Proposition for NEW pet system for Mages and Epic changes

[Seipher]

Burnout line is much more then just haste.

http://www.thehiddenforest.org/spell.php?id=5478

3 : Effect type : Increase All Skills Damage Modifier by 5%
4 : Effect type : Increase Attack Speed by 85%
5 : Effect type : Increase ATK by 52
6 : Effect type : Increase AC by 98

Id still like to see a long term buff on the epics, that goes along with burnout, maybe the epic could buff the ac/dodge/dmg mod or something.

[ChaosSlayer]

Ah I missed this one. But this is the only one that comes with 4 effects rather than normal 3 (haste, atk and ac) for previous 5 buffs

BTW, if someone could link me mage epic 1.5 - I would much appreciate it.

[Seipher]

1.5 - http://www.thehiddenforest.org/item.php?id=3540

2.0 - http://www.thehiddenforest.org/item.php?id=6545

That one is different cause its the level 69 version :p

[Mortbise]

Hey it was linked in my wall of text

Just wanna rebound on

-Once again- mages pets have not been touched yet- so if you looking at a pets stat list , mages pets do look pale compared to the new necro and bst pets atm.

and remind point four, basically wait and see. I voiced my concerns and my vision of mages.

I honestly don't like the idea of losing the epic pet, simply because, it's a pet. Epic. It used to be an incredible achievement to make the 1.0 back on live during Velious/Luclin. I made it on Firiona Vie, meaning I've had to really quest it during my leveling progression due to the infamous TLC (I know, raid bug to bypass TLC, well I started before raid interface was introduced). I still have nightmares about Quillmane and Plane of Sky. And dam was I proud to wield it, and use it. Then Rhag1 gave me a scepter, and I baged my epic, only taking it out to summon a new pet. Then PoP came, and the 61 Air pet owned the epic pet. I simply don't want to see that again, the concept of an epic pet is the fittest for a mage, in my opinion.

Back on topic, we went to arena to have some pet performance test. The current 70 unfocused necro pet with no AAs to boost it fares roughly as well as the 1.0/1.5 with focus and truckload of AAs. Self-buffed, I barely won. With same damage shield, he barely won. With full-buffing I won by 40% roughly. Necro pet is a beast, allright.

So I'll wait and see what comes. And I expect a pet that whoops a necro all the way to luclin from arena and back !

[ChaosSlayer]

Mortbise
Actually your history of hardship of getting epics is exactly why I don't like concept of epic at all.

Why? cause it stops progression.
If you spend 3-6 month getting the epic, and then a mini boss (considering Emperor is a full boss) from 2 expansion later casually drops something that pales epic - the concept of epic goes of of the window. So you have to accept one of the 2 evils:

either:

-epic are so uber, they never can be surpassed and you stuck with them for eternity (well expect maybe upgrading 2.0 to 3.0 to 4.0 etc)

or

-epics not that uber, so next time dev team releases a new zone which has a caster weapon drop - it instantly becomes matched in power, or worse, outdated.

Getting back to the main topic, I don't plan to take your epic away from you, but if you ever want to see an upgrade to your epic pet - this could be the only solution, unless dev team sits down and decides to make 3.0 - and when that will happen - I don't know
If we just add new pet scroll drops to say Fear (which is much harder than epic 2 obtaining tier), then its your in turn becoming obsolete - at leats its MAIN effect - the pet- won't matter anymore.

So this is exactly the reason I like to separate pets from the epics - so they can receive regular updates once in a while without waiting when 3.0 may or may not come out

Again - this is not a done deal - I am not saying anything has been already decided up on. I won't make changes until I am sure I have a decent player support behind such decision.
However it seems that original vote poll has become misleading, and we should formulate and offer new options

More specific on pet specialization before the epic/raid tiers:

1
- we keep the current system of 4 pets with specialization as is (which I believe truly fails)

2
- we do the new 4 pets system proposed in very first post (Earth - tank with rune, Water - tank with slow, Air- rogue with stun, Fire - monk with dd proc) (again this is before we get to raids and epics)

3
- we do the "only 2 primary pets" approach, where we have 1 tank and 1 dps pet (again this is before we get to raids and epics)


So this is the first thing we should decide op on. Once that is done, I will put NEW numbers of the pets, and then we can continue the discussion of mage pets worth anything

Personally I am starting leaning towards 2 primary pets path, as its easier to make them different (than 4 pets), and much less work for me

Specifically in regards to mage vs necro - well mage dps pet should roughly equal necros (since mage dps pet will be a rogue, it will be more potent vs mobs when it gets to backstab), but necro pet simply have higher survival rating due to lifetaps. How it well do vs mage tank pet, I can't say yet, until we put them vs each other and see how they do (after the upgrades)

[Ayeima]

The reason I said mage fire pets should stay casters was because on live didnt they cast Lure of Flame which is -300 fire resist check, and I thought they stayed back and cast until out of mana then they ran up and meleed. but i cant remember it has been years....

