virulent Talon III - 14
--- Zeal of the Elements VI – 20

Here are some important figures to derive from these parses:
  • Excluding Direct Damage, my pet made 38,844 attempts, which is 3.423 a second
  • Virulent Talon Strike III fired every 2.980 seconds on average while it was up (it was up for a total of 1669 seconds). It wore off in 119.214 seconds on average.
  • Second Spire fired every 19.768 seconds on average.
  • Iceflame Strike III fired every 8.294 seconds on average
  • Companion's Strike XXV fired every 4.466 seconds on average while it was up (it was up for a total of 1429 seconds). It wore off in 71.450 seconds on average.
  • Water Elemental Strike XI fired every 8.928 seconds on average.
Now, what if we remove most burn discs from the mix? Here are those same statistics from a pet with only Iceflame Armaments Rk. III, Burnout XII Rk. III, and Second Spire of Elements Strike IV on it (19133 second parse)

/tell Sancus Puksu -vs- Test One Hundred Three: -- DMG: 248951899 -- DPS: 13012 -- Scaled: 13012 -- Slash: 154162669 -- Backstab: 47861353 -- DirDmg: 46927877 -- % dmg as normal: 100% -- Non-crit rate: 100% -- Attempts: 66632 -- Hits: 54053 -- Missed: 12527 -- Defended: 52 -- Accuracy: 81.2% -- Avg Hit: 4605 -- Max hit: 37500 -- DMG to PC: 0
  • Excluding Direct Damage, my pet made 59186 attempts, which is 3.093 a second
  • Iceflame Strike III fired every 7.559 seconds on average
  • Water Elemental Strike XI fired every 8.580 seconds on average
To illustrate the contrast, here are some graphs of my pet from this week's Arx clear on events where, to my knowledge, there are not mechanics that would significantly decrease the performance of pets. It's worth noting that the proc rate would be affected by changes in accuracy, but the rate of attempts should not be:

Arc Facultas Ingens:

Arc Facultas Ingens on 11/1/2015

Puksu (Sancus) - 21
--- Arcane Melody Strike III - 3
--- Companion's Strike XXV - 6
--- Fjilnauk's Strike III - 3
--- Iceflame Strike III - 3
--- Received Bard Epic - 1
--- Received Chromatic Haze Proc - 1
--- Received Quick Time - 1
--- Virulent Talon Strike III - 4
--- Water Elemental Strike XI - 2

Produced by GamParse v1.5.1.5

I buffed the pet with Frenzied Burnout and Virulent Talon before engage, and used Zeal of the Elements VI at the 32 second mark (because I'm forgetful like that :? ). Despite this, the pet put out only 14k points of damage /g Arc Facultas Ingens in 73s, 20195k @14008 --- #2 Puksu (Sancus) 1023k@(14008 in 73s). Much of this is due to how slowly the procs proced. 4 VT procs in 73 seconds is completely abysmal, and all of the procs fired at significantly slower rates than they would on a combat dummy. Furthermore, looking at the graph, there were significant periods of time during which the pet was simply inactive:

Image

At that rate of proccing, VT would have taken 730 seconds to use all of its counters. While this is on the more extreme end of what I've experienced, it is not uncommon for VT to take 250-300+ seconds to expend all of its procs. This is likely due to the pet making only 1.479 attempts per second, which is just 43% of its rate on a combat dummy. Here is the effect that this has on proc rates:
  • The amount of time between Virulent Talon procs increased 512%
  • The amount of time between Iceflame Strike procs increased 193%
  • The amount of time between Water Elemental Strike procs increased 308%
  • The amount of time between Companion's Strike procs increased 53%
Now, admittedly, those numbers are extremely variable, which is due to the difficulty of parsing on real raid bosses and is why I'm providing multiple examples.

Now, let's look at a longer fight:

Praetor Captain Tita Aragus on 11/1/2015

Puksu (Sancus) - 61
--- Arcane Melody Strike III - 16
--- Companion's Strike XXV - 12
--- Fjilnauk's Strike III - 3
--- Iceflame Strike III - 4
--- Received Bard Epic - 1
--- Received Chromatic Haze Proc - 2
--- Received Illusions of Grandeur - 1
--- Received Quick Time - 1
--- Virulent Talon Strike III - 19
--- Water Elemental Strike XI - 7

Produced by GamParse v1.5.1.5

On this fight, I used Frenzied Burnout IX 4 seconds in and Virulent Talon prior to the fight starting. My pet did only 11k damage: /g Praetor Captain Tita Aragus in 200s, 32084k @11177 --- #2 Puksu (Sancus) 2224k@(11177 in 199s), which is very low considering the duration of pet discs (Frenzied Burnout lasts 180s, and VT on Arx raids lasts much longer). Here is a graph of the pet's damage:

Image

Again, you see spikes in the pet's damage at various points combined with huge periods of inactivity. The result is 270 non-Direct Damage attempts, which is a mere 1.357 a second. As a result Virulent Talon procced 251% slower than it does on a combat dummy.

I'd also like to compare this to our pets' performance in older raids, specifically (for this example) WK 2. The fight is notably longer, making the graph less useful because the damage is so compact. However, the difference is evident in the results:

/tell Sancus Xobeker -vs- Combined: Guard Vraymon: -- DMG: 19571275 -- DPS: 21483 -- Scaled: 21343 -- Slash: 11243066 -- DirDmg: 4972175 -- Backstab: 3356034 -- % dmg as normal: 55.6% -- % dmg as critical: 44.4% -- Non-crit rate: 62.6% -- crit rate: 37.4% -- Attempts: 3326 -- Hits: 2796 -- Missed: 304 -- Defended: 226 -- Accuracy: 90.2% -- Avg Hit: 6999 -- Max hit: 54813 -- DMG to PC: 11075

During this 911 second event, my pet had 2723 non direct damage attempts, which equates to 2.989 attempts per second. This is much closer to the results seen on combat dummies, and it resulted in very comparable proc rates. This particular parse was from a time when I still had EM 21, whereas the others I used EM 23. Now pets will admittedly perform better in older content as their offenses are upgraded while the mobs defenses remain constant, but I am not aware of why this would have any bearing on the speed at which the pet swings. Furthermore, I cannot believe that it is intentional for pets to do 1/3-1/2 of the damage that they do just one expansion prior in Arx, which many times brings them well below the DPS that level 100 pets put out in CotF.

