Animal Handling unplayable (because...)

Hello,

I sent in a bug report, but I'm not sure if I expressed myself in an easy to understand manner, so I'll repeat my report here and give you a screenshot to show you directly what I mean.

http://i67.tinypic.com/k3p4dt.jpg

As you can see on this picture, I did 0 damage myself, 100% of the damage that lead to the death of the mob in question came from my pet.
I aggro'd by proximity, doing a "body pull" without performing any action during the pull or the fight.
I didn't use any skills at all to not generate any aggro, so my pet would start out against as low a ceiling as possible.

If ~500 damage from my pet lead to 1/3 my aggro value, I must have hovered at ~1500 damage just by being spotted. This can't be right.

The mob didn't even turn around to my pet once. Had I done any damage on top of my initial aggro, getting the mob off me would have been even more of a problem - which is a moot point in this case, because my pet reduced the mob from 100% to 0% without even overtaking me in the aggro list.

Now, this was a lowbie mob, as you can see. Only a sand dog in Sun Vale against a lvl 57 polar bear. "In longer fights, the pet will overtake you", you might think. Wrong:

I was in the wolf cave earlier today and was facing a challenge way worse than this: How to pull only a single mob as an Animal Handler?

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- You can't send your pet in and let it aggro, then turn tail to pull the mob out of shout range. As soon as your pet is under attack, it performs retribution without moving, in all modes: Assist, Guard Me, Follow and Stay.

- When I body pulled a mob, my pet would run in to retaliate, in all modes but Stay

- When I set my pet to Stay, performed a body pull, ran back, then used Sic Em and Get It Off Me, the wolf would kill me without my bear ever taking aggro off me.

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--> There was no way for me to play solo in this situation, because my pet would not survive the onslaught of everything that would come running after a shout by the mobs. Pulling myself would lead to my own death.

My bear has 180% "taunt", but aggro generation at least of pets, if not in general, seems to be completely broken and needs attention.
I am actively leveling and every pull with adds at challenging mobs near my level is a struggle. Animal Handling is not viable as a combat skill.

Couple this with the extremely low damage output of my pet (I have damage boni and "bypass armor" where possible and as high as I could get it) and you can see where the math goes wrong.


Then there's various bugs like the Sic Em problem: Pet shows the animation but stays still or runs halfway, then returns to me. Other skills (trick) don't do anything and the pet taunt is... well, as I described and illustrated with my screenshot above.

I don't know how pets were before I played - I heard AH/Necro were way overpowered.
The nerf came, according to guild mates, 9 or 10 months ago and nobody I ever played/spoke with ever saw an Animal Handler in any form of endgame content. If you have telemetry to see how many active templates in which level range use the skill, you'll see that most players give up right at the start or in the 20s, when the Great Cat they tame dies to a mob 5 levels below it's own.

I've been running all kinds of pet-optimized mods, with damage, taunt effect and pet-hp/armor, to no avail.

I would suggest the following measures to fix the problem:

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- Reduce initial aggro to 1 (or the lowest value), so that any action of the pet would take aggro off me, as long as I didn't generate any threat myself.

- Give pets more base damage. Start with 10% and see how it goes. Adjust accordingly.

- Make mods on Animal Handling gear stronger. +16dmg in the 50s, when other skills get boosts in the 100s is not sufficient

- Fix Sic Em, so the pet performs proper pathing and doesn't get stuck and gives up immediately

- Make Get Em Off Me a guaranteed taunt for X seconds

- Give pets AOE on every skill. Even low damage is better than what they have now and AOE skills by me "break" the pet if it's on Assist, because it can't assist me on several targets simultaneously.

- Give bears an innate aggro bonus on damage (2x), reduce aggro for cats (50%), to give Animal Handlers actual tools for solo and group content.

- Make pets ignore damage, aggro, completely everything in Follow mode, so it comes to the Animal Handler and doesn't get stuck in combat at the very spot.

- Make pets in Guard Me react to aggro on me the moment it occurs - not when I actually take damage. Pet should intercept the attacker.

- Give pets a "leash", so it can't be further away from the Handler than x meters. This would make it possible to save the pet by running away.

