Mage Pet: Tanking Analysis
 

I just got my air staff and decided to test how durable the pets are on a consistent target. Shady Swashbuckler spawns every 6 mins 40 seconds, is level 45, and has about 5300hps. He actually has pretty high AC. My pets will hit for max damage on Vindi but the highest I recall is 50 on him.

It’s not the best data, only 5 fights each and he runs. One nuke at 20% will almost kill him though so I did my best to keep his fleeing from impacting the logs.


60 hitting air pet, focused. 59dd stun, up to 75dmg kick 882 seconds parsed
Frontal Tank Test, Shady Swashbuckler: Pet did 31 dps burnout4 + Muzzle
Damage to Shady: 28,206 (no damage shield)

Average hit by NPC - 70
Total hits by NPC (and per second) - 3.7215 seconds per hit
Total Damage Taken by NPC: 14,791
DPS/taken per second: 16.76 dps
Hit to Miss ratio: .5761 (210 hit / 121 miss)


60 hitting water pet, focused. up to 118dd cold DD, up to 180dmg backstab. 687 seconds parsed
Frontal Tank Test, Shady Swashbuckler: Pet did 29 dps burnout4 + Muzzle (no backstabs)
Damage to Shady: 20,094 (no backstabs, no damage shield)

Average hit by NPC - 73
Total hits by NPC (and per second) - 2.898 seconds per hit
Total Damage Taken by NPC: 17,302
DPS/taken per second: 25.18 dps
Hit to Miss ratio: .7088 (237 hit / 168 miss)


60 hitting earth, un-focused. 59dd root, Bashes and occasionally kicks (1/3rd as frequently as bash). 788 seconds parsed
Frontal Tank Test, Shady Swashbuckler: Pet did 29 dps burnout4 + Muzzle
Damage to Shady: 22,925 (no damage shield)

Average hit by NPC - 73
Total hits by NPC (and per second) - 2.9513 seconds per hit
Total Damage Taken by NPC: 20,301
DPS/taken per second: 25.76 dps
Hit to Miss ratio: .6916 (267 hit / 182 miss)

It’s a bit tough to calculate pet hps in this way. They regen 30/tick and most the fights are a couple minutes. One 198hp heal gives a focused air or water 6-7%, the earth 5-6%. I expect he’s around 3300 hps at max level and they are closer in that 2800-2900 range.

A focused earth would be different. An epic would be a landslide difference. However for casual players/raiders the air and water is attainable. The stun happened 7-9 times a fight or so. Each one seemed to last 4-6 seconds.

The dps spread is greater than it appears. Spells can land full damage and the water’s 118dd hits above its weight class on an oddly high AC blue. The air would outshine the earth or water (unless it’s backstabbing).

In short:
* I forgot the earth bashes (physical interupt and occasionally kicks.
* They all take a hit pretty well. Most were only slightly falling behind the fight and no dmg shield or assist besides a few heals
* Air is a solid monk archetype and thus tanks well. Unless you need the root for control this would be my pick for that purpose. The stun is brilliant if it will land
* Water positioned well is a psycho. The test doesn’t show this but I’ve parsed it enough to know it will keep up or exceed more players than you would expect.
* Any of these will take two deadwoods but frankly I’m thinking stun whips would be better for stunnable stuff. Deadwoods for dps mainly.

Nice! Thanks for the parses!

Just for clarification, I assume all of these are the highest level pets?

Greater Vocaration: Air
Greater Vocaration: Water
Greater Vocaration: Earth

Thanks!

Yea unfocused earth but is a 60 hitter. The water and air are focused 60 hitters.
All Greater line.

I do have a question about how you are parsing the fights.

You say you did 28k damage to Shady on your Air Pet fight, for example, but you also say he only has 5k HP. Are you aggregating multiple fights together? For example, did you kill him 5 times and combine the damage and seconds? I assume Shady doesn't have high regeneration, so it doesn't look like that was a single fight.

I am just trying to make sure the DPS isn't lower than what it should be. If there are increments of time that shouldn't be included in the total seconds, it will reduce total DPS. You should only be counting the time from the initiation of the encounter (first hit), to NPC death.

It would be awesome if you could post the logs somewhere too!

EDIT: I didn't read the first part of your post apparently. 5 fights each indeed.

Yea I’m using Gameparse and “combining” 5 fights each that were of similar content.

His AC is higher than it should be. I’ve messed with him using my ranger and it can be a nail-biter. These pets on normal blues should be almost twice the dps posted. The water with backstabs even higher.

The best way I could compensate for the flee time is to nuke at 20% (or have it land). He would result with 1-2% left and fleeing but only ate one backstab out of the 5 water fights for like 145.

Really the answer is to find a better target like an AFK player. I was doing this on the laptop while at work. The main thing this showed me was the focused air was the least difficult to keep topped off with tiny heals through the fight. The stun was landing quite effectively and it was less squishy than I assumed.

As for what that helps people accomplish? Shrug. I had hoped the Earth would be a clear brute. Turns out it needed more babysitting than the air with heals.

Note: I know DS and nukes would have made this trivial. I was using that crappy heal to try and not put out my thumb on the scale. I was mainly curious how they could take a hit. I’d love to try EoT in the same way.

Yeah thanks for the post! More data on how the game works is always better, so I appreciate you taking the time.

Dude Snaggles this is an amazing post and data! I'm posting this before I dig into too much but I'm happy to see that I've been right about the Air pet all this time.

It's interesting to see how much less damage the air pet takes, 25 vs 16 dps is a pretty significant difference. The max hit was also lower, does this mean he naturally has more AC as well like monks do? Seems like it. I'm also curious why air does the most damage when facetanking, any ideas?

Also can I add this to my mage guide? With credit of course

Thanks!

Please feel free if you want. My only reservation is it’s a short parse. Law of large numbers would probably be be more illustrative. That said, the air was consistently easier to heal. It would be my go-to meatshield for stunnable things.

In normal situations the stun is going to do 59dd and the kick a max of 75. That’s is on par with the water DD. When the stun or water DD isn’t landing the kick will do something where the water doesn’t have another melee attack besides backstab.

I know in cases where spells are a moot topic the water pet still holds up nice. It’s mid 40’s on Vindi and usually top few on Xenvorash parses.

Also roughly these were 130 second single fights. 5-7 stuns went off. Fairly conservatively that’s 20-42seconds (5 stuns @4 sec up to 7stuns @ 6 sec) where the npc is just sitting there instead of taking a swing.

Prob my main takeaway. Stuns are quite good. I guess monks were right this whole time, lol.