Bare with me on this please...

[hakaaba]

I'm a tad curious -- did they tell us not to ask about those things or are we just trying to stay away from the busy devs as an act of good faith?

Because if i had to sum up beastlord problems in 4 words, it'd be "spells, aas, and itemization" heh

Anyway the only questions i can think of meeting those criteria are pretty vague:

What is the intended role of a beastlord on raids?
Be interesting to get serious dev opinions of this.

What is being done to remedy the serious decline of pets' usefulness in all situations (solo, group, raid)? 

[Zathrix]

I too think the issue of mitigation is worth bringing up.  There is absolutely no reason that I can see that a Monk should be able to take a significantly greater beating than a similarly equiped Beastlord.  And I would add to that the issue of our agro generation.  I hunt regularly with a Monk that consistantly out DPS's me and my warder (minus the mystery DPS of Dog's procs, knowing what that is would be very nice too!) yet I consistantly pull agro from him.  I understand getting agro when I slow.  I also understand that DoT's generate agro, but I think it is too much given the DPS involved.   

I'd also like to respectfully request that the Iksar pet issue be addressed.  I don't KNOW that it affects DPS, but it looks that way and my friends are starting to suspect that Dog isn't really spending that time gnawing on the mobs butt. :-)

[bham]

What is the role of Beastlords in a raid?

If thats too vague for them, ask about the mitigation. Back when Omens was the latest expansion (im talking just before DON came out, not just after Omens came out), my beastlord could tank RSS with no raid gear. Currently, with raid gear, I cant tank high-end 1-group content. Beastlord tanking vs content has deteriorated significantly.

[Rhoam]

I agree with asking about our mitigation and about the decline of our pets. To me, my pet is nothing more than a fragile dot these days. By that I mean, its ability to absorb damage is no more useful to me than as if he were just a dot spell that I cast that does 400 or so damage per round. In most of the recent content, my pet cant last more than 1 and 1/2 rounds of melee before he dies or I hit my pet heal AA and rescue him. Seems to me we give up way too much in our own melee to having a pet that can damage. With the increase in dot spell damage in recent expansions, is it fair to take away from our melee skills because we have a pet that deals melee damage in much the same way as other toons deal dot damage with little to no offtanking ability anymore? I think we might be better off just foregoing the pet altogether. Give us the mitigation and melee damage of a ranger and take our pets  away. Our pets are just outdated dots at this point in time really. They arent as reliable as dot damage is some instances, where the pet just dies too fast or where the content millitates against the use of pets.

As far as our utility on raids, well we sure arent supposed to be buffers and the only spell "some" people want (but arent as reliant upon) is SA and para is just a joke even in grouping situations let alone raid situations. We are down low on the dps scale and even further if our pets cant survive the raid encounter or we spend too much time trying to get them to survive. We arent like mages or necros that can deal significant damage sans pets. Without our pet damage, we fall off significantly and if we try to maintain our pets by healing them we lose a good bit of dps from the loss of our own melee.  Between watching my own health, my pet's health and other groupmates health (yes, I patch heal on raids and in groups) it is just very difficult to concentrate on dps sometimes. Whereas, other toons such as monks, rangers, rogues and warriors can just concentrate on melee and spell dps, we have to concentrate on managing our pet agro, positioning and health. We should get some conpensation for that somewhere.

I think we should ask for some investigation as to whether our melee skills take too much of a hit because "we get a pet that deals melee damage too".  I think our melee skills should be adjusted to compensate for the fact that our pets are just too fragile and require too much maintenance to survive or our pets should be strengthened to eliminate this problem.

If our dps is addressed, maybe we can truly fill a dps spot on a raid. We certainly should not be low on utility and low on dps at the same time. As I have been given to understand, we gave up some dps because we had more utility back in the day. Well, we lost our utility over the past four expansions and our dps is still in the compromised state that it was when we had utility. Something has to give here.

[sunkash]

"What is the role of Beastlords in a raid?"

   I'll simple ask, What is the role of Beastlords.

"Because if i had to sum up beastlord problems in 4 words, it'd be "spells, aas, and itemization" heh"

   Excellent summation!

"I too think the issue of mitigation is worth bringing up"

   Yups! Correct me if I am wrong, but beastlords are now the only melee class that still has nerfed mitigation. Rangers, and Zerks were just corrected, Monks had thier update quite a while back.

Rhoam; yeah, I'd agree with you there.

