Pet heals on Test aren't looking good

[Tastian]

*points up a few posts*  They've already said those were errors stig.   8)  I'm not sure what the real changes will look like and it's possible we'll have some issues to bring up still, but atm we'll have to wait and see what things look like once they get fixed. 

[Strigori]

I'm sceptical on the errors.  Typicly an error is on a specific spell, or a part of a spell that is universal(like stacking). The amount of changes, and  how they are all done to spells across that many levels I cant see how that was all made in error.  I hope they are, but the 'they look like errors' is different from 'these are errors'.  Its a wait and see,  and lets hope the wait isnt  weeks down the line after these go live on the 11th.

[sierf]

i'm just waiting to see what they change our heals to now that they have admited to screwing them up. i'm still hopefull since it was caught soo early.  8-) have to keep our eyes on soe.

[Tastian]

I understand stig and I've talked to some people about it.

What it will likely come down to is hp/mana ratio and bad cast/recast or fast cast/recast with worse ratio.  Personally I think a fast cast, with modest recast and reasonable ratio would be best.  Most beastlords just don't pet/cleric at this point.  You need to be able to keep your pet alive while they run and hide from AE ramp(if they live lol) or whatever.  Also, unless recast was insane it really wouldn't matter.  I mean if you found yourself chain casting heals on your pet you'd probably gain dps letting it die and just fighting/casting/etc.  *shrugs*

As I said we'll have to see what is there, but once the new changes show up on test we'll talk about it and be sure to let me know any feedback you want passed along.  Most people I've talked to don't want over the top "OMFGZORZ!!" pet heals, they want something functional that they might actually mem/use.

[Bengali]

For the life of me, I don't see why this is such a hard issue to get down pat.  Out of 7 pet heals, the first 4 are near-copies of fast cleric heals.  As a matter of fact, they are more efficient than cleric heals, but just as fast and have the same base healing (although clerics have an innate heal advantage and specialization, but we'll keep it simple for now).

Then, all of a sudden at level 55 things get changed to where our heals are abominably slow.  I have never understood why that was, but I imagine it was because someone saw the numbers and got confused about beastlords being as good a healer as clerics.

Again, this logic confounds me.  Obviously things would be wonky if you gave a druid a cleric heal or a shaman or a wizard or a necro.  That is, if they were player heals that you gave them.

But we're talking about pet-heals here.  One of the reasons that the pet heals make sense at lower levels in terms of their superiority to other heals is because they are limited to pets.  Everywhere else in EQ, a spell that is restricted in its target type is MORE efficient than a general spell.  The summoned only nukes are MORE efficient than the nukes that land on everything.  The undead-only nukes are MORE efficient than nukes that land on everything.  More than half of a beastlord's pet-only heals are more efficient than a heal that can be used on any PC or charmed NPC or other person's pet.   Pet heals are not only target type (pet), but they only work on your own pet.  It's not even like a beastlord would be a replacement for a cleric in healing a charmed pet, or a mage pet.  I have no idea what the danger is.

I particularly don't understand what the fear is with 55+ heals.  Even if I had a pet-only heal that was equivalent to the ancient cleric heal, what am I going to do with it?  I can't use that to have my pet just tank mobs in riftseekers.   The difference between a pet and a normal NPC at higher levels is simply huge.  A level 9 pet can tear through level 9 NPCs, but a level 65 pet will be worked over by level 65 mobs.  Ironically, at the time when we're most likely to need big, fast *pet-only* heals, there is extraordinary resistance to actually letting us have them.

I would understand this if our pets were considered 'extra' damage.  If an enchanter had cleric-level pet only heals then there might be issues, because chanters aren't balanced around constantly having a charmed pet available.  Beastlords are balanced around having their pet up -- it's the reason that we don't, for example, get double attack.  So if you consider that a beastlord + pet will do as much damage as say, a ranger, what happens when they are AE'd for 4k damage?

Well, with the ranger, you heal him for 4k and pow, he's back to normal.  In order to get the beastlord back to normal, then you have to heal the beastlord for 4k and *someone* has to heal the pet for 4k too (putting aside feral guard for the moment).  At a minimum, it's twice as much mana just to guarantee that the beastlord can continue to plug away doing ranger damage (or monk, or berserker or whatever damage we're supposed to be doing.)  Under the proposed revamp, (which I do believe to be in error, although I don't know if Rytan is inclined to put all of the heals in line with the lower ones), it will cost more than twice the mana because he pet heal is less efficient than a comparable player heal.  The point is that wherever we are on the dps scale, we have to spend additional mana just to keep that spot whereas non-pet users don't, because our pet are taken into account in our balance/definition.   Imagine if every time a ranger took AE damage, they had to divert mana away from nuking or whatever in order to heal their left arm or else it would start spasming and they would loose 30-40% of their melee damage.  How is that advantageous to the ranger?