- Improve pet accuracy and avoidance against ranged

- Give us an ability to break crowd control effects (for the pet, not the Handler)

- Introduce pets with crowd control, like spiders with a short root

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tl;dr

With 1500 initial aggro (or is initial aggro = mobHP*3?), a pet has to do 1500 damage to the mob and I have to be able to take damage from a mob with that amount of hitpoints to survive - calculate yourself. Add any aggro I'd generate by healing myself, armor patching, chugging a potion.
It is currently impossible to play a support char with Animal Handling, coupled with the pet's damage output, a damage dealing build is more effective, but then, why have the pet at all?

Thanks.

Oh, that's actually quite interesting.

I wonder if there's any other variables about aggro from the type of pet or mob we don't know about? Or time?

How long did that encounter take? Do you have any regeneration?

I noticed it too when i wa sleveling my ah. Pets cant get, hold, or take aggro off me most of the time. There was few instances when mob briefly took aggro, but then agin tehyare not nearly tanky enough to surrive holding it.

On another hand when i recently started levleing bc and druid i noticed that my golem gets aggro off me basicly every time -and i DO use damaging skills.

Yeah, I noticed the same thing with the bc golem. I got one notable autopsy report that showed it having one thousand percent aggro (well, 1127% or something like ), so I think there is a bug involved. Out of curiosity, which abilities is your golem using? Mine was just doing healing and power regen - I'm not sure if it's the abilities causing the problem or just the golem's presence. Ironically, the bc golem seems much tankier than the ah pets to me, too, although I've never tried a bear pet yet.

When I played a spider, the baby spiders seemed to get aggro a lot as well and it seemed to follow the bc pattern of the mob attacking the spider pet for no particular reason. They were too squishy for me to test much, though.

[MENTION=1257]kazeandi[/MENTION] - I would be curious if you have an answer to Crissa questions. I wonder if the game might be overcounting healing/regen effects for aggro, although it seems more likely it's just bugs in the pet coding.

My golem was set to use healing and power restoration, with occasional dmg skill. But sonsiderign his poision bomb had liek 70 dmg and my attacks were hitting for 400+ i cant imagine he overtakign my aggro. Even with healing it shouldnt be posisbel since i had it set up to trigger when im belove 70% hp so hewwasnt even using it.

Another interstign thing - when i body pulled mobs they usualy stayed aggro on me - only when i started attackign they would switch targets.

Imnot sure how revelant this si but i usualy started fight with armor-destroyign skills (acid bomb/rotskin). Mayeb this skills have some werird de-aggro build in.

No regen involved, I just stood there 100% inactive while watching my pet killing the mob.

When I normally hunt, I spam Sic Em for the pet's dmg bonus and Get It Off Me to.. erm, get it off me ;) but normally, both skills don't help. Something that aggro'd me aggros me till the bitter end.

(I did have lvl 5 gourmand food tho)

PS: Sorry for the late reply

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Originally Posted by cr00cy

Imnot sure how revelant this si but i usualy started fight with armor-destroyign skills (acid bomb/rotskin). Mayeb this skills have some werird de-aggro build in.

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I can rule out rotskin since I was using knife/bc, but I would have used acid bomb as well. I haven't tried body pulling mobs without attacking them. I did notice that if I had multiple mobs on me, they'd usually all make a beeline for my golem at the same time, including the mob I'd just dps'd down to 10% of its health. The mobs I wasn't actively attacking would still have taken bomb damage and have a fire dot from me on them, though.

My leading theory is that the power regen from the golem might be causing the aggro, but I can't tell when he's casting it, so it's pretty unprovable. And if I want to blame regen, then maybe the regen from kazeandi's food might have out-aggro'd his pet. If it's power regen though then mentalism should get aggro from their power wave too, and I haven't seen any reports of that.

With me having 300ish armor/HP at the test sand dog in my screenshot, I probably never went below 90% anyways. Fight also didn't take too long, so there wasn't a lot of regen.

My pet was on Guard in this fight.

Now, there's an observation I made: if I don't do anything at all, the mob is sure to stick to me. Sometimes, a nuke (shrill command or one of the druid spells) leads to the mob turning around to my pet - which is counterintuitive and surely not how aggro usually works. It's also unreliable - if this was a 100% workaround, I wouldn't care so much.

As is, every fight is a race - will the mob die faster than me?