What happened to that whole thing, about going through each class, one at a time, and updating them? They did the base classes, then it just died on the vine. "Class Reinvisioning" that's the term I was searching for. Seems SOE's Reinvisioning Beastlords out of the game.

Beastlords have had issues that have even been acknowledged by the dev's, like our god healing spell, long long ago, and yeah they even know exactly what they want to change it to, almost as long, but where's the fix?? oh, priorities, priorities, first, then we will get around to you, well maybe...
http://www.beastlords.org/forums/index.php?topic=6564.msg70902#new
Luclin: all zones with Norrath in the sky: whenever it rains, Norrath shrinks to a quarter of its size – fixed.
Guess someone from the holy trinity didn't like the moon shirkage, so they spend some unknown amount of time fixing a silly issue like this, then spend to 2-3 minutes to edit one file and change max heal from X to Y, file and save, compile.. makes sense to me. We've suggested several ways to improve our class; DPS, spells, abilities, utility.. answers we get back; (Nope!, or Unbalancing.. yeah right, or well, we'll maybe get around to looking at your class, at a later time, we'll reinvision ya, if anyones left that is" devs chuckle/chuckle"  yada, yada... ); just too busy appeasing the holy trinity to worry about beast issues... that response from SOE is getting just plain, old and tired.

We suffer from reduced DPS, and mitigation, because we have a pet. Mages and Necro, have pets better than ours, and crank out tons of DPS, and have up-2-date-usable-requested-uber utility also. Beastlords on the other hand, as a class have been spirialing on the downward slope since GoD release, with no end in sight, and our numbers have declined accordingly.
Mages and Necro, can pretty much forgo even using a pet, and still have excellent DPS/utility, however SOE in its infinate widsom has tied many of our new spells/abilities to our outdated pets; Growl of the Panther; Empathic Fury; Spirit of Oroshar, and while they were at it, reduce range to 50 on some of these, just as with Feral Swipe, we've been trying to get corrected all this time; guess that's thier way to 'just say no' to that idea. Our ranged DPS, very closely rounds to zero. FS is most likely one of the worst return on investment of any AA in the game, and if not should win at least an honorable mention. It's got my vote!

All the parses done in the past, says giving pets a DEX buff is little to zero gain "below the margin of error on parsing, or somesuch" Now comes our latest uber spell: Spirit of Oroshar, Pet ( increase DEX by 75 ). If I hadn't already just given up on SOE ever doing anything for our class, that might just beg the question, what are they thinking.

I believe the writing was on the wall when EQ2 came out, and low and behold, no beastlord, suspect EQ1 will someday be there also, or at best guilds will have one or two, to showoff as novelty items; hey remember when those guys were really needed?

Now we get to ask one question, not to specific, not to generic, and we maybe answer it or maybe not, so don't really expect anything...... Just got to love it! Process impovement taken to a new level.

[Bengali]

All the parses done in the past, says giving pets a DEX buff is little to zero gain "below the margin of error on parsing, or somesuch" Now comes our latest uber spell: Spirit of Oroshar, Pet ( increase DEX by 75 ). If I hadn't already just given up on SOE ever doing anything for our class, that might just beg the question, what are they thinking.

To be fair, all our pet procs add dex, and the tests showed that giving them *more* dex than they already had didn't make a difference.  It's not clear whether this is because dex does nothing for them, or if the default amount of dex on the proc spells puts them at the cap.

Anyway, the reason the dex is on there is probably to make sure that it doesn't downgrade the pet any from the previous ones.  If they removed the dex and pets started proc'ing less then there would be an uproar. :)

[Otuol]

I don't know if this has been touched upon yet but......

How do the devs validate giving enchanters their mana regen aura's in PoR but not giving us a small boost in SA to scale it correctly?  I remember the devs saying they didn't want to give us that 1 or 2 mana regen on SA because there was already too much FT and such out there.  Sounds like a bunch of hypocrites to me.  Complete and total liars.  Ask them to explain that one away please.

[jitathab]

Thats a spell question, we arent allowed to ask about spells :)

[Shieara]

One minor thing, maybe not worthy of weekly question, is whether there will every be a fix to the issue of using /tar Shie and it picking up me or my pet, whichever is closer.

It's really irritating to those trying to toss heals on a raid to type that and get my pet instead of me, or vice versa.  Perhaps they could just add an ! in front of the pet's name, so it would be !Shieara's Warder or something?

I also second the iksar pet freeze.  Been there forever and super annoying (I have iksar bst alt).

