If I stuck with my pet...

FoxRunning - Heavens Tear wrote: »

what i keep wondering about is how people manage to keep playing their original sharptooth wolves and scorpions, even into the 60s and 70s. yes, you can level their moves, but that doesnt help the low hp problem. but its fascinating to see someone out in high level areas, running their first pet!b:victory

Any pet will work just fine when grinding. My scorpion works great when I grind.. so does my CMag, or my sawfly, even my ninetail (which has even less hp than the scorpion....), heck even a bunny works fine for grinding. You just have to know its limitations and play accordingly.

tweakz wrote: »

Low Hp is faster to fill. Defense is better. Djinscream can be tanked easily by a Scorpion. There are some mobs in OHT that can be ideally tanked by a Scorpion as well.

Djinscream only does 1-2 damage. A level 1 qingfu could tank him.

http://www.pwdatabase.com/pwi/mob/14760

As for keeping a starter pet, the scorpion is an extreme (best damage of a land pet, although low defense) while the wolf is balanced (average damage, average defense). If your starter is a scorpion, I'd say keep leveling it just so you have a high-damage pet for when someone else is tanking. It will become important at high level against reduced damage bosses (TT, world bosses, etc). If your starter is the wolf, it's really up to you. If you really want a wolf, I'd recommend a guardian wolf or lunar lupin instead. IIRC, their stats are considerably better than the starter wolf.

Solandri - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Djinscream only does 1-2 damage. A level 1 qingfu could tank him..

It does occasionally throw a magic attack in, but I think my pet could survive w/o heals to the end. Since it does have such a low patk, reflect is useless. The Scorpion makes the ideal tank for it.

Kowlin was the only pet that could hold agro from me, at least until about L80. b:chuckle But then I didn't need to worry because my hubby got me a nix and herc.

tweakz wrote: »

It does occasionally throw a magic attack in, but I think my pet could survive w/o heals to the end. Since it does have such a low patk, reflect is useless. The Scorpion makes the ideal tank for it.

I'm about to be horribly off topic for this thread, but whatever.

I took a look at a scorpion taking into account djinscream's resists and the effect skill cast times have on pet melee (they pause the delay timer between swings, can see my thread I made on skill cast times if you need more info on it).

In 3-1 it's 24% physical, 19% water, 39% fire, 28% others.
In 3-2 it's 26% physical, 20% water, 41% fire, 30% others.
In 3-3 it's 27% physical, 21% water, 42% fire, 31% others.

Seeing his fire trait it was probably already apparent you would want to use a water skill, but being able to compare physical to the rest still helps. I see two ways to go about it, either a scorpion with claw, howl, bash and icicle or a scorpion with claw and bash, icicle, and thunder/toxin/sandblow (any of them).

Taking a permanent sage IW debuff into account, I'm coming up with:
Melee 1090.82
Bash 421.02
Thunder 359.34
Toxin 359.34
Icicle 407.63
Fireball 305.11
Sandblow 359.34

Melee is also taking the loss to activate skills into account. Since those are all expressed as per second, you can add up the combo that gives you the best results. In this case that's 2278.81 damage/sec.

If you instead go the howl route instead one a third bash, you would end up with:
Melee 1090.82
Bash 421.02
Thunder 400.31
Toxin 400.31
Icicle 437.24
Fireball 355.29
Sandblow 400.31

For 47.62% of the time, and the first set of numbers for the other 52.38% of the time, assuming howl is also a 1.5 sec cast. For simplicity lets just say 47% and 53%. That would mean you're getting (.47*(1090.82+421.02+437.24))+(.53*(1090.82+421.02+407.63))-(769.94/31.5) for 1908.94 damage.

2278.81-1908.94=369.06 damage/sec less by using howl. Since howl would take your nukes from a 72% to 80% hit rate for 47% of the fight, you're looking at gaining 5.22% to your nukes, meaning you need to put out 7070.11 damage per second with your abilities after resists (35350 before resists/level mods), before howl would be a benefit. It looks like the 3 skill scorpion is the way to go.

Over 4 minutes it would generate, 546914 damage not taking accuracy into account. With sage soul degeneration you would reduce the damage needed to 1145832, meaning you only need to find 598918 damage from your nukes and amp. Assuming you come out ahead by 10% with amp (opportunity cost of going fox), it drops the damage you need to 539026 or 2245.94 per second (12477.46 per second before resists/level mods). With some chi potions for more triple sparks that looks just about doable at 7k average magic attack, a 1200 damage weapon, and 36% channeling.

Well, there's the goal to hit to pull it off I suppose.

I used the level 90 scorpion stats on ecatomb since I didn't have a higher one to use. Breaks are pretty much impossible to take into consideration due to the randomness and damage ranges can't really be accounted for either, so I just used the average.

I don't think MP would be an issue at all, I'm not sure of the cooldown on god's tea but assuming it's 2 minutes, you could start the fight with 399 chi, use 2 tea's for 699 chi, and generate about 375 chi a minute through casting (taking into account the chi used for ironwood), giving you 2074 chi to burn on sparks. That's 6 sparks (324 chi per spark after accounting for the lost casting during the spark stun) which would be 120% mana, and 1.8 minutes of spark (45% fight time with triple spark going) with just enough chi for 6 myriads. MP food/potions would cover anything else.

If you get lucky on breaks you could cut down what you need a bit (especially armor breaks) but with how rare they are I wouldn't even expect to see one really unless you're willing to give up sparks for it, and sparks would be better damage over the fight unless you get lucky. His resists aren't that high, since I still have the spreadsheet I used put together, I just took a look at the added damage from a break, if you didn't use the elemental bashes (since melee is hitting full damage at the time) you would see 28184 damage over 9 seconds, giving you 7674.71 additional damage. Though in practice it would be more as you could stack that with amp and extreme poison. Multiplicative damage boosts are really powerful but atleast in this case, virtually impossible to account for.

Evernete - Dreamweaver wrote: »

I hope I am not THAT off topic! but I didn't want to open a whole new thread for a simple question!

I have levelled up a Sable Minkii from lvl 5.
Now there are Charing Sable's to tame. They start around lvl 17.

My Minkii is now lvl 18
My Charing is still lvl 17

The Minkii is better in everyway except for running speed...i think. Can someone tell me if the Charing will overtake the Minkii in the later levels?

Thanks!

No. The lower starting level pet of the same type will always be stronger than its higher starting level cousins when both are at the same level.