I wish I was a tamer...

Just see a wyvern doing 9k damage. A bit jealous to tamers with new big cats and good damages

Sounds like I need to farm more exp and train taming.

 

While the most recent balance pass needs further revision in my opinion (it's made some pets, like the wyvern, far too powerful) it's important not to be dazzled just by large numbers. To use an extreme example, a pet that hits for 80k damage once an hour can kill at most a single mob per hour, and there are mobs that it can't kill at all with its 22 DPS. Ferocious Wyverns have been hitting for numbers as large as crocs and other top DPS pets for a while now, it was just incredibly rare. Now it's just as rare, but Chris upped the DPS from 22 to 75 (using his testing metrics) in part by amplifying the power of that rare attack.

So it still does exactly the same damage in some situations (hitting a 2600 health mob for 4k damage or 8k damage gives the same effective DPS, even if our meters like to pretend there's a difference) and in others situations it's become far more powerful than it was. There's further subtleties to it that are related to mob count, damage resit, regen rates, etc, but mostly it's important to remember that hit size means very little, DPS means a bit more, and effective DPS is often what actually matters.

There's a lot of fun discussion to be had about this as it relates to the recent balance pass, and at its core a lot of it boils down to the same thing that is making the wyverns incredibly powerful right now. They were balanced (using those testing metrics mentioned earlier) within the taming tree, but the Bard tree is a multiplier that affects them in different ways depending on how their DPS is delivered. Two mobs doing 100dps, one with a 50% crit rate and one with a 10% crit rate will end up in very different places if you stack a 50% crit damage modifier on top of them, for instance. Fireflies, pet foods, pet gear; those are other examples of modifiers that will go in and unbalance things that were perfectly balanced within the narrow confines of the taming tree itself, but the biggest culprit far and away is bard buffing.

 

^^^ This ^^^

 

Just found out wyvern can reduce a great amount of STR and DEV. Also seeing player's pet doing 10k damage during the fight:

<PET> attacks Frost Giant and hits, dealing 10,972 points of critical damage from Wyvern Sting.

 

if someone running moon spec has a really good fireflies on him? yeah, the highest hit i've ever seen was 16k

 

Archers are so diminished....

Anyway, if you're jealous of tamers then become a tamer! Nothing is stopping you. If you don't want to change your current char then make a new account.

 

After testing pets (all of the 84-99 ones) on hogs in the Spur this last weekend, using only aggressive pet foods, with no Sonata, Frenzy, or other buffs, I can report that the old king is still the king.. The Croc. The new old croc (SoS) is even better since he requires hardly no healing when killing hogs.

When adding in the increased critical chance giving of Sonata and adding in Frenzy the Tiger edged slightly ahead with the wyvern a very close third. However, when you subtract the total aggravation of the screen sized hit box of the tiger and the mind numbing constant roaring of the wyvern... the Croc is still the #1 imho.

 

Remember that this is just one type of fighting. While I was still training up my taming I went to do the Xen waves with a higher leveled tamer that had better gear, and my Ferocious Wyvern was putting out 30% more damage than their Sobek.