I was camping Warsmasher this morning in Korafax with my beast/mage duo and a couple healer mercs. Pretty easy camp using the mage pet to tank mostly. Well, I messed up today and had the mage parked a little too close and slightly the wrong angle from the trash bazu I was killing and when he cast his knockback the mage was flung into the laps of a couple trash mobs which promptly ate him. Ate him so fast the mercs didn't even have a chance to cast a heal and get aggro, thank goodness. I thought I was toast and would have to summon to GL, after all, our warders are worthless as tanks, right? Speedbumps I've heard? Merely visible dots supposedly? Kitty proved all that wrong. My warder tanked the bazu just fine, and not with me chaining rune and heals, I was mostly casting nukes and dots. My beast could maybe tank a bazu in kora, but the incomming damage is so spikey that mercs usually can't keep up with it well. When all I have for healing are brainless mercs, tanking such high dps mobs is for me better left to the pets.
Anyway, I just wanted to tell my little story about my warder who can tank. There have been so many complaining that our warders are crap (a position I've long disagreed with), it's nice to see a counter example. Yes, kitty was wearing full mage summoned gear and I have nearly all the pet defensive aa and yes, I do think that warders need more dps!!
Parses show that air pet and warder(geared up) mitigate hits the same but there are some differences in overall defense. Mage pet blocks ~2% more then warder. Mage and necro pets gets parry and warders do not (does that even make sense?) Mage pet gets a 3.0sec stun that goes off ~4x/minute and warders is 1.5sec stun that fires ~8x/minute. Stun mitigation can't be tested on test dummies due to them not being stunnable, but most mobs have a 20-30 delay. That means the 3.0sec stun has a better chance of interrupting a swing.
Those parses and what you are saying says to me that BST have to hunt down a mage everytime they summon a new warder. Not realistice for those who don't have a mage bot.
Mage air pet vs beast warder
Air pet(and necro/enchanter pets) block 50%(11-12% vs 7-8%) more than warder does, and have parry(nec/enc too), which the warder does not
Air pet can have 10% more hp via AA than warder.
Air pet has 2hit prism skin DA vs 1hit DA for warder
Air pet comes pre-equipped(if focused) with mage pet gear, most beasts I know don't seek out a mage for pet gear.
Air pet can stun level 90 mobs if applicable, where warder can only stun level 85.
Beasts have 1 extra hit on rune spell.
Beasts have a better direct heal.
Those are your differences for air vs warder.
Air pet also gets 3 extra ranks of elemental agility, but just like sturdy companion, this seems to do absolutely nothing from parses shown.
You failed to list the focus you were using for pet, which can play a BIG role in tanking. It does not focus HP that much, but the difference between an entry level warder(spire servant/servitor of scale) and even a low level raid warder(EM IV) is night and day in AC.
Mage is #1 in pet tanking, 2 tiers later are Beast and necros with beasts having a very slight edge, and 20 tiers later is every other pet.
Beast vs necro
Beast have better heals(not greatly important with mercs)
Beasts have 1 extra hit on rune
Beasts have prism skin proc
necros have 50% better block and parry, counteracting prism skin almost perfectly.
*edit*
btw, wasn't trying to make ya mad in anyway, just listing differences between air pet and bst pet. hope you didn't take it as such.
Focus heavily affects the AC of a pet, and thus relates alot to its tanking.
No question, mage air pet is a better tank. I normally have air pet taunting and almost always buffed with Burning Pyroshroud to ensure the mob's attention stays on the mage pet. Although not my primary choice to tank when pet tanking, I am comfortable using my warder to offtank trash up to tier 4 and tier 5 in a pinch.
My anecdote was just to demonstrate what my warder could do alone compared to the more usual complaints about their uselessness as tanks. I wasn't really trying to compare the mage and beast pets, the only part the mage and his pet played was the dying part a few seconds after engage, leaving me and my warder alone except for mercs.
