How well does a bst pet tank?

[Shurn]

I would like to find out just how good a lvl 75's bst pet is at tanking. Assuming I want to just play pet cleric, and assuming the pet has a full set of eidolon armor and pet toys, what mobs in what zone would the pet be able to tank and still get xp?

[Inphared]

It depends on your pet focus and what kind of buffs it has. Generally it does pretty well on anything it can land a stun on, but other than that pets have very little mitigation, therefore they can't take many hits. Pet cleric strategies have become easier with promised mending and our other various heals, but it's not very reliable. If you have most of your defensive AA's, you're guaranteed to tank better than your pet.

[Khauruk]

The pet is usually compared to a naked, no-AA warrior of equal level.  Lvl 72 iirc for our lvl73 pet.  Foci will improve the hit points of the pet, but not the mitigation.

[Tigrah]

indeed, we lack a great deal in the way of pet defensive abilities. Also of note is your pet AAs. The pet with proper buffs, pet foci, and decent set of AA can at least do a fast burn on lower DB mobs. IMHO Bsts should be given at least a partial line of pet defensives, give us some pet mitigation and avoidance for crying out loud!!!

[Spiritclaw]

indeed, we lack a great deal in the way of pet defensive abilities. Also of note is your pet AAs. The pet with proper buffs, pet foci, and decent set of AA can at least do a fast burn on lower DB mobs. IMHO Bsts should be given at least a partial line of pet defensives, give us some pet mitigation and avoidance for crying out loud!!!

I would prefer that they just upped the pet survivability rather than making us pay AAs for them :p.

[Inphared]

Pet survivability is somewhat of a difficult issue to fix. You can't make them easily livable in a raid environment without making them overpowered in a group setting. There have been ideas of making pets scale in power based upon how many people you are in a raid with, but the problem with that is it allows people to just fill up a raid and have a massively powerful pet for them to go solo with. They have ideas on what to do but it's a hard problem to fix.

[Seryk]

Pet survivability is somewhat of a difficult issue to fix. You can't make them easily livable in a raid environment without making them overpowered in a group setting. There have been ideas of making pets scale in power based upon how many people you are in a raid with, but the problem with that is it allows people to just fill up a raid and have a massively powerful pet for them to go solo with. They have ideas on what to do but it's a hard problem to fix.

What about using the flag that already exists that indicates a mob will require "an army" do defeat when you con it? Whenever a pet engages such a mob, perhaps they could use that flag to automatically scale the pet by perhaps boosting its skills with some timer associated that resets the skills after disengaging.

[Inphared]

That's another idea, but it opens up problems on older content flagged as a raid target, like Vex Thal or some such.

[Seryk]

That's another idea, but it opens up problems on older content flagged as a raid target, like Vex Thal or some such.

Yes that's true. Perhaps they can additionally factor in mob level and other known qualities (such as what zone pet is in) in addition to the raid flag to determine how to scale the pet abilities.

[Khauruk]

This is how the pets are generated now - every pet that can be focused must be inputted by hand by the developers.  So, mages get 4 pets, plus monster summoning, plus Rampaging Servant - that's 6 pets to be input for every level of focus.  They settled on 5 or 6 foci working, iirc, so that's 30 - 36 foci.  Add in BST and Necro, and it's nearing 50 pets to be put in the system.

The raid flag is a good idea, but that's then another pet for them to pencil in.

If it's vs. all the things you put in your last post, it would end up taking several days for the developer to create the pets for each expansion.  And a few days just to modify previous content.

And then...tuning them starts.

So yeah....a good idea, but it'll get nixed due to the sheer labor involved, since their code for this still sucks.

[Tigrah]

if we were to sum up all pet classes at this point, and take into account the most tedious problem with them all, I think all of us could agree its the out of date coding. 'If' SoE were to completely recode the pets, all pet classes could see the pets functioning more in line with how they 'should' be. Of course I realize that the work load on something this grandiose is absurd to even consider, however I felt that something like this should be pointed out as a theoretical remedy to the eternal problem of the pet classes weakness. As much as I would like to see the pets recoded to be more inline with the ever increasing level caps and content, I realize that its merely wishful thinking. In reality though, we can just expect to see half hearted fixes to the age old problems, which will likely break something even more important... or do nothing at all.

[Khauruk]

I wouldn't be too shocked to see that they had recoding pets on their to-do list for the code department.  They've been rewriting the code for huge gigantic portions of the game over the past year+, and have a huge backlog for that department to work through already.  Hopefully pets are on the horizon.

[Rabekiz]

To get the thread back on track though, at lvl 75 you really cant pet tank for exp. The pet mitigates too poorly and doesnt have enough DPS. The pet can reliably offtank the light blue gnolls in steppes (with promised mending) but almost all content beyond that is more trouble then its worth. Taking the role of a pet cleric for exp is dead.

[dainfrol]

My pet can off tank well enough as an "Oh sh**"  long enough for me to get a head start to the zone, or to cast gate potion or CR clickey.

[chatoyan]

I think the highest things my pet has "safely" tanked were oozes in Sunderspring. He doesn't last long against exp mobs in Icefall.