86+ pets very underwhelming...

[Failcon]

EM 5 at that content was a raid focus, where as in current content it is a group focus. Raid gear always beats group gear. You cannot expect old content items to be as good at higher levels. Some items are but that is not the standard.

If you really are so concerned, parse a necro and beast pet, show how they are so close to ours, as they are tanking.

Sitting on here and just whining gets nothing done.

I for one am happy with my pets. I use each for it's purpose and have found then to do the job. I don't need to be locked into air pet doing everything. If you need more DPS, use a dps pet.

[Eandori Raintree]

I'm sorry you view posts on this forum as just whining. A group of people must have a place to level set and discuss topics with their peers. That is, and has always been a primary focus for class-based message boards. Developers will not listen to a single person calling out an issue, but they WILL listen to a united group calling out a single issue. What we do here is unite as a class and I think YOU should stop to consider that.

Who ever said crap about raid-level power from grouping, or group-level power from soloing? I don't see anybody saying that is the problem.

No, the problem is that a highly focused and AA'd 81 Air pet did not upgrade much to the 86 pet, at least not in tanking. And YES I do have a lot of AA in my pet, I have over 1800 AA and the Majority of it is directly spent on my pet. I only have EM5 focus but that's because I solo. I also disagree with any perspective that we as a class should be balanced with the ASSUMPTION that everybody has EM8 and 4000 AA at least. We should be balanced without those, and with them. If Sony chooses not to balance mages without piles of AA and EM8 pet focus, then I politely suggest they DROP the level limits for light blue and dark blue mobs. New mages without all the AA and gear can go AA on mobs that they can handle, there is... in my opinion not nearly enough levels of delta for Dark Blue and Light blue under my current level.

If we have developers even coming out and letting us know they are intentionally letting our class stagnate, and if so many people are having the same observation I think you are being too quick to dismiss the concerns. I didn't make this original post with the assumption my perspective was correct, I made the original post to see if other mages were having the same perspective and were concerned about it.

For the record, I have a history in the mage class. "Sitting here and whining" is not my history. I have played since 1999 and I can tell you for a fact that I was directly personally involved in many of the previous time we as a group came together and got issues addressed. You just can't see my old history and posts because that old board died. Now I'm a full time Engineer, Husband, Father of One with other hobbies as well and all I can do is solo when time allows. Thanks to all of your for your replies, and here's hoping that we as a team get these topics addressed in the near future.

Cheers,

[svenalo]

I agree we shouldn't be balanced around the notion of a mage having 2/3 of the max of AA and the highest attainable group focus of whatever the current expansion is - that is not a realistic mark for the bulk of the group level players, and definitely not for the solo/molo players. In my opinion, though, we could balance around a mage having the best groupable focus from the prior expansion and whatever AA point that the aaxp bonus for low aa's ends at (because getting to that number of aa's is pretty easy)...

And no, I don't think you are whining. I just don't think the air pet is as bad as most think...that's not to say it didn't take a bit of a hit, but it still is pretty effective.

[Malleria]

TBH when it comes to Aristo 'balance' isn't a consideration. He puts on a blindfold and throw darts at a board to decide numbers.

[Gnomeland]

Air pet is pretty bad tbh, but earth pet is surprisingly solid. They seem to have kept the 100 pt hit difference between earth and air which means that with higher hits overall the earth pet is doing proportionally more DPS than it used to (I think it hits low 500s whereas air hits low 600s, this is with EM 8). What makes it better though is that it has a lot more hps and noticeably better ac, which doesn't translate to anything on normal T1-T2 mobs, but does translate big time on nameds and T3-T4 mobs. Air pet gets spiked hard on higher level content, making it a unreliable if not altogether unusable tank in those scenarios. Earth pet almost never suffers that problem, and losing the pet usually implies that there simply wasn't enough healing as opposed to the pet tanking horribly. Of course there's no "lol I win button" like player tanks in HoT have (SKs are especially sick in this regard), but with sufficient healing (ie 2 mercs or 1 real healer) earth pet seems to do okay even in T4.

As far as devs purposefully stagnating us goes, I'd be very angry if I thought EQ still had a lot of expansions coming still, but with the way SoE is treating the game now it seems EQ might just be on its way to becoming Vanguard in terms of dev support.

