Enhanced Minion VII  

After finishing Void E progression and a few events in Tower, I was excited to go visit Zeb and see what kind of yummy pet goodies I could get on my 81BST (78 summon pet spell). I then bought this and rushed back to the guild lobby, bought some solvent, and promptly destroyed my Enhanced Minion IV aug. I popped this little beauty into its place, told my pet to shoo, and summoned a new one.

I was not expecting a yellow con pet.
I was not expecting an even con pet.
I *was* expecting a dark blue pet.
But what I got was a light blue pet. I was understandably confused. I had just told my dark blue pet to go find some place else to be.. And now I had *this*? An inferior light blue little squish-thing?!

I zoned. No effect. Dismissed pet, summoned a new one. No change. I put the gear with the aug in my inventory, zoned, pulled it back out and put it back on--no effect. I was summoning light blue pets no matter what I tried.

So I went out to Zeb to blow more chronobines on a Major Dyadic Quartz (Enhanced Minion VI, one rank lower than this) and lo-and-behold.. He was dark blue. So now I was suspicious... I put the piece of gear that had the Enhanced Minion VII effect on in addition to the gear with my Enhanced Minion VI effect. Dismissed my dark blue pet and promptly summoned *another* light blue pet. Took off the VII gear? Dark blue pet.

So then I come on here, where there is no mention of this lovely little issue. I checked the raw spell data and compared them side-by-side. Discounting the md5 data, the only change between the two was for the pet power 80 -> 85.

As far as I can tell, there should be no reason why my pet was being downgraded. I, however, have played EQ long enough to know that Sony occasionally likes to bend people over. I'd imagine the reason they did this was because of all the level 75 folks getting gimped into Tower access and then getting vastly overpowered pets for their level.

I'm going to set forth this theory: you *must* be 85 to take effect of the power of this aug. I would also caution people not to go willy-nilly destroying their +pet power augments their zeal to get an uber pet.. Because, if my experience is any representation of reality, chances are excellent it's not going to work and you're going to be worse off *with* this than without it.

This Augment became available to me last night, after we Beat The Mindblight in discord Tower. Purchasable off Zeb for 90 Chronobines. As a Necro, this Transforms our 85 pet into Iksar Skeleton form when summoned also. Nice Damage increase from enhanced minion VI. VI average hit for me was 245. with VII, average hit was 272.