Again, I could see the issue if pets could be used as anything other than disobedient DoTs at higher levels.  If I could take advantage of the pet's hps or damage mitigation or what have you, then these things might be a larger concern.  That's hardly the case, though.  Besides, look at what players can do with cleric heals.  If clerics do nothing but spam holy light-type spells on players with 10k+ buffed hps they can still run out of mana pretty quickly (which is why they fall back on complete heal when they can).  So what is a beastlord going to do with those spells -- using an inferior mana pool, no specialization, and a tank  (i.e., the pet) with worse hps and mitigation than a player?  Toss in the fact that a beastlord is less likely to have an equivalent heal focus or mana preservation (yay itemization) and again, I fail to see how the sky could fall out from maintaining the same progression that beastlords have up to level 55.  After all, clerics pay a "price" with their fast heals, in that they are mana hogs if they have to cast them a lot.  The same would be true of beastlords if they found a way to pet cleric later on in life.

And lest anyone say, "beastlords will be solo gods," let me remind everyone that we aren't talking about mages and necros, who do all of their non-pet damage from outside a mob's melee range.  In order for a beastlord to do enough damage to kill a mob within a reasonable period of time, they will HAVE to get in melee range.  Once that happens, the pet's hps, AC, avoidance and ability to be healed all become meaningless -- NPCs are hard-coded to ignore every pet that is beating on them in favor of any PC that is in melee range.  Beastlords could duck in and out, trading off between healing the pet and healing themselves, but oops, that uses mana, which we also need to do damage since we are split between melee, spells and the pet to equal the dps of a similar "dps class".  It certainly won't be that beastlords will be better at soloing than any class that can root-rot or kite.  Besides, soloing is beyond overrated.  The best xp in the game is in groups, hands down, so being desirable to a group is 100x more important than being able to mow through blue mobs for an aa point every hour and a half.

Anyway, sorry for rambling on for a bit but this whole thing seems so simple to me and has been made unnecessarily complex by what I suspect are unfounded fears from the devs (and other players who don't understand how we work).  I mean, the very fact that, as Tastian said, it's possible for beastlords to decide that the pet isn't worth the mana to maintain is what makes this issue so frustrating.  You never see a ranger say, "man, my left arm is costing me too much mana to maintain at a cost of my right arm's dps, so I'll just bag my offhand weapon instead of chain healing it."

[Tastian]

I hear ya beng and you know I've been trying to get this fixed for awhile.  *shrugs*  It really just doesn't make any sense.  The fact that our heals get worse 55+ while our melee increases makes it even worse.  We aren't casters like necros or mages.  It's possible for a mage/necro to time their pet heals such that the pet recieves the full healing and their damage done doesn't change.  With the exception of the mana used to heal instead of the mana used to do damage.  However, a beastlord simply doesn't have that option.  Every second the beastlord spends casting the spell is time the beastlord isn't spending on melee, or procs which at the higher end are WAY more damage than our pets.  There were some higher armor mob fights where the procs on my weapons were out dps'n my pet for the love of god. 

Part of the beastlord class from its very inception was pet heals and keeping our one warder alive.  You would think that something beastlords would excel at would be AE fights and dots and AE ramp and the things that frustrate other pet classes.  Instead our pet heals have no extra cures, they take longer to cast, and we find ourselves using the exact same tools as every other pet class (focus, regen, pet mend, suspend out the spare, curse at the monitor). 

There are literally a dozen different things I can think of to make the pet heals more useful, make them more inline with how they were and still keep them from being remotely "unbalanced" or "overpowered".  *shrugs*  Here's hoping the changes are better.

[Bengali]

The worst part of it is that if people like me hadn't said anything, then the heals would only be screwed up at higher levels instead of being screwed up for everyone like they are now.  If I had just kept my mouth shut, then new beastlords would be able to enjoy being "the best" at something for at least some point in their lives, and as it stands now there isn't a single thing that they will do better than any other class at all, not even the esoteric and dubiously useful category of self-pet healing.  I feel like an utter disappointment to the community.  I'm honestly depressed and deeply sorry to you all.

[Nalitra]

/Slap Bengali - grab some catnip and warm milk.

Don't know how many people are aware of all the hard work Bengali puts in behind the curtains to get things improved for us, and I don't know where/how he is connected, but he puts in a huge effort and for that I am very thankful. 

Tastian's efforts are more obvious and again, I am hugely thankful for his efforts.  Without these guys our class would not be nearly as fun to play. 

THANKS GUYS !!

Had to say that, now to get back to the purpose of this thread. 

The heal changes were across the board for pet classes.  Magicians are throwing a fit too because of the mana cost. 

Rytan posted on the Mage boards : 

Rytan EQ
SOE Staff
SOE Staff


Joined: 17 Dec 2003
Posts: 58
Location: San Deigo
   
PostPosted: Tue May 03, 2005 2:05 pm    Post subject:    Add User to Ignore List Reply with quote
Just wanted to give a heads up about a couple of things here.

1) The bolt should be evocation, it was an oversite on my part.

2) The heals are being readjusted to have similar HPS/EFF numbers as normal paladin heals. They are rather br0k3d on test at the moment.

