mage chain summoning nerfed with new changes?
 

I was messing around on my mage alt and found that you can no longer use pet commands (like pet go away) while casting.
It does say this in the most recent patch notes, so i knew about it - but i didnt realize how much it would affect my mage game play.
What this means is that mage chain summoning - casting a new pet and hitting /pet go away on the pet bar when the spell is nearly complete, no longer works.
Does anyone know if this will be the case on green? or will it not come into affect til later patches?
And does anyone know any other way for a mage to solo, without taking the 50% xp hit, now chain summoning doesnt work?

Duo

This was brought up in the technical discussion forum but you can do the following:

create a /pet get lost macro in your socials and, directly from the social window and not on your bar, click that macro and it will dismiss your pet. So it works basically the same as before but you just have to click the macro from your social window.

thanks!

can you type it (/pet go away) while casting? I mean the socials definitely work, just wondering about alternatives.

You can type while casting

I never liked that pet chain summoning strat, on my mage my way to solo up to 55 was to get a max level fire pet, and to barely outdps it with nukes.

Since a lot of the fire pet damage comes from the damage shield wich is neutral damage, you only have to out dps the melee damage part of the pet. Sometime I even didn't haste the pet on purpose to more easily outdps it.
If you do it right your downtime is low you only cast a couple of nuke per mob then med back that amount while the pet regen. Pets regen 30hp per tick in the late 30s wich is like 2 fungi worth of regen.

I never played a mage, but the thought of chain summoning is off putting to me. This method appears more appealing, but does it match up exp wise?

Took me less than a month to go from 1 to 55 on my mage. I'd say it's very fast.

The lower levels are hilarious. It starts getting harder to pull off after 30 because mob damage ramps up a lot. in the low and mid 20s my mage fire pet was soloing red giants at the warsliks giant fort with 1-2 pet heals cast and nothing else. The DS is pretty OP at the lower levels.