pets

[Failcon]

That was pretty much my point... we're not competitive in any situation. Short burns we're tripled, mid length fights melee and other casters are just coming down from their burns and still have the huge damage lead, long fights melee are able to sustain high enough to still be ahead of us long after their discs have faded. We're supposed to be middle ground yes, but our middle ground sucks. You say melee are supposed to rule long fights? Why are they topping burst and mid length as well then?

I agree we don't get all the support we need, and it's been mentioned one of our problems is multiple damage sources. I don't think having a bard and shammy in our group would magically solve our pet problems (especially since the bards would be better singing spell enhancing songs). The major burst buffs are MGB'd anyway (warcry, auspice etc). But just sitting back and accepting we're not going to be decent dps isn't really acceptable either, because in the high end it has the very real effect of mages not being desired. No one is asking to match zerkers and wizards in burst, or match necros in sustained. Just asking to be a little closer... It's not cool that it takes 2 or 3 mages to match the damage output of 1 other class.

I agree, I would love having a bigger burst, thank some of the Beta mages, plus others for having the level 90 TC spell that was on a sepperate timer removed. The reason, cause we are not Wizzies so we shouldn't rely on our casting to keep up. I am serious that is what was said, by a mage. I think we need better casting, but we have to find a way for it to fit in so as that we can present the idea and be listened to, on how it doesn't OP our group/solo game. I group with a bard, I have her pull for me in convo, and then she sits there playing melee/caster songs, which she seems to be able to keep them all running, well with lil drops between, and makes a huge diff from when I am out on my own (I mean on the parse, I always keep it running). Also a shammy makes a big diff if they use epic and such which effect pet also. I don't know about your guild but we are bard light and melees get the shammys so I get mgbs and chanty boost, druids are getting a new buff? that improves fire dmg so that will help us, if for you like me they are our healers.

This is also an issue, Devs are basing us on prime groups that we just don't get. Raid leaders don't want to go out of their way to help mages when we have a lasting stigma, our lovely pets, the scapegoat of the raid.

[nako]

Dude please, first off how can you say what your DPS was compared to the Wizzy's when as you said you don't know where you were. I parse every fight and can tell you exactly how I am doing. Do to mages whining about us being utility they cried till our new AA mod rod was nerfed, rather than it being a benifit to our guilds, that could be cast between nukes, it is now a fairly crappy item compared to its former abilities. Also a nuke based on the number of people in raid has nothing to do with the mage class design, the whole reason for Jolt/Shock/Clash is for the raid enviorment. It is one of the reasons so many classes are being given multiple types of pets, pets that designers complain about having to code. Not all guilds have/like pet classes so yeah can be tough, ROI doesn't recruit beastlords, but every medium to top tier guild on Rathe have plenty of pet classes. With 3 mages, 3 necros, and 2 beasts you have 8 main pets, mages and beasts should be casting servants so you should have more than enough and that doesn't count necros who tend to love tossing out their hordes, that is non host, so how are you missing out unless your guild just doesn't have enough pet classes.

On an optimal 70sec parse I will sit around the 12-14k mark, or 15-20k using 7th/cata. These numbers really don't vary much (given consistent group make up) unless something goes horribly wrong/right. I don't need to make the top 10, or parse myself, to know that.

We generally have 1-2 mages and 1-2 bsts on raid. Nec/sk/enc/shm/brd/wiz/clr/etc don't use their pets (unless a very specific encounter, ie MI), so no contributions from them (and no, they don't spam swarms either). 6-8 pets on agro list is about the norm, unless mob is permarooted or cornered. I pop out flappy even (no push, but adds a pet to agrolist), but there aren't many encounters where it'll live more than 10 sec. Same thing goes for nec archer swarms I assume.

Yeah I bet they would love you to reroll a Wizzy. As for me I don't play my mage for what other people want, I play cause I love being a mage.

I have every confidence that my alt wizzy with 1/3 the AA's and no UF progression/raid gear, could outparse me in almost every scenario, while blind. That the mage is still my main probably says a lot.

Back on topic, have the dev's released a pet stat chart like the one we saw for SoF or SoD maybe?