Im stuck on the fence, I am starting to like both sides of the arguement. 2 pets would be easier to choose and less work for chaos, but 4 pets give a bit more in the mix, so im torn.

as for summoned gear, i thought it most of it was for pets (execpt the neck, ring, earring and bracelet that had focus effects) I am solid on the mask and belt being pet toys because even though it lists classes Race is none and thats the way it was on live so pets should get stats from them.

[Nagash]

Right, I've had a good night sleep and a good thought about all this.

So let me recap, for mages you plan on:
1- giving the boot to epic pets and up the existing 4 pets they have at level 70 (or whichever level they get them, I mean the last line of pets) to match the power of current epic pet (or maybe even more as mages' pets haven't been tweaked)
2- give a clicky of some sort on the epic 1.5

Also you are worried by:
3- epic pets not being epic forever. For this one the answer is easy (I think): we play with Emu rules so basically we will never be able to level beyond level 70, hence there is no risk whatsoever that the epic pet doesn't remain epic.

I understand where you come from with 1 and 2 but that would basically remove the epic pets. Granted the level 70 pets would match or be better than the actual epic pet but we lose the concept of epic pet where a magician has reached such a level of mastery that he can summon not only elementals but also a supra-elemental made of a combination of the 4 elements. They have to work hard to get it (no worry Eska, I don't mean getting you to redo epic 1.0 again, I think the epic 1.5 is fine as it is in difficulty: not undoable but far from being soloable or one groupable) but the reward is unique both in term of lore and in term of flavour.

Another idea that hasn't been mentionned yet but will now be: why not increasing the level 70 pets to make them much more powerfull (ala what's been done for bst and nec) and leave the epic pet on 1.5 but make it truly epic, something unique. Again I'm thinking here about sorting out pets survivability in raids. Why not making it a good hitting pet but make it invulnerable and generating no aggro (or transfering his aggro or part of it to its owner). This would sort out the pets survivability in raids but make it impossible to use this pet for solo or exploit. The only real use of such a pet would be within a group with someone to tank. The only exploit I could imagine would be a group with 1 tank, 4 cleric to keep the tank alive and one magician to use his epic pet for DPS. Yeah, that would be doable but man, it would take ages to kill anything and people would probably die of boredoom before any raid mob is dead.

This would sort out the pets survivability for mages but not for necro/bst/shaman/etc and I think that would be good. As mentionned before, the mage's DPS comes in a big part from his pet so it is paramount that the bugger stays alive during a raid. This is not the case for bst or necro (although it could be argued for necro, bst have no problem due to the quality of the weapons they have access to). To be honest, I haven't parsed my necro to see which proportion of his DPS comes from his pet so maybe it would be worth doing to see if pet survivability during raid is really a problem for necros in raid; one thing is sure, it definitely is for mages.

I know this is annoying to have some people bringing the lore back into the topic as it's an already complicated one but hey, we love EQ and Norrath for one reason, and that's the one.

Regards,

Nagash

[ChaosSlayer]

I just like to say, that level cap of 70 is not the end
Under emu it is possible to go all way to 88 without problem, and up to 255 , given you dodge with annoying code related problems. It just the THf dev team have initially choose 70 as optimal level for end game, and increasing the level cap now would create the same disaster it did on live- it will instantly trivialize previous high end content cause players could gain say another 5 levels they didn't had before. And to keep old high end content in same boundaries, it would require a deep strategic rewamp. Lillu actually has been thinking on this one, but nothing specific atm.

In regards to pet raid survival I am trying something now that may work (self procing rune buff). Mages can have a special raid pet actually who can be made to never be in melee (the rooted in place wizard), but that not a solution for other classes.

Anyway, I think I will start with rewamp of at least 2 basic pets - Water and Air, and then we will see what end result will look like.

[Nagash]

A little bit of info about epic pets comparision. Please not it’s a little bit of info as we haven’t extensively tested this (was like 3:30 in the morning so we didn’t take a lot of time to try but it gives a good general idea).

- 1st fight both pets were equipped with items sold by the vendor in SG, both buffed only with the burnout (can’t remember the name foe necro, glyph of darkness I think) and the rune type (Bulwar of Calliav for Necro, not sure of the name for mages). Mage pet won with 8% HP left

- 2nd fight: same but Eska used her best damage shield and I use the damage shield I have on a right clicky shield (barrier of blade from the top of my head, does 50 damage). My pet won with 6% hp left

- 3rd fight: same as 2nd fight but Eskarina had her pet with Sun’s buffs. Her pet won with 11% hp left

Of course, you have to near in mind a few factors:
- Eskarina has all the pet AA where I don’t have a single one
- This was an already improve epic necro pet vs the standard actual mage epic
- We only did 3 fights (was 3:30 AM, I had to wake up at 7:30 and Eska had been up for 36h straight so our bed were calling us). Ideally we should do 100’s to have an extensive research carried out but that wasn’t the point, we just wanted to compare them quickly

I was expecting his pet to litteraly pulverize mine but we can see that the actual epic pet fully back up by buffs and AA roughly matches the new necro epic pet buffed only by the necro and with no AA. This means that the mages epic (or whichever way you will implement that, i.e. booting the epic and uping the standard pets) needs a major buff.

