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Pet Power Scaling

Started by Sikkem, June 11, 2010, 12:15:01 AM

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Sikkem

I am going to cross post a response I received from Prathun on the SoE forums about how they improve pets each expansion.

I worded my question badly (something I usually do) and therefore his answer whilst showing what I meant was based on the question he thought I had asked.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?start=400&topic_id=164605&#2483008

Quote
Prathun-Dev wrote:

QuoteSikkem wrote:

        As for overhauling I have no idea if you did or not, all I know is you said mage pets were set and other classes pets were set in relation to them.

        A question, if pets are only given a set percentage upgrade each expansion and dps wise a warder is say 20% behind a mage air pet during expansion A.

        If both pets get say a 10% increase in Expansion B wouldn't that make the gap larger than the 20% from the previous expansions pets?

        If that is correct then doesn't it follow that each expansion the gap would be compounded and by say expansion H the gap could be quite latrger than 20%?

    Let's say we have four numbers:  50, 100, 150, 300.

    50 is 83.3% less than 300.

    100 is 66.7% less than 300.

    150 is 50% less than 300.

    300 is our baseline.


    Also, looked at another way...

    50 is our baseline.

    100 is 100% greater than 50.

    150 is 200% greater than 50.

    300 is 500% greater than 50.


    Let's increase these numbers by 30%, giving us: 65, 130, 195, 390.

    65 is 83.3% less than 390.

    130 is 66.7% less than 390.

    195 is 50% less than 390.

    390 is our baseline.


    Or, alternately...

    65 is our baseline.

    130 is 100% greater than 65.

    195 is 200% greater than 65.

    390 is 500% greater than 65.


    Note how the percentage difference between these numbers remained the same after they were all increased by the same percentage.  I used 30%, because that's roughly the percentage of DPS upgrades between expansions, but it could be any number.  You can continue to increase these values by the same value, and the percentage gaps between them will remain the same.

    Also, note how it didn't matter which one was the "baseline".  It could have been the smallest number, the largest number, or one in the middle.  It didn't affect the outcome.

As you can see One got a 90 upgrade between expansions whilst another only got a 15 upgrade.
The gap between the two whilst staying the same percentage wise changed from 250 to 325

This happens every expansion so the problem is compounded and thus we have where we are today.


Sikkem - 90 Beastlord - Bertox

Umlat

Of course, Prathun's example is EXTREMELY simplistic and only includes a single comparison and therefore a constant rate of change over all.

It does not include things such as special gear that only appears as pre-equipped on summoned mage pets.

It does not include things like the diminishing returns from things like the 20% damage increase from growl/feralgia.

It does not include that many of our pet abilities (procs) may stack, but not that they conflict in use and reduce all of their effectivenesses.

It does not include things like auras that increase pet abilites after the fact with respect to their calculations.

I doubt they figure the ratio of warder to mage pet dps (for example) while including a mage's non pet damage shield buffs for instance. I do suspect that they include our non pet specific buffs AND a set of full pet gear when calculating the ratio between warders and mage pets for things like AC, HP, stats etc. If slow is cranked into their balancing equations, it is probably expressed at its full percentage, even though nothing current is probably ever able to be affected at that level.

Of course the most important factor regarding relative pet strengths is that WE don't really get to see much in the way of hard values on stats for pets. We can't observe the exact changes buffs, focii, gear, skill values, etc. make in a lot of things. It's all behind the scenes. There might very well be TYPOS and ERRORS in the equations for damage calculation or any number of other areas for beastlord pets or mage pets that may have crept in during copy/pastes or manual entry  or many other ways. Dividing by 20 instead of 200 or 2 could make a big difference.

Could you imagine what would happen if mage pets were found to have an error built into them of approximately the same magnitude of say Harmonius Arrow and they simply made the correction like they did with HA? Things would certainly be ... interesting until the next patch. Or the one after that. Or even the one after that. (hmm sounds like a good april fool gag for next year  :evil: )

Karve

OK, so where do we think the pet should be both in DPS and tanking skill - the latter is a bit hard to really quantify so best 2 parts.

1) DPS - max hit is probably the best way to start here excluding crits.

2) Tanking ability - Should it realistically be able to offtank a trash mob, and if so how much nursing will that require - afterall, we still need to provide a suitable contribution to group/raid with DPS while our pet is being useful.

Professional Mad Bastard.

gregais

Quote from: Karve on June 14, 2010, 09:57:52 AM
1) DPS - max hit is probably the best way to start here excluding crits.