I use enhanced minion 4 and buffs were just from beast and merc. As my main, the beast has a mix of raid gear mostly from Solt, MMM and tier 1 SoD (Crystollas raids starting this month). The mage is a box so is group geared mostly to tier 3 with a few raid drops scavenged from backflag hits.
Not all of us have a pocket mage to gear our pets with lol.
I love the pets we have but i do think that its not cool that mages bitch the loudest so they get the best pets...
oh yeah and EM 4 is outa my reacha s well lol ive only got 3 :P
nice work on the namer though!
You are parses with anecdotal evidence.
Grats on getting lucky.
My earlier post was actually about my warder tanking a trash bazu, not the named. But this morning a really bad round from the Warsmasher and some lethargic merc healing lead to a dead air pet so I got to see kitty put to a real test. My warder ended up tanking Warsmasher from about 75% health until it fell. Fortified Comp was not up at the time, so had to do without that. Completely drained my mana supplementing the merc heals, but we won. Kitty did great and survived.
Of course, after a tough fight like that it sucked that all he dropped was the stupid type 7 gorget.
Mage pulled two by accident in Korafax.
Had to use comp blessing and fortify companion and do some quick healing + rune use. But kitty lived tanking the add.
Quote from: Vidyne on June 04, 2009, 03:47:28 PM
Mage pulled two by accident in Korafax.
Tell your mage to park his butt and let you pull instead, that way he can CoH you out of a bad pull. Of course, you have to really trust your mage....
QuoteNo question, mage air pet is a better tank. I normally have air pet taunting and almost always buffed with Burning Pyroshroud to ensure the mob's attention stays on the mage pet.
Believe me that you should never have the slightest worry about airpet losing agro to your warder. Mage airpet has insane agro ability, even without taunt / additional proc buffs. You should try giving warder variable head starts with tanking, then send in the mage pet. You'll probably be surprised how fast agro is peeled.
Kerafyrm has an unusual agro mechanic, in that pets can tank when players are attacking in melle range. When a tank died, it wasn't rare for Jober to pop up in HoTT next. We had one of them tank kera for lil over a minute one time. They are pretty hefty tanks.
Was recently fooling around in Giants3 solog the task. Got up to Hulcor part and it all fell apart.
Not only could i NOT pet cleric, my pet could NOT hold any agro whatso ever becuase of his craptastic dps.
I couldn`t even paragon myself as i wouild get : Spell did not take hold bs. WTF its a short buff, why is his debuff blocking it. Poop!
I know hulcor memwipes but jeeze, one little pet heal and i`m chain summoned.
PS: warder was getting raped like crazy and i couldn`t just use promised line to keep him up but had to aslo spam his 4kish pet heal, which hulcor`s, if anyone knows, that dot makes any heal suck, (except for promsed line i think) as you were healed for crap amounts until that dot was cured. Hence I had to spam his heal twice. Once to cure, once to heal, while promised line was ticking in the back.
Still was not enough. Hulcor was like 95% and warder was dead 2x. I died too hehe, but tanked 100% way BETTER then my warder.
Was planning to do him with mage, but at 2am i had to go sleep at aten ha ra lol.
http://lucy.allakhazam.com/stacking.html?id=13210&source=Live
Plague of Hulcror blocks paragon
Hulcror memblurs alot and even if not memblurring he has really strange aggro issues. I've also seen him leave a tank completely who's taunting and go after a mage who wasn't even nuking after he started summoning. Took the tank about 15seconds to get hulcror back.
If you didn't have mage summoned gear, it wasn't even close to a mage pet tanking, as that's what devs supposedly balance our pet against(despite it still not having as much block/parry).
As for mage pets overaggroing warders... it seems to have been changed, but years ago, a beastlord warder would get closer to the mob than an air pet would and for some reason that made the warder almost always end up the tank.
