None of my hangar pets has more HP then my characters ship. If I look at the Scorps the wrong way they go bang, andI have to be nice to the Danubes or they just will not do as they are told and sulk off on the other side of the map.
What level are you? also pay attention to what content you are doing and what it scales you up or down to. Check out my info below where i made several comparisons. The first one was when i took my level 60 toon into the Undine Space BZ which scales you down to 50. The next one was when i took that same character and went into a patrol in the Delta Quadrant which left me at level 60.
First off, let me say that I've only skimmed about half of the rants on this thread.
let me also say that I strongly support the devs, they work really hard at producing and maintaining this complex game, which I cannot imagine is an easy task, especially in light of some players outrage at any changes.
That being said, let me exstol my own take on the subject at hand.
I've got a dozen active alts, most of which use pets in one role or another. And I've tried out most of the pets available--which at normal (basic) level are already essentially useless. Those that are actually useful require RL investment and often are only available for use on specific ships--eg the voth fighters and jh ships, which have a significantly higher investment cost than the cheaper ships. I would hope that any nerfs coming will take into consideration the investment value of the specific pets.
a tweak that I WOULD like to see is a change to the non-hangar support pets such as worker bees, D'kyr support craft and Varanus repair platforms, into hangar pets. One way this could be introduced without allowing heavy fighters to be slotted to these support vessels would be to limit those ships which normally get these types of ships to only slot support pets. Other ships should be able to slot support pets as well, and it would be particularly appropriate to give the larger carriers an additional support hangar. Note also that IMO tachyon drones and power siphon drones, are really support, not combat pets.
Please though, if you must nerf some of the pets out there, don't make it a sweeping gesture, take into consideration the actual investment required to get each, and you may find player outrage somewhat abated.
As an afterthought, something else that might somewhat abate player outrage as well would be the elimination of the ship specific limitation for some of the rarer pets. If captain fickle has voth fighters in his bastion and he wants to slot them on his multimission ship, let him.
Prety sad they feel they have to nerf everything for no reason. I fly a Jem'Hadar Dreadnaught with 2 hangars, Advanced Scorpion Fighters, and there's nothing OP about them. They die in droves and i can barely keep them out in play.
They do a respectable amount of damage, but nothing even close to what my Jem does. So I don't see any reason they should be getting Nerfed.
The same goes for the hangar of Romulan Drones I have on my Scimitar. There's just no real justification for this nerfing.
What level are you? also pay attention to what content you are doing and what it scales you up or down to. Check out my info below where i made several comparisons. The first one was when i took my level 60 toon into the Undine Space BZ which scales you down to 50. The next one was when i took that same character and went into a patrol in the Delta Quadrant which left me at level 60.
Assuming this is accurate I see the correction they wish to make. Your ship does not boost nearly as much as your pets do and they will get more hull than you.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
yes, I AM aware my reference was some odd years deficient of sto. though I am happy to say someone missed the point and some got it exactly right.
I like the idea of "support" and "combat specific" pets though adding an extra hanger would probably be considered an OP move, not that the pets pre nerf are any better now, much lest post nerf.
ultimately I have a feeling none of the rave matters, since they rarely go back on anything once started.
Frigates need to stay frigates, fighters need to stay fighters and support craft need to stay support. they won't DO that if they get cut back.
Cryptic made it painfully clear carrier class ships are not really welcome anymore, the rage is hybrid flight deck and "intel" ships, I'm not about to put mine to rest just yet though.
Nerfing the Galaxy saucer because it has "too much HP, damage".
Had to laugh at this.
stardestroyer001, Admiral, Explorers Fury PvE/PvP Fleet | Retired PvP Player
Missing the good ol' days of PvP: Legacy of Romulus to Season 9 My List of Useful Links, Recently Updated November 25 2017!
Another nerf........ just what this game didn't need.
Cryptic, Geko, Devs, whoever. Stop the player nerfing, you're doing so much damage to this game on so many levels. I once flew a Vesta and my pets died about 30 seconds after launching from my ship. They barely did anything to begin with. They exploded at the slightest touch. And that was BEFORE the npcs and everything was jacked up to stupid levels of hp bloating.
Pets do not need to be nerfed! They need to be buffed!
