The Hidden Forest

Is anyone else scratching their head over the amount of Mages and Necros running around? Especially with the donor pets buffing each other, people seem to be capitalizing on this. Do a couple '/Who all' with the classes and compare. It's consistent.

PROs of a pet army:
- Minimal aggro issues
- Pets do not have to obey certain scripts
- When they die.. summon a new one!
- Excellent DPS with little to no micro required / AFK DPS
- Easy to skip a lot of content farming with cheap T8 pets

CONs:
- Expensive donor gear
- People make fun of you
- Constant rebuffs on pets
- Noobs are being told to roll a mage and win
- People want the pet. Not the Mage.

This just strikes me as being right along the lines of the Ranger Swarms and Wizard armies of yesteryear. Is it just me?

Oh, I hate pet classes. I may be bigoted but I'm concerned about this trend.

well, pet classes are easy to control when you box, just follow, stop, send pet, autonuke, wait till mob dies. This give you time to focus on tank / heal ....

Pet classes are easy to box, hence many players decide to box them. T8 pets are also extremly powerful. Should we nerf pets? I'm not sure I get the point of this post.

I wouldn't box an army of mages or necro , that must be a pain.

if I had to start over I would box 5 paladin + 1 cleric, I would only die of boredomness

I don't disagree that they're easier to box. That's part of the allure behind the pet classes. Relatively high DPS, high survivability, low aggro. What I'm asking: Is the risk-to-reward ratio correct?

From what I understand if they're super easy to use, and one of the best DPS classes, should we adjust one of the above to bring them in balance with the other classes? Maybe tone down the T8 pets to scale better through the lower tiers? Have the raid mobs hit pets with rampage/flurries. Make them poof if the script tells people to duck and the mobs are in melee range when it goes off. Have the pets generate aggro towards their master proportional to a melee class.

I know if sounds like a lot of work. I don't know if it's feasible or what options may work. However, I know the population tends to follow what works best. Most of the time they follow the flavor of the month. It's not because the class is well rounded and rewarding to use. With third-party programs being widely used, it's easy to automate any class and have them do fulfill their role with a one-button click.

So why are there significantly more pet classes? People are moving to these classes because they're very good at what they do: high sustained damage right out of the gate with little micro. Like the pre-nerf ranger armies a couple of years ago. Like the pre-nerf wizzy armies until about 6 months ago.

If there's no risk to the pet class, don't give them high damage (FD pet attack I'm looking at you). Wizard's only method of attack brings them a ton of aggro. Melee have to be in melee range and are subject to ramps/enrage/knockbacks/dispells/scripts more frequently.

Sorry but I use rk3 necro pet and it dies quite often during boss fight, even if I do my best to have it in the back of the mob and it's not becuase they overaggro.
So you can't say that they survive the whole fight with 0 aggro, 0 risk.
I love my necro, and my mage (haven't tested his rk3 I just got).
Pets are very good because they keep doing dmg while casters may be silenced or have high resists but the difference in firepower between pet class and wiz are nowhere close and balance each other.
They just compensate with their pets and have other way of working than regular nuking ("beneficial spells" etc).

I see a lot of people running t8 pets in lower tiers but I don't see any "army" of pets in high end guilds.

No matter what happens, it is impossible to balance everything. People will always make an army of the class with even a slight advantage. I see plenty of people running around with a group of 6 wizards, or mages or necros, or rogues, etc. I don't think its a balance issue really, I think people will box if they want to box, and it will be whatever is easiest to give a bunch of damage.

Quite new to THF but aside from being a necro in my past on live, necros and mages are classically the go-to for soloing. Being able to solo to 60 was the main reason for me picking a necro back in velious times. It could simply be people not always planning on being able to find groups or not wanting to hassle with boxing but still be able to see a good chunk of the content that accounts for the imbalance in class population.

webtools/online.php?sort_by=Class

Mind the bazaar mules.

I'm not sure that too much can be gleaned from a snapshot of how many of each class are on at one particular moment. Most of us have long ago made our choices on which toons we play.
On the other side, I don't think that preventing (class here) armies is a worthwhile goal for the devs. Balancing what toons there are is very worthwhile, though.
I didn't hear much chatter about unbalancing until the recent donor bp's. While they are all powerful, the super-over-mega power of the donor pets I think has caused a lot of the discontent. I know for me it has been difficult to see my donored, t8 melee dps character be out-dps'ed by a fresh 70 mage with a donor robe and staff. I mean, the pets are even now instant cast!
The new special attacks added for the sake of the melee dps bp's seems to have unbalanced the dps order there too.
Maybe part of the solution is re-working the bp's some? And some tweeks to get the caster and melee dps back in the intended order of power.