I made my bear pretty tanky. It has almost 700 hp/armor (at 58) and I have absorb on my chest. 1:1 against similar level mobs, there's no danger of it going down, unless the mob has armor penetration (bear still can't solo it, I have to help).
I think bears should have this baseline, going even higher with mods, but damage intake is not the biggest problem right now (however, for other pets, like cats, it is). The main problems are aggro and damage.

Of course, pet control is bad, but I guess the new UI will help with that. I won't sweat that. But I work twice as hard at least as every other class to level and gear up. Tried Staff today, just for fun - that was like 3 leagues above my AH level play. I've basically been playing this game in hard mode, but whenever I give up frustrated and play something else for a while, I miss my pet gameplay and end up switching back.

I beg of you, devs, please fix Animal Handling :/

I tried a similar test: No food, no regen gear, I body-aggro'd a boar in Sun Vale and just stood there. I hit a stop-watch when my pet (level 50 Fangsworth, on Assist) started attacking the mob and 17.5 seconds later I died because the mob was still beating on me.

So, power regen should decidedly not be the aggro culprit. Oh well, it was a nice theory. :p

Edit: I should possibly add that I was wearing unarmed/rabbit gear, no ah gear of any kind, so the problem is not ah item mods either.

The question is, is it a pet aggro problem, or is aggro broken in general? The combat summary seems to indicate that the game does discriminate between you and the pet, but the inner logic of thresholds of aggro looks messed up.

Bandaids would be a forced aggro switch with GIOM - that shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Btw, do the devs read the class forum? I'd hate to waste my time experimenting and posting if it went by unnoticed.

Another observation:

The initial aggro supremacy only goes one way. If I send my pet in, then cast an AOE, only the mob my pet beats on stays with it, while the rest goes after me. While pets can't save you, you can certainly pull aggro off your pet. This was with AOE tho, didn't try focused "bad dd behavior" yet. An Assist pet usually switches target in such cases - I'll find out after work today, with 50 Druid vs 58 Animal Handling. Cosmic Strike should generate enough threat explosively.

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Originally Posted by kazeandi

Btw, do the devs read the class forum? I'd hate to waste my time experimenting and posting if it went by unnoticed.

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We do, and we're using all the reports we've gotten and the extra details in this thread for hints on tracking down the bugs. :) So thank you!

Yes, we read the class forum :) I appreciate your post -- in cases like this a picture does help a lot more than trying to describe it in the bug report. I tried to repro this bug back when it was first reported, but couldn't find a problem. In simple cases, everything works fine -- e.g. get a new pet rat, body pull a sickly wolf, rat gets aggro with no problem. So this time I actually used a clone of Narumi and your bear, with a sand dog, to replicate your experiment here and figure out what's wrong.

I found a bug in the recent taunt code that made armor damage cancel out health damage when calculating aggro. (I missed a minus sign.) So if your pet does 68 health and armor damage, that cancels out to 0, and 180% of 0 is still 0. This is fixed in the next update, which I expect will land tomorrow!

Harder to fix are the reports of problems with the pet abilities. I've tried to find those problems, off and on, for a long time, but all tested pet abilities work very reliably here. Without a repro case it's very hard to figure out what's wrong. If you find a scenario where you can reliably cause the animal to not work right, let me know.

Oh, that's great news :)
I plan to run a dungeon with high mob density and lots of adds today. Entrance to the wolf cave with it's intersection come to mind. If I can find a good, free Fraps clone, I'll record it and explain what's going on "live". If not, this will be a long reply :)

I'm glad you found out what caused the bug and can't wait for the fix :)

All right, this is a video about Sic Em and how the pet behaves a bit strange.. running up to a mob, turning around, coming back to me, disengaging, reentering combat... this scene here is in the goblin dungeon, where everything is at 20-30 levels below us, so keep that in mind please.