In addition, in following the current trend of widescale nerfing going on in STO, I have nerfed my ZEN buying and will continue to do so until the devs see sense. I haven't bought ZEN in months and will not buy again until there is an improvement. Truly I'm voting with my wallet.
my main is a science captain on a catian carrier I own every fed carrier there is I have most of the elite pets and I have the wing commander trait and I don't see where you think the pets are overpowered at all I out dps them on any ship I use, nerfing what is suppose to my main source of constant damage would render my ship almost useless it wouldn't because I have it set up well for sci and damage but on any of my alts its already barely useable and reducing the effect of its main feature is just a real bad idea. I also have a scimitar with advanced drones now they tend to live the whole match with a few heals that's good but as for dps they suck I use them to distract the enimies when I gota do an objective they do this well but they rarely kill anything even one normal so I think mr gecko you need to rethink this carriers and pets are not an issue with the add of mastery on a lot of the carriers we are just starting to see a lot of 5 star pets flying around so it may be that you are finally seeing the pets live up to what they are suppose to do plase don't ruin the game further by taking away something that's working somewhat well if any fix is need is that they need a buff not nerf
Is this coming from a DEV or higher ups? STOP...enough of that ###. Don't you see the number of people leaving STO...self inflicting wounds will cost dearly...as Spock would put it best...VERY ILLOGICAL :mad:
With today's patch we have carrier pilots reporting nerfed values already in effect.
Based on today's runs through Takedown and Mirror Invasion I have to warn that I think it would be devastating to carrier pilots to nerf our pets any further. I think there are many of us at this stage who will, with heavy hearts, shelve the affected toons entirely rather than pay up to "upgrade" what we have good reason to fear will just be taken from us once we've coughed up the cash.
I am sorry for the cynicism here, but I want to make this position clear.
If, however, no further changes are to be made beyond what came as a part of today's NPC scaling, or if carrier pilots will be given substantial new powers and assets as standard and not pay features, then that is a different matter. I'd like to hope that there will be no further changes to pets now that some have already gone into effect as a result of changing the NPC table.
Can this be confirmed or denied?
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Cryptic: I would love to have a carrier pet overhaul in the next big update, or two. I can wait.
Ideas:
Quality of life upgrades for carrier ships -
2 hangar bays for flight-deck carriers, up from 1
3 hangar bays for full carriers, up from 2
A ship with 2 bays with be able to slot 1x medium or heavy pet, and 1x small 'fighter' pet (3x per wing), or two fighter pets.
And similarly, a carrier with 3 bays can slot 2x medium or heavy pets and a small pet, or 3 small pets. (or 2 small 1 heavy, whatever their choice). This forces some variety to what pets people will use and also limits their DPS potential.
Pets should be in your ships hangars at all times when you enter a map, I know the system / code for the game is making the current method, but this really ought to be fixed at some point, might aswell be when you do this overhaul of the whole carrier system?
After this, you could increase the cooldown on launch times by 5-10 seconds to compensate for already having them all in your hangars when you spawn on a map (as they should be, I mean, they're *inside* your ship, aren't they? it's just silly that it works the way it does now).
- Then you could do something really cool like have a fighter upgrade / customization window, where you could, for example, slot fighter/shuttle sized items (which could be added to R&D as one source) on to your fighters to customize them.
Want your Tholian Mesh Weavers to fire phaser instead of tetryon? swap the [common] tetryon weapons they come with in the customization window with some new crafted and upgradedFighter - Phaser Dual Beam Bank MKXIV (Ultra Rare).
Maybe have another tab to this window where your fighters have a skill tree, and they level up, and say at level 10 you have 10 points to spend and the tree has 20 things to choose from, so these could all be cool little traits or abilities for your pets, you could have the basic ones like +10% shield/hull HP, +10% accuracy, +5% crit, maybe +increase flight speed, improve deflector for deflector ability pets (tractor beam? I dunno etc).
If the pets are out performing the ship then surely that's how a carrier should be working with the frigates as a mobile weapons platform and the ship acting more as a support role.
The xindi frigates differ from the ferjai in that they don't seem to want to move and attack anything when set to attack mode. Ferjai are aggressive littler buggers which can lead you to fight more than you maybe need to but on the flipside the xindi carrier has to take longer coaxing their ships into attacking anything. They're also pretty damn slow compared to the ferj or rommie drone.
Fighters often die so fast due to a refusal to move away from exploding ships that the cooldown itself should be enough to get the player doing more damage.
