quick question

[Rarrum]

There used to be a couple fights where we had banned pets... pal epic2 in mm...  But I bit anyone who even mentioned the idea pretty hard... I can't think of any left now.

But there are quite a number of fights where pet will just die fast to ae rampage, so it's pointless.

[Dreead]

I just had a new one! wasn't really banned. But for the guardian of the sands raid, DoN progression. We fought it as a ranged fight, so that the push was eaisly controlled. No pets were allowed to attack.

[hakaaba]

Guild is trying to ban pets on Hanvar in anguish actually.  Anyone have any arguments for or against this? They claim the tiny amount of damage it occasionally does to hanvar before i hold it after each add contributes to more AEs or some crap :p

Ive got pet focus so i keep it on the adds 99.9 pct of the time and my impression is the dps is worth the occasional slipup

We only did it once without them and i seemed to be getting aes anyway so *shrug*  But a couple times when an add blew up at 5 percent it made me mad cause pets would have totally made the difference

[Dummkopf]

Its about hate transfering, since Hanvars AEs are hate list based they hit only ppl who are on his hate list, your pet hits him, your on it, the bard in group sings a song, he and all others are on it as well etc. None of our beastlords ever had his pet slip out, but mages normally get a lot of screaming aimed at them.

After some time it becomes a habit to press the /pet hold hotkey at the dead of every mob so it wont run astray.

[hakaaba]

Well yeah i do hold after every mob but we do that fight in a weird way...hanvars in the room with the adds so if i dont time it perfect the pet turns around the second an add dies and smacks hanvar.  I usually only miss it once or twice over the course of 20 mobs tho and if i started holding it at 20% i could easily make sure it never hit hanvar.  If thats the only reason its stupid to ban them completely unless someones being really lazy.

[Dummkopf]

Oh, i see, with Hanvar in the room it might be a bit difficult, we just tank him outside in the hallway with a single group while killing the adds.

[psycattik]

Yeh you goto be so conscious of hitting pet hold either right before add dies or instantly after, really fun to do if you are flying through the air at the time. I would not wan't to give up kitty on this fight though, I'll take the extra pressure of making sure it's held, just for the fact  that there is nothing like being stunned and stuck in the wall or up on the ledge and seeing your pet chewing his ass up the whole time your stunned. Goto luv the determination of the pets to kick some ass lol.

psycattik

[Oiingo]

Figure that your pet is between 60 and 100 DPS and multiply that by the number of beastlords in attendance and it can potentially add up rather quickly.  Now consider that mage and necro pets are even higher.  If your guild is like mine, we have an easy 5-10 pets on a typcial boss fight.  is your guild ready to give up that DPS on a fight where DPS is so important?

On the other hand, it could be argued that pets transfer agro, but only if an add gets to Hanvar, and if it does that, any class that damaged the add is also contributing to the ``problem.''

Remeber that if you put your pet on hold at 15% and the add still runs, you're still on the agro list and the excercise is moot.

All-in-all, fun fight.

[Bengali]

On the other hand, it could be argued that pets transfer agro, but only if an add gets to Hanvar, and if it does that, any class that damaged the add is also contributing to the ``problem.''

Exactly, this is extremely important to realize, because it essentially means that any anti-pet Hanvar strat is based on a myth.  Pets will only "transfer" aggro if their owners sic them on Hanvar before doing anything else.  At that point the pet will get on Hanvar's hate list, and so will the owner, and the chain starts.

This, however, never happens.  Of course if you attack Hanvar directly with your pet right off you will cause problems.  That's really no different than a semi-afk wizard inattentively nuking the wrong target instead of following the strat.

What people are actually seeing (and what causes them to "blame" pets in knee jerk fashion), is a pet reacting to its owner getting on the hate list, at which point the damage is already done, and the pet doesn't make it any better or worse.  In other words, the raid lets an add reach Hanvar, then everyone who attacked the add gets transferred to Hanvar's hate list, and then Hanvar's AE starts hitting everyone who was on the add's hate list.  THEN pets (if not held) might start to attack Hanvar, because they and their owners are getting AE'd by him.  People see the pets attacking Hanvar and say, "omg, your pet is attacking Hanvar and now we're all on his hate list and getting AE'ed!"  In fact, it's the opposite -- the pet is only attacking Hanvar because everyone else screwed up and let more people (including but not limited to pet owners) get on Hanvar's hate list.

A raid still will want pets being held after an add dies (even if it reaches Hanvar), because there are several reasons why you don't want pets to continue attacking Hanvar.  But aside from that, pets don't pose any particular problem on that fight.

[hakaaba]

good point bengali -- even i missed that lol

[Essant]

Only fight we do currently that we dont allow pets on is Quarm himself.  Reason being is that its thought that the push into the geometry is what causes the zone to crash sometimes.  Phase 1 and 2 we allow, but not when clicking into Phase 1, they have to be backpacked while zoning - it is thought that the NPC pet might be counted towards the max number of people allowed in the instance.  Chailak and Feratha we have done a few times but we dont fight him ranged so no problems there.  Other than that we are basically on the Time / GoD level up to Inktuka and pets are generally ok as long as you can handle them right, which, of course I can perfectly.

[Nusa]

The very first time we tried Quarm the zone crashed as we walled the mob. When the zone came up, everyone was alive and rolled back a few minutes. [Those who had died before the crash still had an equipped corpse. Can you say full-fledged dupe bug? Yes, we reported it at the time.] That crash bug is known to be fixed, and we regularly wall Quarm without problems now. Until it was fixed, we just balanced Quarm in the middle of the room, pets included. I think we said no zerg pets then, but normal pets are completely controllable if the owners make the effort...we managed fine.

I think all the zone-in problems to Phase 1, which were very real, went away when Time went to the expedition system. We've been dropping our workaround habits the last few runs, and no problems have emereged.