Damage against even level foes is rather low ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCy00Tngmq4

Winter Court fae are even worse, pet only runs up to them 1/3 of the time.

about the necro part being nerfed i completely agree on that and also this problem with the mobs and animal handling has been their since the start from the start because i noticed it early on with low level mobs hence my animal handling is super low i regret even attempting leveling it up to level 10
personally i found it a waste of time cuz i like keeping myself alive i dont care about my pet i do however feel bad for all the high level animal handlers out there

Yea AH is broken skill beyond belive,it was fun skill to play before aggro reworks which destroyed the skill,so many years passed and still no sight of making this wonderful skill playable and viable,looks like it will never get the final rework as it was promised.And to clarify am very experienced ah user with over lvl 60 ah with hissy,bear and other pets,i had alot of fun before a year when i started playing when aggro was not broken and pets had double the stats then they had now,then u could be proud to use ah cas u could run dungs with it,but now not even worth wasting time with ah.

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ea AH is broken skill beyond belive,it was fun skill to play before aggro reworks which destroyed the skill,so many years passed and still no sight of making this wonderful skill playable and viable,looks like it will never get the final rework as it was promised

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<eye roll> yes, it will NEVER EVER get that rework. Now that we're in beta, obviously everything is finished, so don't expect any more skill revisions! Except, like, in every single patch for the rest of beta.

We'll get there. There are lots of things to do, but Animal Handling hasn't been forgotten. The next update has fixes for ability UI problems. We're also looking at damage output. As for making your pet be a tank, that will happen eventually, but there's lots of other balance stuff that has to happen first. There will never be one magic rework of the skill. It will happen iteratively over many updates.

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Originally Posted by Citan

<eye roll> yes, it will NEVER EVER get that rework. Now that we're in beta, obviously everything is finished, so don't expect any more skill revisions! Except, like, in every single patch for the rest of beta.

We'll get there. There are lots of things to do, but Animal Handling hasn't been forgotten. The next update has fixes for ability UI problems. We're also looking at damage output. As for making your pet be a tank, that will happen eventually, but there's lots of other balance stuff that has to happen first. There will never be one magic rework of the skill. It will happen iteratively over many updates.

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Sry i did little overexagarate but all other combat skills are working etlist so that they are viable in combat,AH was viable and it was fine as it was before aggro change and pet stats nerf,so untill there was complete overhaul which will make skill playable it should been left as it was instead giving it small fixes whit which u cant play skill,and yea i know <eye roll> am annoying with this skill but i really love it so sry again.

AH is quite playable, it is my second main skill for Knife, Bard and Spider. I have never played it before the "nerf", so I can't image what it was like before. There are some parts which are less than ideal and some things just do not work. However it's worth playing and I enjoy it. As all skills it may not be the most favourite for everyone. Hopefully it will get it's turn for an update soon :)

Animal Handling is really cool and involved, at least at 19. However, it has an incredibly irritating downside that makes me not want to use it.

Your pet cannot run away, meaning any bad pull results in the loss of your pet. It's very frustrating, especially considering the low chance of reviving your pet with health kits.

I'm totally willing to accept it if animal handling is supposed to be done at high level when your income is great enough to always have masses of health kits, or if these situations can be somehow overcome. But as far as my knowledge currently stands, using a pet is an exercise in frustration as you hit a bad pull because of a runner you couldn't anticipate (or respawns), and your pet dies with no chance of keeping it alive.

Potential fixes:
1) Give the pet a 'follow at all costs mode'. Pet will always follow and won't fight back, allowing you to legitimately run away (and also to run through areas such as serbule hills, holy shit).
2) give me a 'dismiss pet' option to keep the pet alive.
3) make health kits resurrect pets 100% of the time.
4) make pets untargetable by mobs until the pet has attacked (this is how wow does it afaik).

At currently maxed lvls of AH and First Aid (not sure which counts) the chance to revive a pet is around 61% for me. I revive my bear with at most 2 attempts, very often with one. With higher lvl pets, they are not gonna die in every fight which makes it manageable. At lower level I agree it was very frustrating loosing so many first aid kits, because at those lvls they were still expensive.

There is an option to "dismiss a pet". It's the same way as you would dismiss it normally. The red X. However you have to be mindful of the summoning ability recast timer. It may be a while before you can summon your pet again.
My greatest hope for fix for 2 years now, and greatest problem with the abilities is that "Summon living stabled pet" is not working at all. If it were, after your pet died, you could dismiss it and re-summon living one immediately.

I haven't noticed the red X you are talking about! Thank you very much. I assume it is near my pet's info (health, armour & power meters).