But all this is fairly stupid given that the pets are part of the carrier and as such you shouldn't be taking their damage output as a separate number to the player than has decided whether or not to deploy them.
Or is it just another case that they are levelling too fast and are being forced to suffer the same xp gain nerf like the rest of us?
If the pets are out performing the ship then surely that's how a carrier should be working with the frigates as a mobile weapons platform and the ship acting more as a support role.
God forbid the player have to have an active role in playing the game instead of sitting there, targeting the enemy, then hitting 3-4 commands and walking way.
Original Join Date: January 2010. Ragequit Date: January 7th 2012. Return Date: October 23rd 2014.
I didnt say they are there to allow the player to afk while they do the work although if they were actually able to do so it might lessen the utter boredom of the current grindathon cryptic has inflicted on sto.
The pets dont exist without the carrier, they act as a weapon system deployed from the vessel. If they can exist without the carrier then I look forward to taking a wing of fighters into the vault and soloing it. BUT that would no doubt be closed due to exploitation of the enjoyment centres of the brain.
To take them as a seperate entity from the actual ship is like saying cluster torpedo's do less damage that a ship so lets buff them.
It's been a while but didnt they originally work off the players skills before they got given the ability to level up?
So is that deal with this game if people are not buying enough zen stuff. cryptic nerfs something that not broken so people are forced to quit the game or buy new ships... I sorry the but this tread is Asinine... Mainly the part about NERF TO HP OF PETS the hp is fine i don't see the issue pvp or pve wise. the Hp has no need to be nerfed some of these ships just can't last very long as is against anything:mad::mad::mad:
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] DELTA RISING FIXS THERE NEVER COMING WHY I'M I WASTING MY TIME ASKING FOR THEM ???
So is that deal with this game if people are not buying enough zen stuff. cryptic nerfs something that not broken so people are forced to quit the game or buy new ships... I sorry the but this tread is Asinine... Mainly the part about NERF TO HP OF PETS the hp is fine i don't see the issue pvp or pve wise. the Hp has no need to be nerfed some of these ships just can't last very long as is against anything:mad::mad::mad:
I heard from a twitter post that they're going too nerf XP again and then take another Nerf bat to the intl escort. Its never going too stop. There killing the game
I burned through dozens of lockboxes collecting enough Lobi for my Jem Hadar Carrier. That's real world money that I worked for. Some of that money went into the mortgages and bills of the developers.
In their gratitude, they have decided that the product I bought from them needs to be screwed up and made less effective.
In real life would we tolerate such behavior? If the company that made your car sent mechanics around and reduced your gas mileage or swapped out the power windows for hand cranks the customers would go berserk.
The fact is that the MOMENT I notice my fighters are (even) less effective than they already are, every dime I might have spent on STO will instead go into an envelope to pay for "No Man's Sky" when it is released next year.
Until No Man's Sky is released I will continue to play STO (probably), but for me it really will be Free to Play since I will be making the conscience choice to not make any micro transactions or buy the lifetime subscription. Thankfully, I have not made that mistake yet.
Seriously, guys. Get the Devs fixing the bugs. I KNOW it is more fun to make new content, but until the old stuff runs right it is seriously unprofessional to just release more buggy code.
I am a fan of Star Trek and I really WANT to love this game, but it's getting very hard to continue to ignore the glaring problems -- both in the gameplay bugs and the company's apparent attitude toward the customers.
With today's patch we have carrier pilots reporting nerfed values already in effect.
Based on today's runs through Takedown and Mirror Invasion I have to warn that I think it would be devastating to carrier pilots to nerf our pets any further.
<snip>
(note: he is referring to patch as of Nov.6)
I had been running the Mirror event since it began, each day, with all my captains, including one with Scimitar/Elite Scorps, 1 Scim/Elite Drones, and 1 Vesta/Elite Scorps.
After this patch, although no change to carrier pets was mentioned, my Scorps and drones are dying faster and more often.
This may be due to more frequent npc explosions, or changes to the way/rate at which the NPC's use abilities and skills, or some other factor. Just reporting what I see.
I have only had the Scims and elite pets for a couple weeks now, and my builds are not 'optimized' in any way. (Previously I was using blue Runabouts for the Vesta and didn't have Scims before the last sale)
I can honestly say that none of the Elite level pets have been out-performers in my experience. (I have also run the Mirror Voquv with BoPs though not the elite ones).
