Recently I've done some more old EQ pet research and I'm posting the conclusions here. I'll include some of the previous conclusions with it as well as some skill caps I've figured out previously but never mentioned before for completeness. Note that this applies to PoP era/levels and earlier and I can't say how later eras may differ.
Sony buffed pets at some point after the year 2004 and before 2015. In this post, "Live EQ" means the post-buff pets, and "Old EQ" means 2004 and earlier.
This post also talks about stuff I outline in the
Melee Combat Routines Analyzed and Modeled thread. See that thread for more information.
Parse data mentioned in this post can be found in my
AC and ATK data spreadsheet.
See also my
pet stats spreadsheet.
NPC Dual Wield and Double Attack Skill Caps
Level 1-50 non-pet NPCs: Skills capped at 200
Level 51+ non-pet NPCs: Skills are 250
Old EQ summoned pets: Skills capped at 200, this includes PoP pets
Live EQ summoned pets: Mage, Necro, Enchnater pets cap at 225; Beastlord and Shaman pets cap at 200
These were determined with a high amount of certainty and I explained how I came up with it in a previous post in this thread. I rechecked it recently.
NPC Offense and Weapon Skill Caps
Level 1-50 pre-PoP non-pet NPCs: Skills capped at 210
Level 51+ pre-PoP non-pet NPCs: Skills are 250
Level 1-50 PoP non-pet NPCs: Skills capped at 275 (skills are level*6 up to cap instead of level*5)
Level 51+ PoP non-pet NPCs: Skills are 250+level
Old EQ summoned pets: Skills capped at 225, even PoP pets (shaman pets might have been 215, unverified)
Live EQ summoned pets: Skills capped at 225 for non-PoP pets; 235 for PoP pets; 215 for shaman pets
This was much harder to figure out and has less certainty. The way I figured this out is by parsing pets' hit/miss rates. NPC and PC
To-Hit is simple to calculate and did not change with equipment or buffs until the late PoP era/LDoN equipment mods showed up. It is simply:
offense_skill + weapon_skill + 7.
Years ago Mackal gave me a little MQ2 plugin and I was able to get precise To-Hit values from a handful of NPCs because (oddly) the To-Hit value of NPCs is sent over the wire if the NPC has a contact proc that is a beneficial spell and it hits you. This is the only known way to get actual NPC statistics from the server. I was able to detmine that old world non-pet NPCs cap their weapon skills and offense skills at 210 up to level 50. At 51 and up the skills jump to 250 for all non-pet NPCs through Luclin. That is true for NPCs earlier than PoP, but In
PoP and later NPCs have level*6 for skills with a 275 cap up to level 50, then at 51+ they do 250+level. Arena dummies use the higher PoP skill caps as well. Note that the number in the packet is the value after the 1.21 multiplication and +10 -- read my other melee damage thread to understand what that means. Anyway, this confirms that NPCs calculate To-Hit like players do.
So, if you have logs of pets attacking targets with known Avoidance values, you can estimate a To-Hit from that. I made (very) long logs of characters with known To-Hit values attacking Area dummies on the Test server to get Avoidance estimates for those dummy NPCs. I then logged pets attacking them. From this I could estimate the pets' To-Hit value. With the To-Hit value I could deduce the Offense and Weapon skills by assuming that both were the same and subtracting 7.
It's worth mentioning that old skill caps for players were 200 for weapon skills and 210 for Offense, so NPCs seemingly had a higher weapon skill cap. NPCs however had skills of level*5 instead of (level+1)*5.
NPC Offense ATK
ATK as a stat is comprised of two parts which are added together, similar to AC. Those two parts are To-Hit (the chance to land a blow) and Offense (the chance the blow will hit harder). This is easily confused with the Offense skill, but is a different stat. Offense ATK determines how frequently the attacks will hit for one of the 20 possible damage values. It's the actual number the server rolls against the target's Defense stat (the mitigation stat) in the final calculation. I explain this in the other thread.
Offense ATK is calculated simply: weapon_skill + (strength_over_75 * 2 / 3) + atk_bonus
atk_bonus is ATK from items, spells, or other sources like AAs or a database field. Also debuffs with negative values.
Non-pet NPC offense up to level 60 is rather linear and is roughly between level*6 to level*7 up to around level 43 where it goes flat until level 51, then becomes less predictable up to around 400 then becomes much more shallow. Generally level 60+ NPCs (PoP and earlier eras) have around 400-430. See the other thread for a chart.
I recently discovered some new data for summoned pet Offense ATK and is largely the reason for this post. I had parsed pet Offense ATK years ago on Live servers but I couldn't tell if the current Live estimates would apply to old EQ or not. So TAKP had the Live numbers for this. When Quarm launched it was obvious that pets were doing crazy damage (upwards of 2x rogue DPS) so this got me resarching this again, and I discovered that
Live's pets were buffed at some point.
I checked old EQ logs and looked for cases of summoned pets attacking similar NPCs for extended periods of time. In one case I found mage pets from January 2000 (which is before Kunark) attacking Seafuries. I then carefully parsed the mitigation AC for these NPCs where possible and tried to estimate some ATK offense for the pets. In all cases they were significantly under the Live pet estimates and ended up roughly about equal (there is significant margin of error) to the expected weapon skill of the pets after adjusting for the pet buffs.
So presumably, pets had 75 strength
in old EQ, meaning pet Offense ATK is equal to its weapon skill. Sony might have just granted pets strength some time after 2004, or granted the pets ATK in some other way. It makes some sense for old pets to not have innate ATK because the pet buff spells grant a lot of strength. Sony seemingly wanted players to have to give it to them that way originally.
The one exception I found was the Mage epic pet which seemed to have a higher ATK value than expected, which may have been upwards of 50 points but again the certainty of this is not very high.
NPC Defense Skill
I'll mention Defense skill here briefly for completeness. As far as I can tell,
Defense is also capped at 210 like weapon skills for non-pet NPCs. NPC avoidance shows the same flattening around level 43, then
it jumps at level 51 to what I assume is also 250. See the other melee thread for a chart.
I could not figure about how NPC mitigation scaled with Defense skill however. It doesn't seem to be computed like player mitigation is. It goes up mostly linerally (with a slight curve) until level 50 where it ends up around 200 AC and stays flat. Even most PoP NPCs have about 200 mitigation. Again see the other thread for a chart. I mainly mention this again here because I was able to confirm the NPC skill caps. Also knowing that AC ends up around 200 allows one to estimate pet Offense ATK from logs.
Live pet mitigation usually follows the non-pet NPC scale but some pets are well above 200.