My thought (but it’s just me) is that:
- Mage’s pet should be able to take at least 1.5 or 2 time the amount of punishment of a necro pet
- Mage’s pet should be at least 50% of their DPS where I reckon it should be 20-25% of a necro’s
- Necro pets should look the best, and they do. I mean c’mon we command the dead not some meaningless balls of dust or candlelights. By the way, could I have a bit of rotten flesh added to my pet? Maybe a zombie skin for the epic one to diffrenciate it? I know this is a personnal opinion, might not be technically doable and might not meet the other necro’s approval but screw them, I am Nagash, Lord of the Dead, Commander of the Armies of Darkness and Ruler of the Next World, do I look like I care what the others think?

Hmmm, sorry I got carried away here I think, /roleplay off, back to the topic. I wanted to come back to a point you mentioned earlier Chaos regarding a fixed “turret” pet for mages and then kind of discarded this idea saying it would be too close to wizard. I think I understand your reasons but I beg to differ. OK when a mage would pop this pet out he would be a pure range DPS machine like a wizard but does a wizard have other choices in terms of strategy? No and they don’t need it as they are 100% focused towards range DPS. For the magician it’s a different story altogether: they would have to get this pet out, again (but I think I said it already) the right choice of pet should be mandatory for the magician to be efficient. Giving him such a pet would allow him a bit more flexibility in how they reach this efficiency, let me give you some examples:

- Imagine you do that but give that pet a ridiculous amount of hp (say 3k for example), this pet could not off tank at all. Can a wizard tank for a group? No (and he’s not intended to) but a mage could dig out his earth pet and voila, your group has an ok tank. All of the sudden, the mage’s DPS has fallen far away from the wizard but his utility is here and his tankless group would be unable to perform if he wasn’t here, I think that’s a fair trade off being able to do some DPS whilst ensuring the role of the tank (via the pet) for the group

- What if the mobs are highly magic resistant? The wizard would dig out his lure line of spell and have a good laugh at the mobs while throwing fireballs out of his… eyes (Ha! You thought I was about to say something else you bunch of perverts! Well, you’d be… right ). In this situation the mage wouldn’t have this option and would have to dig out another type of pet.

I could go on and on with examples but I don’t think it’s necessary. Wizards are all about KABOOM! and CATCHANG! effects, the mage is more about kaboom (note the non capitale version) and utility so I don’t think the “turret” pet is a bad idea, actually I think is a flipping good one as long as it’s one way to sort things out for the magicians and not the way to sort things out (magicians need different ways to keep their flexibility).

Wanna know the difference between a wiz and a mage? Easy. Look at the old Batman series with Batman and Robin being very much “in your face” and with all these signs popping on the screen during fight, that’s your local wizard. Now look at the latest Batman movies with more special effects, a shitload gadget (he’s more like a super James Bond) adapted to face any possibilities (but did he take the right gadgets when he left the Batcave?), that’s your local magician. They are both Batman like wizards and magicians are all long range DPS casters, but they do things differently. Is one Batman better than the other? Can’t tell you, it depends on your tastes, I personally love the latest one but I have some friends who hate it and swear by the original series. Same goes here, is one better than the other? Can’t tell you as it depends on your tastes and on which button you click during the character creation process.

OK, I’ll stop here as I start to rant and rave like an old lady. Please note my (rather long) posts only express my opinion and point of view and in no way reflect the ones of the necro or magicians community. I just try to underline what looks important to me (keeping the lore side of things and making sure that magicians remain ahead of everyone when it comes to pets versatility). Obviously I’m not a raider (yet) and maybe a lot of what I say is flawed or needs to be tweaked, if that’s the case, please do correct me; trial and error is the best way to learn; I’m just trying to put as many ideas on the table as possible. The more we will have, the more option Chaos will have to work with.

Regards,

Nagash
Chatting (way too much) skelton

I think I should start to STFU, having a necro defending the magicians and speaking more than anyone else on a post dedicated to magicians is not natural, but hey, thinking about it, raising the dead, controlling the elements and shitting fireballs just because you can has nothing natural to it, has it?

[ChaosSlayer]

Nagash - the necros are unnatural, so

I must say that necro pet differ in type from mages pets cause its compact all-in-one. It does have higher dps than mages tank, and it has higher survival than mages dps pet, but mages pets will be more specialize: so mages dps pet will out dps necro, thought necro pet (in a duel) may still win cause its chain lifetapping. But vs mob a rogue mage pet will obviously do better than a skely.

I may yet get back to a "turret" pet idea

BTW Ayeima, I am currently examining pet spell lists in details to see what fire pet casts in specific.

Also, - dear mages, if you could take your highest FIRE pet to the dumies and see how well it parses, compared to say rogue pet, and if it actually casts anything