As others have reported, any significant nerf to them seems like it will make them not worth the trouble of running, but I guess we will have to wait and see.
I had been running the Mirror event since it began, each day, with all my captains, including one with Scimitar/Elite Scorps, 1 Scim/Elite Drones, and 1 Vesta/Elite Scorps.
After this patch, although no change to carrier pets was mentioned, my Scorps and drones are dying faster and more often.
This may be due to more frequent npc explosions, or changes to the way/rate at which the NPC's use abilities and skills, or some other factor. Just reporting what I see.
I have only had the Scims and elite pets for a couple weeks now, and my builds are not 'optimized' in any way. (Previously I was using blue Runabouts for the Vesta and didn't have Scims before the last sale)
I can honestly say that none of the Elite level pets have been out-performers in my experience. (I have also run the Mirror Voquv with BoPs though not the elite ones).
As others have reported, any significant nerf to them seems like it will make them not worth the trouble of running, but I guess we will have to wait and see.
It's because they are tied to the HP of the NPCs and so when the NPC lost theirs on normal and advanced last thursday the pets did as well.
It feels to me they are now almost exactly what they were pre DR. The frigates may still be a little stronger but - good.
I expect they will nerf them again. We'll see.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
I think whatever calculation was done to get NPC health to scale up was also used for pet scaling.
So when they reduced NPC health (by adjusting their scaling mechanism) they also adjusted the pets.
However there are still some situations where the overblown scaling of pets is still in effect. Private PVP maps and lvl60 elite queues would be two possible examples.
Comments
What level are you? also pay attention to what content you are doing and what it scales you up or down to. Check out my info below where i made several comparisons. The first one was when i took my level 60 toon into the Undine Space BZ which scales you down to 50. The next one was when i took that same character and went into a patrol in the Delta Quadrant which left me at level 60.
Level 60 scaled to level 50 (undine space BZ)
T5U Vesta
36967 hull
Advanced Danubes
0 stars 21217 hull
1 star
2 stars 21557 hull
3 stars 21727 hull
4 stars 21896 hull
5 stars 22066 hull
level 60 and scaled to level 60 (DQ patrol)
T5U Vesta
52627 hull
Advanced Danubes
0 stars 52280 hull
1 star 52698 hull
2 stars 53116 hull
3 stars 53534 hull
4 stars 53953 hull
5 stars 54371 hull
let me also say that I strongly support the devs, they work really hard at producing and maintaining this complex game, which I cannot imagine is an easy task, especially in light of some players outrage at any changes.
That being said, let me exstol my own take on the subject at hand.
I've got a dozen active alts, most of which use pets in one role or another. And I've tried out most of the pets available--which at normal (basic) level are already essentially useless. Those that are actually useful require RL investment and often are only available for use on specific ships--eg the voth fighters and jh ships, which have a significantly higher investment cost than the cheaper ships. I would hope that any nerfs coming will take into consideration the investment value of the specific pets.
a tweak that I WOULD like to see is a change to the non-hangar support pets such as worker bees, D'kyr support craft and Varanus repair platforms, into hangar pets. One way this could be introduced without allowing heavy fighters to be slotted to these support vessels would be to limit those ships which normally get these types of ships to only slot support pets. Other ships should be able to slot support pets as well, and it would be particularly appropriate to give the larger carriers an additional support hangar. Note also that IMO tachyon drones and power siphon drones, are really support, not combat pets.
Please though, if you must nerf some of the pets out there, don't make it a sweeping gesture, take into consideration the actual investment required to get each, and you may find player outrage somewhat abated.
As an afterthought, something else that might somewhat abate player outrage as well would be the elimination of the ship specific limitation for some of the rarer pets. If captain fickle has voth fighters in his bastion and he wants to slot them on his multimission ship, let him.
They do a respectable amount of damage, but nothing even close to what my Jem does. So I don't see any reason they should be getting Nerfed.
The same goes for the hangar of Romulan Drones I have on my Scimitar. There's just no real justification for this nerfing.
Assuming this is accurate I see the correction they wish to make. Your ship does not boost nearly as much as your pets do and they will get more hull than you.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
I like the idea of "support" and "combat specific" pets though adding an extra hanger would probably be considered an OP move, not that the pets pre nerf are any better now, much lest post nerf.
ultimately I have a feeling none of the rave matters, since they rarely go back on anything once started.
