DoD Pet Survivablity

[Kanan]

rofl hak.. painfully, so true nowadays.

[cassaya]

Part of the survival issue for the standard pet is that it just does not respond to a retreat fast enough to survive AoE ramp. If a pet is on guard somewhere away from the mob you are fighting and you tell it to back off / hold it turns around and walks away instead of running back to its guard spot. Likewise, if your pet is following you then you have to move back twice as far away from the mob to get your pet to follow out of range. In the case of AoE Rampage even if you see the pet taking damage and react as fast as humanly possible 99% of the time the pet just cannot move away from the mob quick enough to live.

But as bad as that is, that part that has always annoyed me the most is the mobs that have AoE Ramp ranges greater than the range from which you can melee hit the mob. Tacvi and Anguish are bad for this, I can have attack on and be facing a mob & getting too far away messages while my pet is standing behind me on follow / hold and the Mob AoE Ramps and not only hits me but squishes my pet flat who is behind me.

IMO pets that are NOT ATTACKING should be immune to Ramp.

[Kanan]

pets not on the hatelist mayhaps?

[Dreead]

Pet not on hatelist means they won't get hit with some raid mobs AE's, which they should be.

[Kanan]

bleh.. clarity's a good thing when typing responses.. I was meaning pets that aren't on the hatelist shouldn't get hit by ae ramp.

Only thing I see there: the casting growl would get them on it and negate that thing.

And I do agree that pets, if on hatelist, should get hit by the AEs etc.

I wasn't wanting pets removed from the hatelist.  That would kill pet tanking, which is so important at lower levels and AAs

[hakaaba]

People dont get aggro by being buffed by someone with aggro.  You  have that backwards. (You get aggro by buffing someone with aggro)

[Tastian]

Growling wouldn't put the pet on hate list, but if you are keeping the pet off the hate list then the pet is no part of the fight anyway.  That can usually be handled by simply parking the pet somewhere and using it as a battery.

The real issue are those situations where you can melee, or use a pet some of the time, but AE ramp is so crazy for pets right now they just plain poof.  Having it so that if the pet wasn't on top of the aggro list their damage taken via melee(AE ramp mainly) would be mod'd by say 1/10th.  There is already code in place for this because they changed how pet regen worked while on pet hold.  Originally you could put your pet on hold and it could still be getting hit and just keep regen'n up.  With the change though the pet wouldn't regen while it was "tanking", but if you stepped in so the mob turned to you then the pets regen would kick back in.

The real issue for most people with AE ramp is the "poof" effect.  We have pet heals, we have mend companion, we have rune and other options.  Unfortunatly, in a lot of situations we literally go from "ok" to "boy mend is too slow" lol.  The situation where you are stratling a fine line on AE ramp/melee range(curse you feral swipe) and have your warder going good and then suddenly it moves up on it's own too fast, or you even notice it move up, but it doesn't back off fast enough and poofs is the real problem.  We've got tons of tools to use, but atm most of them are simply too slow.  This solution seems to work well in that it only hits the AE ramp issue.  Unlike the depths pet that is basically "overpowered" to deal with these issues this change would only really change the situations where AE ramp is an issue.

[cassaya]

The issue isn't with pets being on hatelist, if they are fighting they should get agro like anyone else. Also the normal AoE spells are not the problem, the sole issue is AoE Rampage where the mob hits everything in range. Our standard pet's mitigation and avoidance is so poor that AoE Ramp can literally kill them in seconds (and we don't want to give them more mitigation/avoidance/HP because that might overpower them in other situations). To combat this poof effect, the only thing which has a chance to work is something which as an immediate effect on removing the pet from Ramp.

Pet heals are too slow for this (and they do not need to be faster since they are fine for most situations where healing a pet is needed), Mend Companion is fast enough to heal the pet (although it isn't pet CH anymore) but the problem still exists that if I cannot get the pet out of Ramp in seconds after the Mend it is still going to poof anyway. And lets face it realisticly nothing is going to move my pet out of Rampage range fast enough for it to survive (short of giving me an instant cast pet shadow step ability).

To my mind the solution should be pet hold. Put simply a pet that is not attacking is doing no damage, and the only way it even benefits us at all when not attacking is as Tastian stated "as a battery for Growl". Put simply if the pet is on hold (and hence not attacking the mob) it should gain immunity to Ramp until it attacks again. The pet is still going to die if I get killed anyway, so being immune to Ramp if it is not attacking does not really gain it anything beyond the chance to survive AoE Ramp.

It is a simple solution, which I do not believe affects the overall game mechanics in an way other than giving me the chance to keep my pet alive if I can mash the hold key fast enough. I don't think most of the raid encounters really require the ability to poof a "growl battery" but if you are dead set that even that small benefit is too much, then fine add another level of pet affinity so that if I "/pet hold2" it is immune to Ramp but also can't be used for spells to benefit me. I just don't think it should be too much to ask that I at least have a chance to keep my pet alive past AoE Ramp.

[Tastian]

The problem with the pet hold issue though is that the warder is simply doing nothing at that point shy of being a growl battery.  Other melee's aren't unable to double/triple attack, mobs aren't immune to backstabs, etc.  The only reason beastlord dps suffers on the AE ramp is because of the way our class is divided.  Although simply having the pet immune while on hold works and would keep the pet alive, so would just /pet guard outside of AE ramp range and inside of growl range.  Many beastlords simply don't want their pet to be just a battery and I've yet to see anyone accurately explain why pets need to be poofed from AE ramp for any "balance" reason.

