Game Mechanics: Pet taking half exp

[zaltabik00]

on live if you did 1 damage you got full exp from mob, i played a mage and only a mage for many years. according to noleafclover's mage guide to leveling http://wiki.project1999.com/Noleafclover_Magician_Guide on the wiki it was also like this on p99 but for some reason it was changed in an october patch but why.

[zaltabik00]

at my level it takes about 50% of my mana to solo a blue con mob using any pet (fire pet requires massive amounts of heals to keep alive) other pets you need to nuke as well and for a whopping 1% a kill please tell me how this is OP.

[Sinestria]

If you're struggling so badly then you are doing it wrong. Are you getting max level pet? Do you have your torch? Are the mobs low DB? Where are you killing?

[zaltabik00]

that is all irrelevant Sinestria. Yes i have Torch, yes i am summoning max level pet, yes i am killing low dark blues, yes i can only kill 2 or 3 before i am oom and yes i am only getting 1% a kill still.

[CodyF86]

It's actually not irrelevant at all, but the simple answer is it was changed (even tho it's not classic) to prevent people from afk camping things. (Along with increasing spawn times on certain merbs that it was conducive toward.)

lvl 30 is the akward lvl range where you kind of suck. At 39 your pet starts regening 30 hp/tick instead of 6. At 46 you can click Burnt Wood Staff and never be out of mana ever again.

Also, all you have to do is right click that torch to reclaim your pet when the merb starts to run or is at a few %, kill the mob, get full xp, recast a new pet with full hp. Pet spells only cost 200 mana up to 49 then 300 mana after, so instead of healing your pet (for 150ish mana), just cast a new one before it dies, and tell it to go away right before the spell goes off.

Once you get your 39 pet, you'll start to suck less.

You don't even have to worry about getting a max pet each time if you chain cast. Although I was able to use a max level fire pet up until the 49 pet series without chain casting.

Aaradin
Aaradone
The A-Team

[baalzy]

Chain Casting
At some point in a mage's life, fluffy will not take the hits like he used to. The pet heal spells, although great for soloing at lower levels, do not keep pace with fluffy's hps or the damage output of mobs. Therefore it becomes necessary for an alternate strategy: chain casting, which is the summoning of multiple pets in succession to kill a creature. At lower levels, the mana cost of pets and the cost of reagents makes this less feasible (and unnecessary due to your pet being strong enough to take the hits). However, at higher levels the mana cost of summoning pets drops (in addition to naturally dropping relative to your mana pool as you level), making it more cost effective to recast your pet rather than try and heal it.

Even in the days of having to do 1 dmg to the mob, pet chaining was a thing that mages had to do eventually. It's a bit less efficient now with the 50% dmg requirement because you have to reclaim on your pet just before the mob dies even when your pet is doing just fine on HP, but it's still going to be your best bet to continue solo'ing at a decent rate.

[zaltabik00]

thankyou CodyF86 for answering my question as to why this happened. I am not even sure as to what AFK camping something is can you please explain that. And can you have an open mind here and understand why after realizing someone was exploiting something that the punishment would be that mages and every other mage that is ever going to be made will have this exp penalty and you stated yourself that its not classic. it seems to me that someone just took the simple way out of a problem instead of addressing the actual issue there. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldnt get full exp after doing damage to the mob.

[ibso]

I don't have a mage on 99, but I'm kinda with the OP on this one. It seems like the way to deal with people afk camping is for players to report it, not to effectively nerf mage solo exp in a non-classic way.

[Potus]

Pets on P99 are woefully underpowered compared to live, which is saying something because on live they were rather gimpy.

History lesson:
EQ launches in 1999, the servers are extremely overcrowded and a lot of classes are broken/buggy/unfinished on release. People see Mages and Necromancers solo'ing and start spamming the Verant forums demanding both classes get nerfed.

Verant responded by nerfing pets hard. Like every patch for months hard. Reduced levels, reduced hp, reduced damage, changed the way pets used weapons (damage/delay used to impact them), and added all sorts of weird code to make them gimpy.

The exp nerf to my knowledge never really played out the way Verant at the time said it did. If you do at least 1 point of damage your pet didn't steal exp. That's the way it ended up working. This was a kneejerk response to rumors that people were AFK solo'ing entire levels while asleep. Shit that was much more fiction than fact, for obvious reasons.

So no, you shouldn't have to try to outdamage your pet. Verant claimed that pets leveled with experience which was a flatout lie as well. There was a lot of hearsay garbage said on the early Verant boards that weren't true about pets (at times the developers tried to claim that pets were "better" after the nerfs).

So yeah, no stealing of exp, no reclaiming pets so you get 100% exp, that's absurd and not classic at all. Just like having instant aggro isn't classic. Just like high level pets not innately dual-wielding isn't classic.

[Asap]

Even from a lore standpoint, mages out damaging their pets makes zero sense. A magician is nothing without his elemental, why would he try to outdo it? He wouldn't, a Mage lets his pet do his bidding for him, and sends a nuke to get the finishing blow.