Quote from: Saniiro on August 17, 2009, 07:15:47 AM
Believe me that you should never have the slightest worry about airpet losing agro to your warder. Mage airpet has insane agro ability, even without taunt / additional proc buffs. You should try giving warder variable head starts with tanking, then send in the mage pet. You'll probably be surprised how fast agro is peeled.
Really??
My son who played a mage was quite upset that his air pet could not hold agro against my warder. We had the same focus, and same self buffs. He even re-summoned a pet and put the agro weapons on. He was pleased that his pet could keep agro... then I notice my pet needed haste again... then agro was back on my pet. Even with the air pet head start, the warder won the agro contest. I even put the flame proc on (-50 hate) and it seemed to help a little.
Grouping with a different guildie mage made him comment "What are you doing that makes your pet grab agro like that?"
Granted, that was awhile ago. Maybe things have shifted to the mage's advantage again.
I forgot to mention that I was boxing a bst/necro in Kora. I was using my warder to tank, and 2 clr mercs as the healers. I have my pet AA's pretty much maxed, but not sure what the necro has for AAs. I eventually, just left the necro pet dead (kept eating rage). I would cast growl before the pull, then slow on incoming and sic the pet on it. Cast cripple, then load up the dots from the necro and FD. Re-slow and re-growl. On named, I would spam the pet heal while I was dotting with the necro. The puppy can tank fine!
thats not really thanking then thats just MASS healing
Quote from: Saniiro on August 17, 2009, 07:15:47 AM
Believe me that you should never have the slightest worry about airpet losing agro to your warder. Mage airpet has insane agro ability, even without taunt / additional proc buffs. You should try giving warder variable head starts with tanking, then send in the mage pet. You'll probably be surprised how fast agro is peeled.
Warder's > Air Pet in agro, always have been, always will!
Look at the Pet Buff you place on your warder. It's like +500 hate every time it proc's, and our pet Proc's alot. The only one I know of that has a -hate mod is the level 55 SoL one you can't research.
As a side note...With Underfoot going live and them increasing the # of charges on Prism Skin, he should be able to tank munch better. And he gained more defensive abilities in Block I believe :evil:
Quote from: Blarp on December 12, 2009, 09:14:22 PM
thats not really thanking then thats just MASS healing
Tanking is just surviving between heals and keeping aggro, the longer you can live between heals just makes you more efficient at it :P
I must be missing something. Rune? I have my delayed pet heals, normal pet heals. Which Rune are we talking about?
From reading everything here, I am definitely weak on my toon. HELP!!!
The pet gets 2 types of runes:
1 - Prism skin, which it casts as a recourse of one of the procs (single hit rune last I paid attention. Thought I saw something somewhere abt it increasing to muliti-hit, but that might've been on wishlist)
2 - Cast runes - I use Bulwark of Tri'Qaras, I think there's another that's more hits (I like the small dps gain from the fade of that one). There's also some spell mitigation type runes, but I never bother with those, spellbreaker's aegis/bulwark.
Aye, Dragonscale Guard is the 'most" common one. At rank 2 it blocks 9 melee or spell hits period.
http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=14136&source=Live
You can only have ONE of the rune line on your pet on him at any time, so either spellbreaker's line or Tri'qaras or the Dragonscale I linked above. Prism skin stacks however (procs off your pet's Spirit of XXX line buff (yes now has 2 hits rather than 1).
I know that prism skin takes the FIRST hit... and then your cast runes above start taking the next hits.
You can also have your healer merc or any cleric cast the VIE line, which is a mitigation % off damage your pet takes, up to a certain total.
Chanters can also cast either their damage Rune line on you and pet as well as a spell mitigation damage buff. I have a chanter as my alt and I know those two buffs stack with everything else on my pet as well. Also chanters have an aura (runic shimmering aura line) that will pulse a small damage absorption buff on you and your pet (as long as you have the pet affinity aa that is). Heck Chanters can even cast Dermal Brimstone which is yet ANOTHER rune on you or your pet... you got lots of choices :)