Animal Handling unplayable (because...)

[kazeandi]

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.



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?

- 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.

--> 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:

- 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

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.