DPS has nothing to do with max hit, you could have one max hit of 5K and the rest for 10 and have crap dps. Baseline dps is prolly the best way to start. I'd say 500 baseline, that's while naked. That way all buffed up and focused it would be respectable, it is a pipe dream, but its my dream anyhow. I have no parses or anything to know what we are baseline now, just tossing numbers. I may be waaay too high, but like they say start high and meet somewhere in the middle.


Tanking wise...well I don't use the warder to tank much. I would like him to last long enough on trash mobs to maybe cast like 4 heals or so if I do happen to need him in a pinch.

Grbage

Yeah, max hit really has nothing to do with DPS it's just a milestone. As an example, our max hit with a 2h is wayyy bigger then our dual wield setup but miles apart in actual DPS.

Now for offensive-defensive, for me it depends on what we want as a community. Do we as a community want a pet that can take some hits or deliver some hits because I do believe there should be a trade off. Think water pet vs earthpet (yes I use mage pets as a base) or all around pet like the air pet that can do decent dps and take hits both.

Personally I would like to see a carbon copy of the air pet in abilities because 800ish dps is nothing to sneeze at while tanking trash mobs (granted that is with merc heals).

To go along with a better pet I also want back our far superior pet healing abilities without having to mem 4 spells. Just one big mana effecient heal that does ~75% pet hp with a 1.5-2 sec cast time. Afterall we are descendents of a priest class and up till the last few years been able to keep the pet up without any outside help.
Grbage Heep
85 Beast of Torv

bradam

I'm all for a much more powerful warder.  It i wanted to just dps myself I'd have made a monk or a ranger.  I wouldn't care if our personal dps stagnated some AS LONG AS the warder's dps and survivability got bumped up to compensate for that stagnation. 

Umlat

Quote from: Karve on June 14, 2010, 09:57:52 AM
1) DPS - max hit is probably the best way to start here excluding crits.

I think the point Karve was trying to make was that, all other things being left as they are, increasing the base max hit for warders is the best place to start to increase dps. Our warders already get sufficient attacks and flurries, there really isn't a need to increase those. Increasing our pet max hit to get the average group pet focused warder (EM1/2, as of SoD) to at least equal that of a rank II sk/ench pet is the minimum needed. Fixing Growl/Feralgia to act like it was originally supposed to from what I SEE, based on the initial spells in the line and pet haste buffs of that level, is that growl was supposed to provide warder with an increase of 15% or 20% damage all skills over whatever the base bonus from the pet haste was. Original spell was 15%, second spell was 20%, but base 5% damage bonus was added to pet haste the level before the second growl. So the numbers on growl really should be boosted from 20% to 15% or 20% over the pet haste damage % bonus each rank of pet haste.

Karve

Yes, take the pet as is, up its max hit from 241(or whatever base is, I have EMVII) to ~430. That in turn will show a huge improvement in terms of DPS, with no other changes offensively.

The AC/Avoidance/Mit and total base HP would need love liove.

The Offensive stun/bash/proc rate /resist checks/ would then need tuning possibly.

I'm just trying to get to a place where we could get things changes simply to get the right result. I'm no expert on how pets are coded, but would like to keep away from anything which would require a lot of dev intensive time so that we stand a chance of getting something anything done.

At the end of the day, a C+P of Air would be a good start but I'm not sure what the effect of buffing it with vaxtn and haste would be, hence tweeking ours as we know where we are at at the moment.

Professional Mad Bastard.

tmkeehn

I think of a copy / paste of the air pet would be solid.  They'd still have the advantage of the gear to offset our buffs.
Dausheit Goldeneyes
Cohort Chalybeius
Cazic

Grbage

Quote from: tmkeehn on June 23, 2010, 03:20:29 AM
I think of a copy / paste of the air pet would be solid.  They'd still have the advantage of the gear to offset our buffs.

In a copy/paste situation it would come pre equiped with visible pieces of gear because mage pets come pre equiped. I do think they still have to give them non visible gear but not entirely sure on that.
Grbage Heep
85 Beast of Torv

bobokatt1970

All mage pets need after summoning, if the mage has a decent focus, are weapons of his/her choice.  Everything else is pre-equiped -- hence why they can chain cast pets as a possible strategy if their main goes down and the new pet can actually take a beating.

I am all for getting better warder damage, and the idea of having our warders possibly put out as much damage as an Air pet is great, I can never imagine that they would give us the Mage pet's defensive abilities/mitigation.  I can see them increasing out pet's overall DPS but never making it capable of tanking the stuff Mages can with their air pets, not to mention their Earth pets.  That's their realm. 

Karve

I'm more for the warder being able to take 7 bales of crap being knocked out of him for several minutes while keeping his current DPS,and not requiring anywhere near as much healing, rather than upping the dps in an area where we probably don't really need it.

Professional Mad Bastard.