Yes, immunity when not attacking works, but that is conceeding that our warders should be nothing more than a battery on any mob that might poof it.  What others would prefer is to use their warder, have it take a reasonable amount of damage(read: not poof lol), and then use the other tools we have available to us so that with work we could keep our warders up.  Most people I've spoken with would rather the pet took less damage from ramp, but could be healed/mended/runed/etc to try and mitigate it further.

" I just don't think it should be too much to ask that I at least have a chance to keep my pet alive past AoE Ramp."

Many agree and simply take it that step further and don't think many of today's AE ramp mobs should basically be "pet immune".  I definitely want warders to live through AE ramp, but a warder that is alive simply to be a battery for growl is still a very weak thing.  I'd much prefer the warder not only lived, but also did some dps as well.

[cassaya]

Tastian I think you miss my point which is that I can have pet attacking and then as soon as the AoE Rampage happens (audio trigger goes off) I mash pet hold to save it and step back to save me if I need to. Then when the Ramp stops I can have pet attack again, and when it attacks again it loses the immunity so I have to be on my toes to pet hold again and save it next Ramp round as well.

This lets you use the pet as it was meant to be used and still live through AoE Ramp in a manner that does not overpower it. In terms of how melee battle typically flows this seems intuitive to me. If I get hit by Ramp and am in danger of dying I am going to try and step back from the mob to get out of range of the Ramp until I can catch a heal. But pets cannot move out of range quick enough, so by holding attack and gaining immunity (note we cant keep attacking if we step back out of range either) it is the functional equivalent of the pet stepping back fast enough.

A quick edit to add this.......

Perhaps one of the reasons that this seems intuitive to me is that this is how I would be responding to the issue of pet surviving Ramp if I were playing a Necro or a Mag (which I have done in the past). The difference of course is that the Necro or Mag are not standing in Rampage range of the mob (they are more likely at max casting range away than max melee range) so with their pet on follow and they hit /hold the pet "runs" back to them and out of Ramp.

This does not work for a Beastlord however because we are usually standing in melee range of the mob so when we hit hold our pet is just as likely not to move at all from where it is and just stop attacking. The /guard command to set a spot for the pet away from the mob before the fight would cause our pet to move away from the mob when commanded to hold, except that a pet on guard "walks" away from the mob back to its guard spot which is just not fast enough.

I hope that helps clarify things.

[Dummkopf]

Your pet runs back to a /guard point if it has a movement buff on it, shrew and sow are easily available and that is therefore not an issue (except the latency until it starts to move and horrible pathing in most raid zones, especially demi plane of blood).

I have to agree that i dont like the /pet hold idea simply because it has the same issues as using replenish (which by the way is a pet ch with those nice 17.9k crits i see nearly every time), it is often just too slow. Mobs do ae ramp very often most of the time and dont give enough warning like Ture does (only case where a pet shouldnt mitigate ae ramp) so that it will poof most probably on the first round. Even on Vish with its very low ae ramp my BE pet enrages every time and that has a way higher survivability than my warder.

As Tastian said we dont get innate double attack because our pet should account for the damage we would do with that skill, the sad truth is that it doesnt on a lot of raid mobs and therefore that issue has to be corrected by special mitigation to ae ramp or immunity to it. If i get killed my pet poofs too so there is already a mechanism in place that ensures that we dont get a higher gain than other melee classes.

[cassaya]

If the pet has a movement buff it may move a bit faster, in the same manner that you may walk faster with Selos than if you don't have it, but pets most certainly do walk rather than run when returning to a guard point. This the reason which you always have the pet on follow rather than guard when pet pulling.

Although we may still need some mitigation on ramp for the pet to make this reasonably reliable, testing should bear that out. The primary reason that I am suggesting this method is that it is similar to what other pet classes already do, and based on past experience I just don't see the devs giving us a freebie like outright pet immunity to Ramp without expecting us to do something.

[Tastian]

Ah, I did partially misunderstand, but what you suggest just wouldn't work atm.  If your warder has attacked the mob at all it's on the hate list.  Maybe they could make it check the warders hatelist?  That'd need to be cleared via /pet back off or something, but even then you are talking about yo-yo'n the pet to avoid the ramps which really doesn't work so well for several reasons.

I guess what it comes down to is that there still hasn't been any reason for the "poof" factor which is the biggest issue most pet classes I've talked with have.  If they just scaled the damage pets take from AE ramp then all of the tools we have available could actually be used. 

Like I said I don't know how many times I've been "ok" on a mob, AE ramp, AE ramp, *NO* problems because my range is right, my warder is in position and then my warder happens to adjust a tidge that I might not even notice and the next ramp they poof and I'm still standing there like "uhhh darn".  The pet hold option doesn't help at all in those situations.  The hold option could help in those situations where the warder survives with some health left, but doesn't get out of the way fast enough. 

The whole mitigating AE ramp idea seems to work because it doesn't unbalance or effect anything except for AE ramp.  It can be given to all pet classes, it allows mend/guard/heals/etc to all see reasonable use and how different players/classes re-act can vary a lot.