Several players have asked me to post this. I am not sure if this is the best forum, but...
There are two complaints that seem to be becoming consistent amoung pet owners:
- Chain rooting in missions is becoming a problem.
I can only speak from my experience and I think that "Chain rooting" may be an over statement. I do find that my pet seems to get rooted in at least one out of four rooms in missions since the 13.6 patch. However, I have leveled some in that same period and the problem may have been caused by the higher missions I m doing and not the patch.
But, this doesn't change the fact that pet-roots-post-combat really makes the game boring and hence, less fun.
Please don't misunderstand. I DO NOT want roots taken our or nerfed. They are an important part of the game. Perhaps I should explain for those who don't play pet professions and don't know how we solo.
The pet is our strongest weapon. Whether it is yellow or red, self-buffed or help-buffed, using the pet as a personal tank is the best way to solo. Typically, I sneak-target the MOB in an upcoming room. Then I command the pet to wait at the door while I retreat from line-of-sight with the MOB. At this point I send the attack command to the pet. Nine times out of ten times, the MOB will agg onto the pet and I am left out of the battle completely. Depending on the color of the MOB I either join in the attack (lower level MOBs) or stay out of line-of-sight (higher level MOBs,to be safe). When the combat is over the pet returns to my safe-position and resumes guard mode. Because of the strength of the bot, these battle typically last less than a minute. So, the battle is over and there is very little chance of additional agg unless I have done something really stupid like stand next to a door to a room that is not yet cleared. Obviously there are complications to this senario (rooms with 2 MOBs, MOBs calling for help, the MOB-is-90%-dead-and-desperately-trying-to-change-target thing, me being stupid, etc.), but in most cases this is a repeatable process for most rooms in a missions.
The problem occurs when a the pet gets rooted during or (in particular) just at the end of battle. The room the bot is in is now empty, so he's not gonna get agged. I'm not gonna get agged, cause I'm in my safety-spot or in the room with the pet. If the root were on me, I could break it with melee incompetence (which I keep on the action bar for just that purpose). I cannot run melee incompentence on the the pet. A master is not allowed to run hostile nanos on his pet. SO there I am, completely safe and utterly bored, because I can't move to the next room and repeat the steps listed above without the pet. And its just not safe to move forward on my own without my weapon (da pet). As you know, roots can last anywhere from a few seconds to 20 minutes (seems like hours); this can get really boring and it is not good for games to be boring.
This whole situation is compounded when the pet is behaving as the tank for a team and the whole team has to wait for the pet-root to end...its just plain embarrassing.
So, back to the original statement, "Chain rooting in missions is becoming a problem." I think the problem is caused more by the lack of a mechanism to break root on pets once they have completed battle...although roots do seem to have become more frequent.- Bots are not responding to commands.
Many things have been reported to me in this area, however I will only present the data to which I can bear witness.
I have experienced only short term and minor problems in this area during soloing; nothing worth mentioning here.
Teams are a different story. The problem I am about to describe seems to occur more frequently, more severly and for longer durations as the number of pets on a team increases, but one pet is enough to get it started. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe its caused by net team members (eg: 6 players + 2 pets = 8 net team members). Since I don't usually work in small teams, I don't have enough data to be sure. I did do a duet (2 players + 1 pet = 3 net team members) for a couple of missions the other night and the problem never occured. I can state that for net team members of 7 on up the problem occurs and gets worse and worse (6 players + 3 pets = nine net team members = crippled pet functioning).
So here's the problem. Normally in team missions, I keep the pet on guard. That way, once a puller has initiated battle, all I have to do is run through the MOB and the pet aggs on it. I never have to use attack and the pet just stays on guard constantly. This works very well.
However, since 13.6 in teams with large net team member totals, this no longer works because after battle, the pet either does not go back into guard mode, or guard mode does not function the same way. More specifically, once a battle is over, the pet just stands there where the battle finished. He does not return to my side. HE does not seem to guard. He doesn't even seem to know I am there. If I send commands, the first few are ignored. If I get a guard command through he utters the guarding response chat, but still just stands there. If I send follow commands, after 6 or 7 he will respond to 2 or 3.
I believe this to be a bug because; A) It is not consistent, B) FunCOm has never suggested any changes like this and C) The behavior resembles a memory leak or resource exhaustion since it will not occur as soon as the team begins the missions, but rather after several battles have taken place (it seems the larger the team, the quicker it begins). A full team zone seems to help, but its hard to get that sort of cooperation (rezone every 6 battles? what r u, nutz?).
This may or may not be what folks mean when they complain to me that their Bots are not responding to commands, but I sure would like to see this fixed.
There! I done posted it!
How about......
