Tier 8 Spell Issues

[lazylob]

Did you use the Atcho dummies on the balcony and did you hail them before attacking and parsing ?

Ya I had hailed him and other dmg was working fine just not backstabbing

[Adonhiram]

Did you use the Atcho dummies on the balcony and did you hail them before attacking and parsing ?

Ya I had hailed him and other dmg was working fine just not backstabbing

Thanks for replying. I must admit I am not sure what happens here. But there is a workaround, which is annoying, I admit : Summon your Ornaments bag, take the dagger out, give it first to pet. Then give the bag to your pet, Normally it should have the dagger in primary. If this doesn't work, give separately the two weapons you want to have in the right order before giving the bag as a whole (and destroy the third weapon which is not used anyhow).

If you have the patience, you can also summon a first bag, give the dagger, destroy the bag, summon a new one and give again the dagger separetely then the rest of the bag, that way your pet will yield two daggers (pets ignore lore tags, but the master doesn't).

Have you also parsed your pet without weapons at all ? EE I is technically a rogue pet or should be and does not NEED weapons to be able to backstab (on live it works this way). Unfortunately EE2/3 overwrites EE1 in your spellbook and I cannot do tests myself to help you with logs and numbers.

If both nacked without weapons abd with two daggers which have backstab modifiers, your pet's backstabs are staistically lower as its normal hits, then something is definitely wrong. Think of staying close to Atcho, emu servers have a bug with displaying combat logs you need to stand right beside the "mob" to see all types of damage and crits are ignored (the parsing utility will retain the line under the crit which will be lower as the value displayed in brackets).

Tell us your results please

[lazylob]

That's a good idea. I went ahead and tested without any weapons and they were able to backstab just fine. I was able to reproduce the same issue on the 66 Air pet (Child of Wind) and the spectre necro pet and they both had the same behavior. Can backstab without a weapon or with a piercing weapon but not with other types of weapons. Backstab dmg also seems to be based on the backstab dmg of the weapon given.

[peterigz]

I had a quick look at the code code and can confirm that if an npc is carrying a weapon then there is a check to see if it's piercing when performing a backstab otherwise it fails. Don't see why that needs to be there tbh so I guess we could remove it.

[Adonhiram]

I had a quick look at the code code and can confirm that if an npc is carrying a weapon then there is a check to see if it's piercing when performing a backstab otherwise it fails. Don't see why that needs to be there tbh so I guess we could remove it.

Thanks Lazybob and Peterigz, now we have the answer, it's customized emu code which differentiates from live. On live, you can give +bachstab wepaons to an air pet (or any other non rogue pet), it will never backstab no matter how high the bonus is, because the ability to backstab is tied to the type of pet and not the type of weapon.

I'll do some tests myself for fun, I never gave my pet dagger in primary because I know it is not a backstabber type pet. Would be interesting to see if I gain some dps, but as Lazybob already reported, I doubt it.

Also once you get EE3 or the donor pet, frankly, the dps is good enough not to ask yourself if the backstabs are correctly working or not, but that is not a reason not to change or fix it of course. But if that applies to all NPCs, enchanters, I hope you are reading the thread, haha

[Adonhiram]

Just tested giving donor pet 2 Ornaments III daggers with backstab modifiers. Unfortunately, it didn't work and pet didn't land a single backstab (which is normal as it is tagged as WAR and not as ROG). Pet was psotionned behind Atcho and I was meleeing facign Atcho so pet would stay in the back of the dummy the full 5 minutes of the parse.



Would have been to cool to have a rogtank pet

[lazylob]

Just tested giving donor pet 2 Ornaments III daggers with backstab modifiers. Unfortunately, it didn't work and pet didn't land a single backstab (which is normal as it is tagged as WAR and not as ROG). Pet was psotionned behind Atcho and I was meleeing facign Atcho so pet would stay in the back of the dummy the full 5 minutes of the parse.

Would have been to cool to have a rogtank pet

With higher levels of the EE spell can you still summon another time to get a different type of pet? Also I think THF has changed Air pets past 50 to be Rogs and Water pets are Monks which is why the test worked.

[Adonhiram]

Just tested giving donor pet 2 Ornaments III daggers with backstab modifiers. Unfortunately, it didn't work and pet didn't land a single backstab (which is normal as it is tagged as WAR and not as ROG). Pet was psotionned behind Atcho and I was meleeing facign Atcho so pet would stay in the back of the dummy the full 5 minutes of the parse.

Would have been to cool to have a rogtank pet

With higher levels of the EE spell can you still summon another time to get a different type of pet? Also I think THF has changed Air pets past 50 to be Rogs and Water pets are Monks which is why the test worked.

1. No, you can't, for T8 pets the higher rank overwrites the previous rank. EE3 is tagged as MNK
2. Yes, I tested PoP pets, Child of Air is ROG and Child of Water is MNK.
3. I tested EE3 and Scrap Bud pet, none of them could backstab when yielding two daggers
4. I tested Child of Air, it backstabbed and the dps gain was not huge but significant : 6.2% of its hits were backstabs but 12.5% of its dps came from these backstabs. Whereas its max critical hit was around 10k, the max critical backstab was around 20k (makes sense if you compare the backstab/normal hits ratio to the backtsab/normal hits dps ratio).

So, regarding pets, the ability to backstab is definitely tied to the class tag, only ROG tagged pets can backstab, giving anothert type of pet backstabbing daggers won't make them backstab. And when you use a ROG pet, you better give it two daggers for full efficiency.

[Adonhiram]

5. For PoP pets; the dps difference between water (MNK) and air (ROG) pet is quite important :
- PoP water pet (MNK) = 9.4k dps
- PoP air pet (ROG) = 14.8k dps

Unfortunately I cannot compare the dps of EE pets but you should not fear to upgrade your EE1 pet, as EE3 will be a superior tank with more hps/ac etc. You lose the backstabs but in the grand scheme, it doesn't matter. You have to factor in that rogue pets are pure raiding pets on live and tank like paper bags. And the dps difference on live comes from pet burn AAs like Frenzied Burnout which doesn't work well here (it won't raise much your pet's dps, that's why I suggest a new rank and to look into it btw).

[Adonhiram]

6. Last but not least, I have been trying to parse whether the slightly different characteristics of Ornaments Rk. III weapons make a difference in terms of pet dps (except the particular case of a ROG tagged pet we already discussed). To be honest, it seems to me the results are not conclusive as the differences on a 5' parse on the tier 1 Atcho are too small to be statistically meaningfull.

Same donor pet, same donor pet buffs + donor Sune + Elemental Glory :

- With 2 daggers = 134k dps
- With 2 swords = 135k dps
- With 2 maces = 131 dps
- With 1 dagger and 1 mace = 138k dps

As you can notice :

1. The deltas are too small to be significant, under 5%
2. The dagger/mace result is the highest whereas dagger and mace separately were the lowest, which makes me think it is purely a RNG issue.
3. All weapons have the same +20 extraplanar bonus so it won't matter on HoH bosses
4. Damage shields, weapon procs, etc. parse at 1k globally. On T8 dummy it was closer to 0.5k.
4. However, when fighting from front, there is a -40k dps difference to fighting from behind (see above). This is why I regret that the AA "Companion's Relocation" doesn't work on emu even if it is there and activable. --> When pet is not tanking, this AA would have sent by insta click the pet behind the mob and raise its dps accordingly. And fights don't last long enough to make it worth repositioning your pet manually behind the mob as you would do on live in the early expansions before DoD and Companions's Relocation AA.