Conclusions/TL;DR
In Arx raids, our pets do significantly less DPS than they do outside of those raids, which is extremely detrimental to our DPS as a class. There are a number of possible factors contributing to this, which may include the increased AC, increased mob level, decreased pet accuracy, etc. However, the most startling issue is a pets only performing 40-50% of the attempts that they perform in previous raids and on combat dummies. This has a huge impact on their melee DPS and the speed at which procs fire, which further reduces their effectiveness in raids. I did not play during VoA and do not know the exact nature of the issues pets faced then, but it certainly appears to me that there is some very large issue in the performance of pets in Arx, and possibly going into the new expansion.
Last edited by Sancus on Tue Nov 03, 2015 2:07 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Sancus
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Sancus »

So I guess my question is - does anyone have any evidence/thoughts/etc on this issue? Am I among the only ones who is extremely bothered by it? Do increases in mob defenses have some significant bearing on swing speed that I'm not aware of? Especially with the number of pet-related upgrades we've received in the TBM Beta (Second Spire, new pet spell) I think it's very important to address the issues that pets have. I really wish I could acquire decent length parses from Arx, but it just doesn't seem feasible.

And, as a side note, I haven't even started looking at RS pets yet, which also perform extremely poorly in Arx compared to how they historically have performed.
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Mintalee
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Mintalee »

Sancus, you won't find a bigger cheerleader for your tireless parsing than me, and I would love to see meaningful feedback on your post, but sadly you aren't going to get enough on these forums. Try posting on DBG, you'll reach a much wider audience. <3
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Tweelis
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Tweelis »

I do applaud your dedication Sancus. I'd join in the fray but as of late my playtime has been very sporadic at best. Heck, the last time I was even online at raiding time was 6 months ago. One of these days my playtime will pick up again but the days where I could parse for a few hours are over.

Something I do wonder though is are pet's "nerfed" due to what my geared up parses showed? If so I'm sorry gang....while saying poo poo to Daybreak.

Yes I'm still bothered by the pet "adjustments" but apathy is starting to set in and I'm just logging on these days to hang out with old timers and relax before bed.
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Sancus
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Sancus »

Unfortunately I'm somewhat doubtful this would gain anymore traction than it already has. I'm told Piemastaj has sent parses dating back to House of Thule to the devs which they've ignored, and other Mages I've talked to have echoed the sentiment that the devs have ignored this issue for quite a long time. Aristo hasn't even made one post in beta thus far, and Dzarn hasn't posted anything about Mages since removing the Heavy Rain AA despite pages about our various issues as a class (including multiple mentions of pets' performance). Based on that, it seems pretty unlikely that they're planning to address any of these issues, and we'll therefore fall further behind with our lackluster AAs/spells this expansion (especially with the uselessness of the Dichotomic Companion spell in its current state).

I'm not at the point where I stop logging on, but the lack of progress for Mages in The Broken Mirror is pretty depressing. Not looking forward to suffering through another year of stagnation/regression.
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Tweelis
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Tweelis »

Sancus wrote:I'm not at the point where I stop logging on, but the lack of progress for Mages in The Broken Mirror is pretty depressing. Not looking forward to suffering through another year of stagnation/regression.
This...

Forever ago when we were coh'bots and rod whores I made a baby sk to alleviate the boredom of playing a mage. Things were a lot of fun playing a sk back then. When things picked up for us I shelved my sk and returned to playing Tweelis. Now I play Tweelis to pl my sk's box crew (shaman and/or cleric) in hopes of having fun. However according to the sk boards it looks like sk's are getting the shaft as much as we are.

Either things get fixed or they don't. The box account is silver, it may go all access if things get fixed. Tweelis' account autorenew is set to off which will only get switched if I can viably play in current (or at least current enough) content. As it stands brother island is the most difficult content I can take on. If that means I suck so be it but it's their game but my time and money.
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Sancus
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Sancus »

So I posted a shorter version of this (with a link) on EQ's forums. The devs screwing with pet aggro without fixing actual issues with pets really irked me; basically no chance it amounts to anything but /shrug.
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Tweelis
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Tweelis »

So with the changes I'm curious how the damage spikes are now. I might try and do some parses on Shoon or Roon just to see if things have changed enough to warrant giving additional info to mages and dev's. Do you have any other mobs that would give more relevant parses? There's still the high guards in Shards Landing but I'm trying to get as current as possible (still haven't purchased TBM).
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Sancus
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Sancus »

Not sure if there are some good options in TDS (could probably find a decent mob in Thuliasaur if you're flagged for it).

Personally I'm more concerned with pet aggro, especially RS pet aggro, rather than mitigation at the moment. I don't think much has changed since the 105 pets came out in that regard, and prior to the aggro changes I didn't have much issue with my pet's tanking ability.
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Danille
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Re: Pet Issues

Post by Danille »

Yeah RS pets basically cannot function as off tanks unless you really put some distance between the mob the regular pet is tanking and the RS one.
I sent a PM to EQ developer team about it last week the day the patch went live and have not yet heard a peep from them. They are very quiet lately which is strange and makes me wonder what the heck is going in in San Diego.
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