I tried VMA on PTS with exact same pet build and sets I have been using. Long story short, pets die all the time. On 2nd arena they are mostly useless since they are dead even before monsters spawn (unless you spam the switches).

Empowered shield goes down immediately as most of the instant damage is above 5k+, so half of the time Matriarch's heals are not there because it's either dead or I am out of magicka. Can't imagine how painful stages 7 and 9 would be with these shields.

Based on my initial experience, I am not planning on doing a full VMA run on PTS, I'd rather try to farm for my inferno staff I never got till nerfs go on live server. But even if I get a staff before Nerfmire, what will I be using it for anyway? I love playing glass cannon, always have but switched to pet sorcerer to to farm VMA. Now with these changes it makes no sense to even farm it.

I feel like after all these years I can only continue to play ESO like "story mode" and keep looking for other options.. Been playing MMOs for 16 years, never seen such clueless devs before. Enough is just enough. For those who say "adapt", games are meant to be enjoyed, not stressed about.

*hits alt + f4*

I did the same, more or less, and it was admittedly brutal. The ward honestly felt like it was made of tissue paper, and my familiar died far more times than I can count. Then I would go to respawn the familiar, hit that oh-so-fun cast time, and have a 50-50 shot of going splat before I finished.

Major pain points of the run, regarding the pet, were the boss of stage 2 (the spinny blades and the cannon shots into the air which still hit him), the boss of stage 4 (the pet slows out of the safe spot, or I go to heavy attack the sentry or adds, and he dies. Or he goes to attack the spider during the flame phase, and he dies), the entirety of stage 5 (because the water kills the pet over and over again), environmental damage in stage 6, the behemoth's roars in stage 7, and the lava geysers along the arena edge in stage 8.

After stage 8 round 4, I exited the arena, logged to character select, and deleted the test character I made for the experiment. There's really no point to continuing it to its conclusion.

@ZOS_Finn I understand that there are reasons pets aren't invulnerable in vMA, at least in the abstract (reasons exist). That said, however, they're dying far too much, which, in conjunction with the cast time that feels like an eternity in the middle of the fast-paced vMA combat, is incredibly frustrating and makes it where I'm skeptical that they're even useful in that content.

Add to that more player deaths than I care to count, my shield feeling like it's not even a defense even in conjunction with boundless storm and crit surge, and the fact that those people who are getting 600k scores in vMA will still get 600k scores because they don't use shields, and I'm honestly more frustrated with the arena than I've ever been, even when I was learning it the first time.

To add context, this is the reason why they are dying...

dlypj3c32cgo.png

As you can see, the pets only get a 3 damage shield granted to them. This is not a graphical bug, they literally get the shield knocked off immediately upon combat with anything...

Note his health bar showing "16,683 + 3" @ZOS_Finn

I will name my familiar "super tiny shields" from now on to compliment my character's tiny shields.

Edit: This bug also happens in overland combat and is not specific to vMA