Also, this one may not be legal, but why doesn't the wildkin armor have endurance on it?  We do use endurance, and our PoR disc that we got is very dependant on it...so our class armor from the same expansion doesn't have it on there?  Kind of a /boggle situation to me.

Uhh...lets see.  Will our pets ever get a graphical update?  The bear model is really outdated.  When I say graphical update I do mean to the same species (/mourn gator pets).

That's all I can think of.

[trixbro]

Troll beasty here, want me wally gator back.!!


Trixbro Gatoraide

(notice the name, not sixleggythinggyaide)

[Gaeastar]

My biggest 2 issues are my mitigation (wet paper towels) making it difficult for me to solo or duo blue cons in most of the current and even some of the older content lol. Granted it is possible but blue cons that hit hard at all make kitty  :cry:  Second issue is what happened to being able to share the fight with my pet my pet is supposed to be half of the team. together we are supposed to be an amazing combination  but of late my pet dies so quickly on current mobs that my chances of survival solo or duo tend to be subpar.

[Grbage]

After reading about our mitigation I dusted off a monk alt I had last played prior to redoing monk mitigation. Prior to the mitigation change I would lose ~30-40% per mob so would BW back to 70% before hitting the next one. Now (with nothing having changed equipment wise) he can solo the same mobs non stop, popping mend everytime it came up and natural regen (iksar) was all the healing needed.

Edit: Let me add a disclaimer. In no way has the defensive ability of my monk been parses, this is just what I observed from playing the toon.

[Sikkem]

I would add my vote to mitigation also please Tast...

Since I have come back my play time is now only with my wife and son and no more raiding but I think this issue is something that faces both ends of the beastlord spectrum.. and thanks for the hard work   :mrgreen:

[Rykusx]

Off the top of my head; some of which have already been mentioned:

#1) Mitigation. 'Nuff said.
#2) DPS. If you don't fix mitigation, at least fix our melee DPS. Please don't tie any more significant DPS increases to spells; mana regen sucks as it is.
#3) Agro issues - I rarely ever DoT and my DPS isn't that great, but I still manage to steal agro quite often with similarly-geared tanks.
#4) Lack of burst DPS. Two discs (Bestial Fury and Empathic Fury), lasting 30 seconds,  on the same 30 minute reuse timer, isn't sufficient. Frenzy of spirit, Feral Swipe and Roar of Thunder don't come close to being considered burst DPS. Rake sounds nice, but is relatively difficult to attain unless you're a well-geared level 70.
#5) Speaking of burst DPS - Empathic Fury / Growl line of spells and at least one clicky item (OoW tier 1 tunic) switch target to pet... very annoying, seems like an easy fix that should have been done months ago.
#6) Pet survivability.  I really like the rune proc of Spirit of Oroshar, but it doesn't do enough. An idea I heard mentioned before that seems like it would work well is to directly link the pet's resistances / avoidance / mitigation to the summoning beastlord's resists / defensive AA's. It could be made an innate part of summoning the pet available to all pet classes, or it could become available via the Pet Affinity AA.
#7) Pet pathing - supposedly being fixed at the moment, but I'll believe it when I see it.

I enjoy playing my beastlord, but I'm enjoying playing less as I progress through content. Our utility that made us so great in previous expansions has declined sharply. Playing a beastlord now is sort of like being the guy in the office who has the Fine Arts degree; you could go to him if you need something done in a pinch but you're better off going to the other half dozen people in the room who actually have skills.


BTW I'm a troll, and I like the new gator model =)

[Kitathia]

Quote:
I enjoy playing my beastlord, but I'm enjoying playing less as I progress through content. Our utility that made us so great in previous expansions has declined sharply. Playing a beastlord now is sort of like being the guy in the office who has the Fine Arts degree; you could go to him if you need something done in a pinch but you're better off going to the other half dozen people in the room who actually have skills.   YOU worded it PERFECTLY!


I'll chime in to say MITIGATION. I have YET to start on the "serious" offensive AA's but the dmg output of a 70 bst is RIDICILOUSLY low compared to say a ranger - COMEON~ they stand WAY back there ( points FAR behind her) and do more dmg with a DARN arrow then I do with TWO weapons.. that makes me a VERY sad cat indeed. Part from our petproc a shaman pet aren't that far behind on dmg - which again makes me sad.. they get AWESOME slows - dots - heals AND A pet that comes close in dmg output ( I'm talking about my 68 pet without all them juicy  PET dmg AA's).

And a perspective from the DERV's on beastlords role would be grand.. I'm curious by nature  :wink:
Take care of yourself.