Lets talk about pets!!

[Yaksnot]

Ok guys I need some help here

We were having a guild discussion about pets. The only pet I have or know about is the Battle Chem pet.

Heres the deal with Battle Chem pet. its amazing...sometimes...and its completely useless....sometimes. The golem you summon you can program to do things at different times or when the rage bar is full or if you/ the golem reach a certain percent of HP. but it feels very random and pretty clunky. Couple other things if your trying to pull a mob from a group sometimes it will just stand there, and sometimes it just runs right in and agros everything. not only that but when it attacks it causes that mob to call for help sometimes bringing even more mobs crashing down on your head.

with all this going on I just normally leave it off. It keeps me in combat, and goes from useless to a giant pain. now here is the exception. in a one on one fight, think boss fight or something, the support it offers can be amazing!

So my question to all you other pet owners out there is do you have the same issues? I feel I really need a combat bar or something ( I hate to mention it but even something like what wow had would be a huge improvement). A way to make the pets less inconsistent and more of a linear help.

That being said, does Animal Handling have something like that already?

-Yak

[Tagamogi]

In my opinion, the pet interface in general is a bit clunky and makes it hard to control my pet as well as I'd like. There are also some bugs that are pretty hard to pin down in the absence of combat logs. I've reported what I can, and I trust pets will get another development pass at some future point. In the meantime, I try to avoid relying on pets.

I do use the battle chemistry golem, but basically just as a passive mana battery. You are probably less interested in bc feedback since you've a golem of your own but since that is what I've been playing the most lately, I wanted to talk about it a bit: I've set up my golem to cast power regen and healing spells only, and it mostly works pretty well. In particular, this avoids the scenario of the pet blindly rushing into battle. There are still some problems:
- When we are not in combat, passing mobs seem to prefer aggroing on the golem instead of me. I've had mobs spawn right on top of me, take a second to think, and then make a beeline for the golem.
- When we are in combat, the golem will pull aggro quite regulary, and in situations I don't think it should. For example, I will dps a mob down to 10% of its health all on my own, and then suddenly and mysteriously it will make a beeline for the golem and I have to chase it to finish it off. I did one memorable autospy that showed the golem having one thousand percent aggro at the time the mob died. Mostly, however, I get aggro back before a mob dies, so it won't show up in the autopsy, or I don't get the aggro portion of the autopsy report, or I just forget to look at it... Long story short, something is very borked about golem aggro at the moment.
- The golem likes to stand away from me a little bit. This will cause it to aggro mobs that wouldn't have joined the battle otherwise, and I think sometimes the golem stands far enough out of range that it doesn't actually help me with the mob I'm currently fighting.

I played around as a spider with two baby spider pets a few weekends ago, and I had my usual pet control problems. I tried toggling the pets between Follow and Assist, and couldn't really tell the difference between the modes. I was looking for a mode where I could tell the pet to attack the same mob I was attacking, only after I started attacking it, and not to hit back or stop if the pet itself was attacked. I couldn't really get that to work. I lost several spiders when they got aggro a mile behind me as I was running around and, as far as I could tell, the pets just stopped to fight the mob instead of trying to catch up to me. ( Laying eggs and having adorable spider kiddies was still a super-fun experience, and the babies mostly did a good job helping me in combat, but I definitely felt like they had their own mind at times and weren't listening to me. Oh well, kids, what did I expect...)

I last did animal handling a year or more ago, so I don't have an informed opinion on its current state. At the time I stopped, I had the same problem of not being able to get the pet to do what I wanted which was twice as annoying for animal handling since nearly all the ah abilities are intended to help out my non-responsive pet. I find skills with a minor pet easier to play at the moment since if the pet decides to act strange, I still have a whole lot of other abilities I can use for myself.

As usual, I pin all my hopes on the new UI.:D I think it's likely to have some pet display improvements, and I'm really hoping it will include combat logs. Once that is in place, I think it will be easier to find out what's going on with the pets and submit useful bug reports that go beyond "WHAT did my pet just do?"
I'm also hoping for some extra development on the pet handling eventually - I think EQ had some excellent pet control options, and I'd really like something similar to its "passive" mode at least.

I would definitely be very interested in hearing how other people are handling their pets of any kind.

[Hoxard]

Personally, I HATE pets.
I have no space to put the pet bar on my screen, I hate having them following me around, I can't stand waiting for them to get in range to attack things, I hate having to try to keep them alive when a gentle breeze is enough to kill them outright, and I hate having to waste sidebar(or even worse, main bar) slots on an ability that does nothing but summon a pet.

I have animal handling up to 39. It is easily my least favorite skillset in the game and as soon as I get it to 42 for the survival instincts bonus level, I can say with confidence that I will never use it again.

As a deer, the only time I use summon deer is when I'm sitting around town and feel the need to throw a stag party. He's useless in combat because he does almost no damage, never gets to attack anything until I've already killed it, can't get aggro ever, dies instantly if by some magic he does get aggro(like if I don't attack the monster and he gets a few seconds to wail on it) and is just not worth the sidebar slot. Worst of all, he doesn't share my permanent +8 sprint boost, so the only time he's ever on the same planet as me is when he gets teleported back to me because he maxed out his leash.

When I play necromancy, it's for wave of darkness and death's hold. I never use archer or mage skeletons, and I only use sword skeletons for two specific builds. I occasionally use shambling corpse and super zombie, but only because necromancy doesn't have enough non-pet skills to fill the full bar.

The only times I've enjoyed having pets is when I was playing a pig and when I was playing a spider, both times paired with necromancy.
My pig/necro build focused on using pig's detaunt mods to make things attack my skeletons while I killed them. All it took was a single pig bite and I was basically invisible. I eventually stopped playing it though because even with negative aggro generation, monsters preferred to run all the way across the map to attack some random player rather than attack my skeletons. The only time I could rely on the build was when I was literally the only player in the entire zone. If anyone else was present(I.E. I'm killing tigers in Serbule and someone is idling at the well in town) it wouldn't work because I'd have to chase down the mob and struggle to gain aggro, since my skeletons sure as hell wouldn't do it.
My spider/necro build involved using grappling web to pull things into my personal army where they would be slaughtered, or gathering up a bunch of mobs, making my pets take aggro, and then killing everything with premeditated doom and wave of darkness. I stopped playing it because getting spiderlings is one of the most annoying things I've ever had to do in this game, and since spiderlings despawn every time you change zones you have to do it constantly.


The biggest improvements I can think of would be to make pets share your movement speed, totally revamp the pet UI, improve the pet AI, and give players a way to manually control the pet. Something like "Using a basic/core attack will immediately force your pet to attack the target". I think that would be enough to make space on my sidebar for summon deer.