I’ve been doing some comparisons of xp/hour of charm soloing outdoors vs indoors vs animation pet
It seems like the ideal situation is charming a pet in a dungeon, sending it to aggro a clump of mobs, rooting all of them (torn between using root or paralyzing earth here, root you will have to re-apply), letting them kill the pet, charming a new pet from the clump, repeat
Nothing can beat that in terms of xp/hour, but that’s not a situation that occurs in every dungeon room. Sometimes, you only have 2 mobs to work with. So then you charm one, make them fight each other, and try to even out their health (a fun little mini-game) with various things like slows. The downside is I haven’t been able to make my pet lose lots of health vs a mob it out-levels. /pet sit doesn’t seem to do much. So if your charmed pet is at 75% and the other mob is about to die, I don’t see it as worth the mana/time to release charm (cajoling whispers is expensive to cast), just to kill the other mob for full xp, may as well let the pet kill. Also, assuming both mobs are at a similar health total at the end, finishing them required at least 2 anarchy’s, possibly 1 discordant mind (expensive), depending on health totals. So this method is definitely slower than the first in terms of xp/hour (because the pets die much slower)
Outdoor charming tends to play out like the second example, unless you run way out of your way to gather up a bunch of stuff like a bard would. But then in doing so you also slow down your exp/hour gathering mobs to root in a clump and make fight each other. So when I solo outdoors, I don’t go out of my way to do that
The level 49 animation pet DOES kill exp greens and low blues faster than a charmed mob of those levels. This is because I buff the animation with 60% haste and garou, while I don’t buff charmed mobs (no point unless they out-level everything else, they die too quickly to waste mana on haste solo and it’s risky in dungeons). The 49 animation pet hits quickly for 52/per with 60% haste, that is more dps than the non-hasted hits of 88-94ish from mobs (once again, talking about exp greens and low blues, NOT high blues). The animation pet is also more effective against casters than a charmed pet, because it is much more reliable at interrupting casts, I’ve noticed (for the times I don’t have the mana for or want to twist stuns). But the pet steals 50% exp. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that due to its higher dps, I can kill more things in a shorter amount of time (unless we are talking about the first scenario where it’s a clump of rooted mobs beating a single charmed pet)
So the TL
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Unless you know you can engineer scenarios of a clump of rooted mobs beating on a charmed pet, then charming a new one from the clump and repeat, then the animation pet can roughly match the exp/hour of charming 1 mob and making it fight 1 other mob, breaking charm, and then killing both for full exp. This is because the pet kills singles faster, but for less exp per This only applies to if you are fighting exp greens and low blues, because for my own safety I prefer to go for these as charm targets for the basis of comparison. If you want to be risky, charming high blues would be better xp/hour then the animation pet
“Using the animation is just being a poor man’s mage” - true, but a mage doesn’t have chanter CC. Even with the animation pet I can go further and deeper into a dungeon than a mage of comparable level due to having cc
“Using the animation pet is boring” - won’t disagree at all. I still prefer charming for the vast majority of my solo’ing