Frigates need to stay frigates, fighters need to stay fighters and support craft need to stay support. they won't DO that if they get cut back.
Cryptic made it painfully clear carrier class ships are not really welcome anymore, the rage is hybrid flight deck and "intel" ships, I'm not about to put mine to rest just yet though.
Had to laugh at this.
Missing the good ol' days of PvP: Legacy of Romulus to Season 9
My List of Useful Links, Recently Updated November 25 2017!
Elite Scorpion Fighter:
http://home.comcast.net/~volfin/20141106190751518.jpeg
Elite Tholian Widow Fighter:
http://home.comcast.net/~volfin/20141106190718351.jpeg
Cryptic, Geko, Devs, whoever. Stop the player nerfing, you're doing so much damage to this game on so many levels. I once flew a Vesta and my pets died about 30 seconds after launching from my ship. They barely did anything to begin with. They exploded at the slightest touch. And that was BEFORE the npcs and everything was jacked up to stupid levels of hp bloating.
Pets do not need to be nerfed! They need to be buffed!
In addition, in following the current trend of widescale nerfing going on in STO, I have nerfed my ZEN buying and will continue to do so until the devs see sense. I haven't bought ZEN in months and will not buy again until there is an improvement. Truly I'm voting with my wallet.
Helpful Tools: Dictionary.com - Logical fallacies - Random generator - Word generator - Color tool - Extra Credits - List of common English language errors - New T6 Big booty tutorial
A fix out of synch with the rest of the game. Like the XP "fix".
Upscaled pets only make sense with upscaled enemies. Like upscaled XP.
system Lord Baal is dead
Is this coming from a DEV or higher ups? STOP...enough of that ###. Don't you see the number of people leaving STO...self inflicting wounds will cost dearly...as Spock would put it best...VERY ILLOGICAL :mad:
Guess I should go use my OP Tal'kyr pets before they nerf it:rolleyes:
Seems like the guy doesn't play the game if he thinks Tal'kyr needs a nerf. Or my OP Hohsus or Aquarius pets.
The future & only use for STO Carrier pets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvsI_0E8ep0 BONZAI!!!
You just never do get it, do you. Move along now, Cryptic/pwe fanboy, move along...
Based on today's runs through Takedown and Mirror Invasion I have to warn that I think it would be devastating to carrier pilots to nerf our pets any further. I think there are many of us at this stage who will, with heavy hearts, shelve the affected toons entirely rather than pay up to "upgrade" what we have good reason to fear will just be taken from us once we've coughed up the cash.
I am sorry for the cynicism here, but I want to make this position clear.
If, however, no further changes are to be made beyond what came as a part of today's NPC scaling, or if carrier pilots will be given substantial new powers and assets as standard and not pay features, then that is a different matter. I'd like to hope that there will be no further changes to pets now that some have already gone into effect as a result of changing the NPC table.
Can this be confirmed or denied?
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Ideas:
Quality of life upgrades for carrier ships -
2 hangar bays for flight-deck carriers, up from 1
3 hangar bays for full carriers, up from 2
A ship with 2 bays with be able to slot 1x medium or heavy pet, and 1x small 'fighter' pet (3x per wing), or two fighter pets.
And similarly, a carrier with 3 bays can slot 2x medium or heavy pets and a small pet, or 3 small pets. (or 2 small 1 heavy, whatever their choice). This forces some variety to what pets people will use and also limits their DPS potential.
Pets should be in your ships hangars at all times when you enter a map, I know the system / code for the game is making the current method, but this really ought to be fixed at some point, might aswell be when you do this overhaul of the whole carrier system?
After this, you could increase the cooldown on launch times by 5-10 seconds to compensate for already having them all in your hangars when you spawn on a map (as they should be, I mean, they're *inside* your ship, aren't they? it's just silly that it works the way it does now).
- Then you could do something really cool like have a fighter upgrade / customization window, where you could, for example, slot fighter/shuttle sized items (which could be added to R&D as one source) on to your fighters to customize them.
Want your Tholian Mesh Weavers to fire phaser instead of tetryon? swap the [common] tetryon weapons they come with in the customization window with some new crafted and upgradedFighter - Phaser Dual Beam Bank MKXIV (Ultra Rare).
