Mage pet Reclaim / Resummon / out DPS Level 1-39 and 39+
 

Given the 2011 exp pet patch 'pet does 50%+ it takes 50% of the xp':

I hear that post 39 it's best to chain summon pet and nuke at 1-5%.. or something like that

But i'm confused about 1-39, should I be trying to outdps my fire pet (easy at low levels since their dmg is mostly DS) OR should I be reclaiming and nuking?

Any advice is appreciated, i'm pretty confused on this one.

For instance, currently at Blackburrow, i'll summon until I get a yellow con fire pet. After giving the elemental a dagger, I cast level 1 or 4 fire spell to pull. Pet quickly takes aggro. During this time I'm casting 1 and 4 fire spells to try to outdps pet.

Am I doing it right? lol i have no idea

From my understanding, the DS doesn't count toward you or your pet's damage total. Try to add up how much damage your pet actually does from hits during a fight and just try to beat that number. Find out the % of how much damage you need to do to the mob and, in theory, this should be the number you try for each fight. Count the % the mobs health goes down every nuke and try to hit that total every fight. Say you need to do 35% of the mobs health to get full exp, count the % each nuke brings it down and try to get over that number. That being said, I don't have a mage on this sever....

You'll have a better time chain petting from the beginning. At low levels you may find it good enough xp to just let the DS eat mobs alive but soon it'll yield better results to just chain pet. Always use the fire pet if applicable since the DS is always more powerful than any DS you can cast.

Yes sadly with the exp modifiers here you need to let your pet get murdered all the time as a mage. It's a bad deal for a class that already has serious solo crowd control problems, but thats how it is.

The imposition of an experience penalty on pet classes was a very stupid and misguided decision on part of the original EQ dev team. I can't think of any good reasons why they would introduce such a silly mechanic.

If there are good reasons I'd like to hear them. Pet classes are already penalized enough with the mitigation of their core abilities to balance out the power of a pet.

In fact many times, due to bad pathing mechanics a pet will cause the owner to get needless aggro or aggro the group which results in player death and possible death to other group members.

Pets can't zone with their owners. Pets also die when their owners die unlike PC pets which do not die. Again, this is just more evidence how pet classes are unfairly penalized.

Getting the very best pet is a crap shoot. On various occasions it has taken my mage up to 15 mins of constant summoning to get the very best pet. That's valuable time I could be exping. Then I have to equip the pet with weapons and haste the pet. Oh and if your pet dies, you can kiss those weapons good bye. Yep, just another penalty.

Therefore the owner of the pet is already sufficiently and intrinsically penalized.

So what do pets do with this experience that they steal from their owners? Nothing at all.
The original EQ designers could have implemented some kind of temporary talent and ability system for pets to "level up" their skills but they did not.

A player should not be competing with his pet to see who can do the most damage. Pets stealing experience from their masters is just another bad "classic" EQ mechanic that is being reproduced here on P1999 that serves no real purpose but to irritate and frustrate players all in the name of authenticity.

Aim for 60% damage (count the mob's health before a nuke lands and after, and at least get 55%).

It's easier for a necro than a mage, I used to stick to the same dots on every mob, know I was doing about 55-60% so when a mob turned to flee I'd just let the dots run their course and let the pet finish it off.

Because this is supposed to be a game of dependency and socialness not a game of solo isolationism like live turned into. Same reason boxing isn't allowed. Group up no penalty easy fix.

But most of these are minor annoyances when compared to the power of the pets. And even if there was no pet XP penalty you'd still be re-summoning pets each mob for maximum solo XP (a focused 200 mana fire pet can solo blue mobs by itself up to 50 thanks to its DS). It makes no sense to bother with buffing, hasting and healing when you can just summon a fire pet that DSes itself, doesn't need haste (since most if it's damage is from the DS anyway) and doesn't need heals because you summon it with full HP.

Also, it's easy to lose sight of how powerful the pets are generally due to the mudflation on the server and the easy access to high ratio weapons. The damage that level 49 pets put out is absolutely crazy for the classic era, especially compared to the melee weapons of that era. Having your own tank, DPS and heals (through resummoning) makes the Mage a one-man group. There's an awful lot that the pets allow Mages to do that would make other classes green with envy. For example, it's stupidly easy to farm loads of plat with a Mage and requires zero gear to do so. And even with the supposedly awful pet XP nerf, Mages can still solo faster than almost every other class. And Summon companion is a great spell that nullifies most of the problems with pet pathing and agro if you use it well.

tl;dr Mages are great and the pet XP nerf doesn't really impact them nearly as much as you'd initially think.

Root nets