If pet does 51% dmg or more, it eats half xp.

The Damage Shield on a pet is Neutral Damage, does not count towards the pets dmg.

In group settings pets will eat 50% of the exp if they do more then 51% of the dmg to a mob. So say your two mages grouped together and each pet does 26% of the dmg or 26%/25%, they eat xp.

That was fixed a long time ago.

this is wrong
in group setting pet can do all the damage as long as you do 1 point of damage youll get full exp. this misinformation makes people wary of doing so many good duos where the pet is the main dps

Basically, there's not many mages out there these days...and for reasons above, whichever the numbers happen to be :/

And half of them are in OOT killing seafury's lol.

Where did you read that this was the case? for my own knowledge.

its just common knowledge not written anywhere that i am aware of but its crazy easy to check. just hop in a group with an enchanter. kill a mob. then have enchanter charm something and have it do all but 1 point of damage. exp gain will be the same. this is why so many of "whats the best duo" posts are ench+anything because grouping allows a char that can charm to just go to town on mobs at a crazy speed without having to worry about pet exp.

I think the lack of mages is probably because mages are incredibly lackluster without Epic pet.

Mages were very average in Kunark and Velious. And since this server will never leave Velious, it's somewhat foolish to level one here without the promise of big upgrades in Luclin and PoP.