Maybe have another tab to this window where your fighters have a skill tree, and they level up, and say at level 10 you have 10 points to spend and the tree has 20 things to choose from, so these could all be cool little traits or abilities for your pets, you could have the basic ones like +10% shield/hull HP, +10% accuracy, +5% crit, maybe +increase flight speed, improve deflector for deflector ability pets (tractor beam? I dunno etc).
The xindi frigates differ from the ferjai in that they don't seem to want to move and attack anything when set to attack mode. Ferjai are aggressive littler buggers which can lead you to fight more than you maybe need to but on the flipside the xindi carrier has to take longer coaxing their ships into attacking anything. They're also pretty damn slow compared to the ferj or rommie drone.
Fighters often die so fast due to a refusal to move away from exploding ships that the cooldown itself should be enough to get the player doing more damage.
But all this is fairly stupid given that the pets are part of the carrier and as such you shouldn't be taking their damage output as a separate number to the player than has decided whether or not to deploy them.
Or is it just another case that they are levelling too fast and are being forced to suffer the same xp gain nerf like the rest of us?
God forbid the player have to have an active role in playing the game instead of sitting there, targeting the enemy, then hitting 3-4 commands and walking way.
Almost called it.
The pets dont exist without the carrier, they act as a weapon system deployed from the vessel. If they can exist without the carrier then I look forward to taking a wing of fighters into the vault and soloing it. BUT that would no doubt be closed due to exploitation of the enjoyment centres of the brain.
To take them as a seperate entity from the actual ship is like saying cluster torpedo's do less damage that a ship so lets buff them.
It's been a while but didnt they originally work off the players skills before they got given the ability to level up?
DELTA RISING FIXS THERE NEVER COMING WHY I'M I WASTING MY TIME ASKING FOR THEM ???
I heard from a twitter post that they're going too nerf XP again and then take another Nerf bat to the intl escort. Its never going too stop. There killing the game
In their gratitude, they have decided that the product I bought from them needs to be screwed up and made less effective.
In real life would we tolerate such behavior? If the company that made your car sent mechanics around and reduced your gas mileage or swapped out the power windows for hand cranks the customers would go berserk.
The fact is that the MOMENT I notice my fighters are (even) less effective than they already are, every dime I might have spent on STO will instead go into an envelope to pay for "No Man's Sky" when it is released next year.
Until No Man's Sky is released I will continue to play STO (probably), but for me it really will be Free to Play since I will be making the conscience choice to not make any micro transactions or buy the lifetime subscription. Thankfully, I have not made that mistake yet.
Seriously, guys. Get the Devs fixing the bugs. I KNOW it is more fun to make new content, but until the old stuff runs right it is seriously unprofessional to just release more buggy code.
I am a fan of Star Trek and I really WANT to love this game, but it's getting very hard to continue to ignore the glaring problems -- both in the gameplay bugs and the company's apparent attitude toward the customers.
Sev
(note: he is referring to patch as of Nov.6)
I had been running the Mirror event since it began, each day, with all my captains, including one with Scimitar/Elite Scorps, 1 Scim/Elite Drones, and 1 Vesta/Elite Scorps.
After this patch, although no change to carrier pets was mentioned, my Scorps and drones are dying faster and more often.
This may be due to more frequent npc explosions, or changes to the way/rate at which the NPC's use abilities and skills, or some other factor. Just reporting what I see.
I have only had the Scims and elite pets for a couple weeks now, and my builds are not 'optimized' in any way. (Previously I was using blue Runabouts for the Vesta and didn't have Scims before the last sale)
I can honestly say that none of the Elite level pets have been out-performers in my experience. (I have also run the Mirror Voquv with BoPs though not the elite ones).
As others have reported, any significant nerf to them seems like it will make them not worth the trouble of running, but I guess we will have to wait and see.
It's because they are tied to the HP of the NPCs and so when the NPC lost theirs on normal and advanced last thursday the pets did as well.
It feels to me they are now almost exactly what they were pre DR. The frigates may still be a little stronger but - good.
I expect they will nerf them again. We'll see.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
So when they reduced NPC health (by adjusting their scaling mechanism) they also adjusted the pets.
However there are still some situations where the overblown scaling of pets is still in effect. Private PVP maps and lvl60 elite queues would be two possible examples.