[svenalo]

Air pet is fine - unless I am on a raid that's all I use and have no trouble moloing in HoT with my EM8 air pet. Can I do every named in T3 and T4 that way? No...but I can do a lot of them. The bigger problem is finding free camps.

[Shardin]

I use earth pet now like I used to use air pet. I think balance of mobs vs. pet may have gotten better since UF. I understand your gripe though. They keep adding "features" for our pets.. we have uncountable buffs gear etc. to give our pet.. it is really complicated... what other class has to do this just to get to the status quo level of power. Not to mention if we want another type of pet we have to go through all this again. If I die it takes me a long time to get all the gear and buffs etc. and then maintain those buffs. I thought those buffs were for added power not just to get the pet to a minimal level to function? The measure should be totally unbuffed pet without any gear against a dark blue mob. They should also combine all buffs into a single buff or just make the pet innately have those powers.

[Gnomeland]

Well, last time I parsed it with EM 8, earth pet had about 8k more hp than air pets. That alone makes a huge difference considering that you want as much hp as you want to mitigate the effects of spikes esp. with mercs who have a tendency to not heal when you most need them to. Of course the extra ac helps as well on higher level mobs - air pets seems to get rounds like:

7867
5372
6512
4556

More than earth pet in T4.

[Failcon]

I'm sorry you view posts on this forum as just whining. A group of people must have a place to level set and discuss topics with their peers. That is, and has always been a primary focus for class-based message boards. Developers will not listen to a single person calling out an issue, but they WILL listen to a united group calling out a single issue. What we do here is unite as a class and I think YOU should stop to consider that.

Who ever said crap about raid-level power from grouping, or group-level power from soloing? I don't see anybody saying that is the problem.

No, the problem is that a highly focused and AA'd 81 Air pet did not upgrade much to the 86 pet, at least not in tanking. And YES I do have a lot of AA in my pet, I have over 1800 AA and the Majority of it is directly spent on my pet. I only have EM5 focus but that's because I solo. I also disagree with any perspective that we as a class should be balanced with the ASSUMPTION that everybody has EM8 and 4000 AA at least. We should be balanced without those, and with them. If Sony chooses not to balance mages without piles of AA and EM8 pet focus, then I politely suggest they DROP the level limits for light blue and dark blue mobs. New mages without all the AA and gear can go AA on mobs that they can handle, there is... in my opinion not nearly enough levels of delta for Dark Blue and Light blue under my current level.

If we have developers even coming out and letting us know they are intentionally letting our class stagnate, and if so many people are having the same observation I think you are being too quick to dismiss the concerns. I didn't make this original post with the assumption my perspective was correct, I made the original post to see if other mages were having the same perspective and were concerned about it.

For the record, I have a history in the mage class. "Sitting here and whining" is not my history. I have played since 1999 and I can tell you for a fact that I was directly personally involved in many of the previous time we as a group came together and got issues addressed. You just can't see my old history and posts because that old board died. Now I'm a full time Engineer, Husband, Father of One with other hobbies as well and all I can do is solo when time allows. Thanks to all of your for your replies, and here's hoping that we as a team get these topics addressed in the near future.

Cheers,

Now You have a major point here. While I partially disagree that pets are below par, I do agree about the level of mobs being to high. A light blue mob should be no challenge to our pets, and dark blues should be a fair challenge to the pet and Mage. The game has become so over powered with the difficult of the mobs. Our new pet is a beast, but the challenge of the new mobs are even worse. So the new pets seem even worsse than they really are. I think this is why some people are finding the new areas so challenging, just as UF was exceptionally over powered. point is goto HoT lower and fight the lt blues (at 90) in there, they take a disproportionate amout of time and also pet connot tank near as many as it should. then goto Tosk and do the same and pet can tank 2x's as many. It is not the pet but rather the content that is moving disproportianately.

[svenalo]

Yep.

Note we did push for the "out of the box" pets in HoT to be able to take on blue con mobs no problem like they did in SOF and that didn't get any traction with the devs. We didn't even get it for light blues. And with UF and HoT they seem to have totally done away with the "weak" mobs idea (like the pigs in Tosk).