[Molak]

Dont think we got the pet stats this time nako, though it was asked for several times.

[Failcon]

Pet tuning:

Significantly increased the AC for Magician Earth pets.
Significantly increased the accuracy for Monk swarm pets.
Increased damage, accuracy, HP, and AC on all HoT pets. I can post numbers later but I want to see real world tests before I color expectations.
I additionally made some general changes to focused pets:

Higher focus ranks will gain slightly more power per tier than they did previously.
Slowly increased pet defensive skills as they are focused by higher tiers.


This is what they told us, I know no details.

[Gnomeland]

There are no details because they made the changes at the last minute without any testing. Who knows what they actually did to pet defense? Reports will have to come after release, and the increases most likely have to do with other classes' pets (BST esp.) rather than ours, since BSTs got a HUGE boost to their pets' power (similar to what we got in SoF).

But one thing's for sure: none of it addresses the problem of raid DPS. If they want to address that, they need to improve our nukes and/or gargoyle pets.

[micker]

I just want a bad ass pet. It's why I play a Mage. I'd take a stronger pet over higher burst dps, but that's me.

[Baramos]

Haha well. Failcon you're not a "bad guy" after all. A lot of your continued information here makes sense, and you also apologized so right back at you. I don't think you are a troll. What I do think is that Mages have been stung and are just in a bad mood.

We did try to achieve some kind of consensus before beta as to what we would ask for but despite our efforts here, and on the Sony board, the community has really been pretty fractionated since the old Mage board died. We are still recovering.

As far as Pet Data, I don't know how to post a graph, but the old data works out thus to EM8:

For Air:

HP = 365*(EM)X + 18.4k
AC = 118*(EM)X + 1100

For Earth:

HP = 455*(EM)X + 23k
AC = 138*(EM)X + 1300

Those curves are derived from the data. The actual data barely deviates from being linear.

It would be an interesting experiment to look at EM9 and beyond using empirical data. Given the above we could make some assumptions given a fixed MOB (for the AC portion anyway).

Even better would be to get the tabular data from the devs. Again.

Bara

[Voragath]

To be clear, it was Tulisin who first brought up the Harvest to cause dissention. I chewed his ass until a dev told us to stop bickering.

[Merlaina]

I will agree there was a lot of infighting and bickering among mages on the beta forums. We had a hard time coming to a consensus about much of anything. Rods in particular seemed to be a powder keg issue. Some wanted them targetable, some wanted them self only, some wanted the recast on them to be 5-10 minutes, some wanted them to be AE, some thought they should have 3 charges, some thought 1... you get the idea. Same went for gather potential and our big bolt, calling them too wizardly (and we got a visit from a wizard complaining about our bolt).

We did try to present a unified front at the start of Beta, coming to the devs with the suggestions and requests from the 3 months or so before beta. To be fair if you look at the poll results we did get a lot of what we asked for (www.emagepoll.info, click the results link. But a lot of what we asked for was the sort of low hanging fruit that we get pretty much every expansion (more ranks of XXX AA, upgrades to existing spells, etc). In fact I may do a "dev scorecard" here in the next couple of days comparing what we asked for to what we got.

[Mindrix]

Late beta cycle pets always end badly. Add in no comprehensive parsing, and it leaves things to be in a bad place for a while.

Mod Rods are always a contentious issue. If you lived through the Rod Art days, you don't want to go back to that. If you didn't, they seem like they're more utility that you can get. No easy way to settle this.

And the reason there isn't much "consensus" is that Magician consensus was, for many years, what Kozvar & I decided. Others had a say in the matter, but we set the rules for how things were going to get done. That ship has now sailed, so the boat is completely at the whim of the Developers. No Magician has the force of standing with the community to really impose their will, so it will simply move around to what is popular. Just hope what is popular is good for the Magician class.

After I work down our best DPS later this week, I'll make a post explaining it. As the creator of "The Weave", I figure it's my job to give it one last outing. Though, looking at the final spell list, I'm seeing between 3 & 5 different variants that'll exist due to context. Best DPS isn't going to be 1 button anymore. That was always something of a crutch, but a solid one. Magicians will need to get more adaptable to their nuking.