Mage pet chain summoning on Blue is broken

[Dolalin]

The Magician's Tower is back on the Wayback Machine, and here is a guide about chain casting pets:

CHAIN CASTING PETS -- A How-to guide

So you want to learn how to chain cast pets, and find out just what all the hoopla is all about? Here's a how-to.

1. For starters, pick a pet appropriate for chain casting. The overriding bias is to use an earth pet. The pet root will help keep the mob away from you between killing the old pet and siccing the new pet. You can theoretically use any pet, however. Don't be afraid to experiment.

2. Keep in mind that the biggest key to chain casting is mana recovery. Buffing the pet should be kept to a minimum to conserve mana. Fire shields are useful, but not in every circumstance.

3. Make sure you have these hotkeys set up: a. /pet attack b. /Assist , and optionally c. /pet report health

4. This part kind of goes without saying, but bring a lot of malachite with you to keep you hunting for a while between merchant trips. It's inexpensive, and a wise investment.

5. Find a safe spot to pull to, and park your pet there (/pet guard here). Now pull your mob. The preference is to use a low aggro spell like a small nuke, or cancel magic, or Malise-type spell.

6. Sic your pet now, and quickly start negotiating a safe sitting distance. *Sit down and meditate while the pet is fighting*, and hit f1 twice to target your pet and monitor pet hit points. Pet hit points are your major concern early in the fight, and monitoring them is critical.

7. Depending on how fast the pet is losing hit points, you will want to recast roughly when the pet is between 20 and 40% of his hit points. When it's time to recast, hit your /Assist hotkey to target the mob, then start casting a new pet.

8. It takes 10 seconds to cast a new pet, so you have approximately 9 seconds to type this message: /pet get lost. Do not make this a hotkey, and when you type it do NOT hit <Enter> yet. Wait until you have half a bubble of casting time left, then hit <Enter> to kill the old pet. Your new pet will appear in about half a second or so. At that time, hit your /pet attack hotkey to continue the fight. Go back to step 6 and repeat until the mob is either low on hit points or dead.

Alternately, with the New UI, you can click the "Go Away" button in the pet window instead of typing /pet get lost.

9. When the mob is low on hit points you must decide whether you want full experience for the kill, or share it with your pet. If you pulled with a small nuke and did any damage, you will get full experience for the kill. If not you will need to nuke at least once before the mob dies to get full experience. If the pet does all the damage it will take 75% of the experience.

10. Dead mob, loot at will. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Edited by: Jochan Galadar at: 2/26/03 12:23:03 am

and a reply:

Chaining

Couple additions, /pet report health is still very usefull to hotkey as it gives you instant and accurate health and buff information. The new ui pet health meter and percentages only seem to update on a tick boundary so can be up to 6 seconds old. They also don't update at all at extreme ranges.

In answer to the multi-mob question. Yes, if your pet can handle the damage output from several mobs at once, you can chain pets. There are a couple tricks to this. First off, a damage shield is mandatory, your pet can only attack one mob at a time. So with a damage shield in place, all mobs are taking damage.

Second, you have to control your agro on the multi-mobs very carefully, do not nuke any of them unless you can finish one off completely before you need to chain another pet. If you haven't nuked any of the mobs, when you chain the next pet and send it in, it won't need to overcome any agro you have built on a mob and the mobs won't run past your pet to bum rush you. You can also train a mob that has rushed you back onto your fighting pet if you don't have major agro on that mob. DS-ing, burning out, and even healing your pet do not generate significant agro.

Earth pets are prefered for this as the rooting of one of the mobs helps out. Other tricks you can do, are spread the pet agro around to both mobs. On chains, tell your pet to attack the opposite mob on each succesive chain, or tell it to first attack the mob that you think you have more agro on. If you have nuked one of the mobs, always tell the new chained pet to attack that mob first. You can also alternately target the multiple mobs and use /pet backoff, /pet attack commands to get the pet hitting a preffered target, either one with less health or more agro on you. I do this often in jaggedpines when I get a roaming add, with practice, taking down two gnoll warriors at once is easy, I have even done three once, but would truthfully have to say that you are better off gating with 3 gnoll warriors as your pet will be losing health very fast and there is little room for error.


Mandrayke
57th Mage Innoruuk

https://web.archive.org/web/20030419...picID=94.topic

[Nycon43]

It's funny how this used to work just fine but was changed for some reason? Not sure if intentional or not but never know.

[renegadeofunk]

So I guess this is never getting fixed? Really sucks to not have a core aspect of the classic Mage.

[Dundrige]

Bump. Fix mages!

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Dundrige [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Bump. Fix mages!

[CrazyPro]

^

[Dundrige]

Bump for mages to return to classic form

[Zuranthium]

Originally Posted by Nycon43 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It's funny how this used to work just fine but was changed for some reason? Not sure if intentional or not but never know.

I feel like they intentionally broke it for the release of Green server to limit the power of Mages in the pre-Kunark era. That's really dumb though, because we were already doing this in 1999 and there were already more powerful things in 1999 - Necromancer and Enchanter pets had lower attack delay when given low delay weapons and could dual wield (Mage pets were not able to equip weapons until early 2000, at which point they fixed pets getting faster attack speed from weapons; although pets did instead gain higher attack damage if given a weapon that was higher damage than the pet's normal max damage).

[Dundrige]

Originally Posted by Zuranthium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I feel like they intentionally broke it for the release of Green server to limit the power of Mages in the pre-Kunark era. That's really dumb though, because we were already doing this in 1999 and there were already more powerful things in 1999 - Necromancer and Enchanter pets had lower attack delay when given low delay weapons and could dual wield (Mage pets were not able to equip weapons until early 2000, at which point they fixed pets getting faster attack speed from weapons; although pets did instead gain higher attack damage if given a weapon that was higher damage than the pet's normal max damage).

So bad... against the constitution of P99 (not classic)... imbalances the game (Mages are literal coth bots)... and they actually decided to spend their hard work and time doing it!

[Zuranthium]

Well unfortunately the CotH thing will always persist unless a change is made to the game. Guilds are advantaged by having Mages parked throughout ToV and a few other places, and it's a waste of time to move them once they are there. That will always create a meta of most people wanting to dedicate time to other characters, since one of the key raiding aspects of the class can just be fulfilled by alts.

Our best hope with regards to p99 is the devs deeming this an unclassic behavior, since people had less alts and less time to make them during Classic EQ. The fix can be "any character that logs out in privileged areas of the game, which includes all of ToV and Veeshan's Peak, will log back on at the zone entrance if they were logged off for more than 4 hours".

In a more interesting version of Everquest, CotH would be a crucial spell in raid combat that is used to summon back allies who get teleported away by the bosses. And a faster, shorter-range version of the spell should exist, allowing Mages when grouping to position themselves a good distance away from the healer and crowd control members of their party, and summon those people to them if they are getting beat down too much, giving a little extra time to cast a spell or run away.