Problem:
Feign death allows you to become an invalid target in all circumstances, providing offensive tactics that are abusive. For this ability to remain balanced, the pet should follow the same rules as invisibility. Offensive tactics used by other classes involve the creature getting a saving throw verses the effect. Since creatures do NOT get a direct save verses feign death (as you cast it on yourself), and since you can retry the combat once you have feigned death, there is very little risk to necromancer himself. As this tactic involves charming an NPC and turning it against another NPC, which could be part of the same spawn, it allows for Necromancers to solo MUCH bigger rooms than any other class could. This situation is well beyond what would preserve game balance for any other class (soloing the Bloodthirsty Ghoul room and Ghoul Lord room, for example).

Example:
While there are many examples of how the Necromancer Feign Death tactic is abusive, one of the most egregious occurs in the Ghoul Lord room of Lower Guk. The room consists of 2 Bok Ghoul Guards and the Ghoul Lord himself. Using the current system, a level 50 Necro can easily solo the room at virtually no risk to himself. The Necro can get into the room quite easily with Invis To Undead. To clear the room he uses Screaming Terror on one Bok and Charms the other. When the Ghoul Lord rushes him, he feigns. The Lord then turns on the charmed Bok and kills it, taking considerable damage during the fight. The Necromancer waits until the Ghoul Lord returns to its spawn point. When the necromancer gets back up, he is in no danger of being attacked due to the way Feign Death works now. He then charms the 2nd Bok and Feigns again. The fight goes on and the 2nd Bok is killed. When the Necromancer gets back up he has a VERY wounded Ghoul Lord AND nearly full mana. The Lord is now an easy kill, and the necro collects his special items.

Solution:
Ideally, Feign Death should work like Invisibility, where summoned pets suicide and the charmed ones break Charm. We do not want, however, to adversely affect lower level Necromancers to such a large degree. What we do recognize is the need to prevent higher level Necros from exploiting key spawn points. Hence, when you Feign Death, any charmed NPC will immediately break Charm. However, summoned NPCs (pets) will NOT be affected. While this still allows the use of the Feign Death tactic with your summoned pet, it does not imbalance the game and many dungeon spawns to the degree that charming an NPC does.

This change will be live on the Test Server when it comes back up. Baring any problems, and assuming that we have not missed anything, these changes should go live in the next patch. Please feel free to comment on our new solution further. We’ll review your opinions again before making the final decision to implement it on the live servers.

The roleplay logic is that your hold on a pet is tied to its fear should it disappoint you. If suddenly it couldn’t see you, there’s no reason for it to hang around.

The out-of-character reason for it was a balance issue. Back when you could invis with a pet (in beta), people learned to test areas out and pull camps while invisible using their pet. If they got a “bad pull”, they’d just walk away and summon a new pet when theirs died. It also presented some PvP problems whereby pet users would just sic their pet on an adversary who couldn’t see invisible and there was no recourse.

>>>Since creatures do NOT get a direct save verses feign death (as you cast it on yourself),
This conflicts potentially with information that has been told to us monks before. Some time ago, Abashi stated that creatures do get a skill check to see through feign death. This constitutes a save versus feign, doesn't it?

Notice it says no “direct save”. This means they don’t roll versus feign. What they get is what amounts to an intelligence check, which every creature gets for these “I’m going to fool you so you don’t attack me” abilities and spells. It's a very low chance. All cases of direct saves have a much higher percentage of the creature saving.

>>>As far as your example goes...whats to stop a necromancers (with sow) from charming said bok, casting harmshield, and running to zone? same overall effect, only difference is he doesnt have to worry about feign failing or his pet magically going away because he feigned.

Well I suppose you could try that, but it really wouldn’t produce the desired effect, that being soloing the Lord room, and other rooms in Lower Guk.

>>>IT'S A NERF!

Actually it’s a bug fix, but that’s neither here nor there. The issue came up, and we had three choices:

1. Leave it as is.
2. Fix/Nerf it, but not as severely as originally intended
3. Fix/Nerf it as was originally intended.

Our desire going forward is to avoid making global changes to the game to solve a localized situational problem. We had some other suggestions that came up, such as making all undead able to see through feign death (shot down internally), giving all creatures a direct save versus feign death (shot down internally), making pets suicide in addition to the change implemented (shot down internally), and a good half-dozen other ideas. We chose the route that solved the situational problem without globally affecting the game. The Charm/Feign tactic is the only one that was causing problems, and that was really only useful in Lower Guk, and perhaps with spectres.

One aspect of the change that I forgot to mention above: The charmed pet will only uncharm if the feign death is successful.

There’s one last thing I think I should make clear. When there is a situation that decide not to nerf (and there are many of these), or reduce the overall effect of a nerf that we implement, we will not “compensate” for this by elevating all of the other classes. I’m just mentioning this because I saw several posts in the last thread where people suggested that this should be left as-is, and that other pet classes should get something similar.

Tuning exclusively up, or exclusively down just doesn’t work.