please fix mages dpsFollow

Mage earth pet was traditionally king tank of pets. Other mage pets are situational tool box... for a while, fire pets were favoured lower level but almost never seen above 50 (funny how scaling and changes impact usage of things). So many changes to pet behaviour, AAs and gear to strengthen them (as well as improved spell power at low levels, and status in current endgame tuning-wise)... mage class would always have been a top-population class if they had been this good originally.

Beastlord pets were really strong into the 50s, and have had kind of a mixed amount of attention/developer love post luclin.

Necro pets have some up and down with the tanking thing... but were always supposed to be somewhat strong (aggro kiting was the less forseen tactic. fear kiting was much bigger once upon a time.... rogue pet backstabs the feared mob).

These are the true pet classes. SK, Druid and Shaman got a "flavour" pet that was much lower level, so really just a dot spell that followed you around. Considering everything else these classes has or can do... if they had even Necro warrior quality of pets that would be a pretty major boost (though not that useful to an SK... a rogue pet would be moreso).

Enchanter shiny bob wasn't a true pet until AAs made it controllable. It remains glass in most situations though.

Cleric hammer pet is pretty bad. Was always painful grouping with a new cleric that finally got to the level to mem that spell. Mems it, tries it out and realizes how little benefit is gained from using the spell gem slot.

Enchanter pet has definitely improved. When I box I view it as yet more protection for my enchanter, who already has a godly amount of protection with her various runes and other defensive AAs. But "Shiny Bob" is more than a speed bump now.

Any pet-less class, and also shamans, druids and sk's, would probably give their eye-teeth to have a pet the current equivalent of the enchanter's.

As a druid when I quint-kite I throw everything PLUS the kitchen sink at the mobs, to maximize my dps, because in a big quint I can run very low on mana. I use the summoned pixies and bear, which add a small but decent amount of damage to one mob in the pack. I won't bother with the regular spell pet ("Boo Boo") because he's close to worthless and I'm sure he takes some of the XP, being a pet and all. But if Boo Boo had the current enchanter pet's dps abilities, I'd use him.

Now whether they nerf Shiny Bob down the road.... one never knows. Nerfing pets is a time-honored EQ management tradition, at least under previous management. Probably this explains some of the differences of opinion regarding pet "worthiness" over the years.

Magician pets remain the best of the best, however. I've screwed up and lost my warrior in battles with TDS named mobs and the mage's pet has taken over and handled the rest of the fight very well. The only change in approach I make is to ensure none of my casters are too close to the named because pets don't hold agro as well, especially with respect to proximity.




Edited, Apr 14th 2015 10:00am by Sippin

It's tuned to the highest level person in the task (instance?) at the moment. I actually once watched a red con mob change to yellow right in front of me when the highest person left the task. Not sure how that's related to whether someone can log in character A on an account, join a task with someone on another account, then log out character A, and log in character B on the same account and join the same task. I'm honestly not sure what would happen if you did that. I know that people who log out stay in the task and can rejoin it. So the question would be if the person could complete the task and log out character B, then log in character A and get credit for the completed task on that character as well.

At least that's what I thought the question was about.