The Magician's Tower

I've been out of EQ for a few months. Got the urge to come back, started reading these boards again, but now I read about a "pet nerf" while I've been gone?

How bad is this "pet nerf"? I'm casual, EM14 (if I remember correctly), box a 95+ Mage+Shammy (don't remember the exact levels....mage is at least 96). T5 mercs on each.

Seems a shame to reactivate two gold accounts to come back and box group content knowing that I am less powerful than I was when I last unsubscribed earlier this year.

I usually pet tank with one cleric merc.

Pets were nerfed, but the nerf did not seem to have a huge impact on the group game. Pets health does seem to swing a little more up and down, but they still do pretty good.

Did the nerf only affect the RoF pets?

Did the nerf just reduce the pet's HP + AC, or did it reduce the pet's DPS also?

It was a hp and AC adjust, basically how well your EM item would focus a pet, so it effects more than just RoF (unless they were extremely lazy on changing templates). DPS didn't change.

Fleiss wrote:It was a hp and AC adjust, basically how well your EM item would focus a pet, so it effects more than just RoF (unless they were extremely lazy on changing templates). DPS didn't change.

Thanks for your response, but I am not sure I completely understand what you are telling me. The part I do understand was that the nerf affected the pet's HP and AC, and not DPS. The part I am a bit confused about is whether the adjustments were made to the EM items or the pet templates themselves.

Goranothos wrote:

Fleiss wrote:It was a hp and AC adjust, basically how well your EM item would focus a pet, so it effects more than just RoF (unless they were extremely lazy on changing templates). DPS didn't change.

Thanks for your response, but I am not sure I completely understand what you are telling me. The part I do understand was that the nerf affected the pet's HP and AC, and not DPS. The part I am a bit confused about is whether the adjustments were made to the EM items or the pet templates themselves.

Umm, same thing. The pet that is summoned is based off of the spell (example: like 91 air or 96 air) and than your EM. SoE builds templates for ever EM that will affect that spell (thus way there are level caps on some EMs so they don't have to make more templates). The top EMs were doubling the hps and AC of that template compared to a pet template with no pet foci. Add in other classes not liking how well our pets could do versus grp and raid content, boom, nerf.

Fleiss wrote: Umm, same thing. The pet that is summoned is based off of the spell (example: like 91 air or 96 air) and than your EM. SoE builds templates for ever EM that will affect that spell (thus way there are level caps on some EMs so they don't have to make more templates). The top EMs were doubling the hps and AC of that template compared to a pet template with no pet foci. Add in other classes not liking how well our pets could do versus grp and raid content, boom, nerf.

Ahhh, that's right. Thanks. I actually knew that, once upon a time. Having to build a separate pet template for every combination of pet and EM item seems....like a lot of work...even though they try to limit it with level ranges for EM items. The whole system just smacks of poor and/or archaic coding, IMO.

Well, sucks about the nerf. I'll have to think about whether or not to resub. Thanks for the info.

I went ahead and resubscribed. Goofed around a bit today in T2 and didn't notice much difference in what I remember from several months ago. Only got singles though with the 96 air pet tanking. Nice to be back.

Goranothos wrote:I went ahead and resubscribed. Goofed around a bit today in T2 and didn't notice much difference in what I remember from several months ago. Only got singles though with the 96 air pet tanking. Nice to be back.

You won't notice much difference, especially against single mobs or older content. In addition to that nerf, our aegis line was capped, but we got more aegis spells to kind of compensate. All in all, it was an unneeded nerf, but it's not game shattering. You can still do what you were doing before.