-Ryan

Granted this was posted on the magician's board, but given the fact that the heal changes on test are for all pet classes, I'm guessing that the ability to heal like a pally will also be for all pet classes.  If that's the case, I don't see the benefit to memming our pet heal.  It won't be worth giving up a spell slot for when we can just use our regular heal for approximately the same results.

Nalitra

p.s.  Here is the link to that magician thread  http://eq1.eqsummoners.com/viewtopic.php?t=21227&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=50

[Rhoam]

I am confused here. Are all pet heals for mages, bsts and necros going to be the same or similar spells? Doesnt the difference in pet level, pet ac and pet hps have a factor in the type of heal we get? I mean our pets dont have the ac, damage mitigation or hps of a mage pet and yet we get the same tool to heal them? I hope I read the mage boards posts wrong. I really hope I did. :roll: Edit: nm I read lucy today and the heal is now a cast of 3.5 for 2468 hps and 691 mana cost. Fast cast. same hps, lower hps to mana ratio. This seems better to me, maybe now I can at least keep Lobo alive when the aoe's start flying.  I think I can live with this heal.

[Bengali]

Yep, right now it's a pet only version of Yoppa's mending.  I personally think it's the wrong way to go but I'm actually kind of tired of arguing over it.  The real issue isn't whether I like it, but whether you guys would use this spell, and if the lower levels can live with the nerfs that accompany it.  If you all can live with it,  then I'll mark it in the win column and stop giving myself an ulcer over it.  :)   So now our pet heal is 3.57 efficiency.  As a side note, the mage heal is now 3.32 efficiency so hopefully we won't have any manifestos about how we are such better healers than shamans and druids and clerics and therefore need to be nerfed so that mages can have better pet heals (/wave Xalmat)  We are truly mediocre at every single thing that we can possibly do in EQ now.  Grats us.

[Rhoam]

From reading the mage boards, I dont think this heal will eliminate any further griping from mages. They seem to always have issues to gripe about and I am sure we will find our way back into their nerf bat conjurations again at some point. I dont see why their heal would be superior to ours given the difference in pets. But I suppose one could say because they are the "master of the pet classes". Funny how lore is brought out only when it suits a class. Arent wizards supposed to be the masters of burst spell dps? Bring on the mage invasion to our boards, LOL.

[Oiingo]

I just want to know why Rytan has poted on the mage forums 58 times, but only twice here.  Makes me sad, as I like to read what he says. 

Heck, anyone use anything other than the ``Dev Tracker'' link on the official SOE forums? 

[Mahes]

Today's changes are nice in that they more than double the amount of hps being healed vs cast time, i.e. 303 HPs healed per second of cast time on Mikkily vs. 658 now.  That's cool to me because I spend less time getting HPs to the warder and can essentially cast 2 of the new Mikkily in just over the time it took to cast one now.  Of course this doesn't take into account spell haste, which skews it a bit.

That said, in my opinion SOE is still not getting it.

The issue for the high end BSTs (losing pets to AE DDs, DoTs, and Ramp) doesn't just require a shorter cast time to remedy.  Part of that issue is the amount of HPs a top level warder has.  I'm sorry, but 2,468 HP heal...let's say 3k with AAs, isn't going to do a hell of a lot when my warder's getting ripped up by an AE ramp.  I understand that perhaps they don't want to give us such a powerful heal that we can sit back and pet cleric on RS exp mobs, but we all know our pets don't tank well at this level so that's not even an issue.

These heals may be great for casual players or players raiding PoTime and GoD, but this still will not effectively help a BST raiding Anguish level content on the fights where we're having issues (2.0 Ragefire, Yar'Lir, Vishmitar, etc.).  A quicker cast time on pet heals helps me, but it does not give me a feesible solution to allow me to use a pet on these encounters.

If they're only trying to balance heals for mid level content against cast time, they've done it.  But another thing to point out is the HP to mana ratio on the new heals has severly decreased and with mid-level players being less likely to have a decent mana pool and FT, this has as much of a negative impact on them as a positive one.

Maybe this would make sense if they'd tell us what their desired outcome is.  We originally requested faster cast times on pet heals for a good reason, but we didn't expect to have the mana cost and HPs healed penalized in turn.  They've merely shifted the problem away from cast time and over to efficiency.

I'm gonna go bang my head on the keyboard some more.

[Rhoam]

Well I suppose the easiest and least creative way to fix this is the way it is right now, No it doesnt address the problems with maintaining pets on aoe raids. No I dont understand why our heal is substantially the same as mage heals but with less efficiency AND LESS disease counters, 16 to 24. I mean arent our pets subject to the same aoe spells and dont our pets have less hps, ac and damage mitigation. As it stands now, our pets with less hps, less ac and damage mitigation get a few more hps per heal, less disease counters per heal and our mana pool, which is most likely much smaller than a comparably equipped mage, gets hit harder per heal.  I dont get it, but then I never did understand why our heals didnt progress rather than digress as we improved in level either.

[Mahes]

My brain is starting to hurt from looking at Lucy.

What's going on with Chloroblast?  Our 62 heal is now a better, more efficient heal than our 65, but with a .75 longer cast time.

/boggle