So a bard zoned into PoF and started kiting the portal area. When the bard had around 40+ mobs on his kite, we all zoned inn. Everything was fine at first and it seemed clear, then a player zoned inn alittle late and the train was close to him. Then a thing happend that blew my mind: All the scarlings and crocs left the train and went after this person. Why? (Nothing was casted, the player ran straight towards the rest of the raid) So lets say the bard kiter (Player A) has 1 threat as it gives 1 threat for inital aggro. How can Player B only take aggro on all the scarlings and crocs from a huge train? When Player B initially didn't do ANYTHING to gain above 1 threat. The Player B shouldnt even generate 1 threat in the first place, becuase he didnt do ANYTHING. Can someone please explain to me how this is even possible? We were 20 people witnessing this incident and its clearly something wrong with threat/aggro mechanics. If more details are needed, feel free to ask and il try to respond as detailed as possible.
This was my initial thought, but then someone told me you can't out run mobs in Plane of Fear and they will stay on you forever in that zone. But regardless, the odds of only 2 types of mobs leaving this train has to be astronoimcally low, wouldnt it?
Getting to far away from NPCs will cause them to ignore that player, yes. However there is another way this can happen. Fear NPCs have 'proximity aggro' which means if you get in melee range of them, then you will end up on their hate lists, regardless of how much they hate other players. If two players have nearly the same amount of hate, and both are outside of melee range, then the NPC will try to go after the closest player. The combination of both of those might have been the cause. It doesn't take a lot of hate before NPCs will always chase the top hater regardless of distance, but bards can't generate a lot of hate due to their hate cap. In short, avoid trains chasing bards. Also just being in melee range adds a significant hate bonus.
A bard can chain singing Shield of Songs for about 1-2minutes and it should override any normal proximity aggro hate. It counts as a rune being cast each pulse since that's what it is. Atleast that's how it worked on AK and how it should work here. I can't confirm here because my bard is still low level!
I've definitely noticed some weird proximity agro. As in proximity agro being way too high. Toon 1 agro a mob with nothing but proximity Toon 2 cast hate generating spells while outside melee range of the mob. Very non scientific conclusion is that it takes waaaaay too much agro to overcome the proximity agro from toon 1. I've observed this in Kurns while boxing. Took about 4 or 5 spells before pulling the mob off toon 1 onto toon 2
I believe Torven coded hate to be level specific and dependent on the amount of HP mobs have up to a certain cap? I also have noticed that at low levels my paladin could put 4 stuns into a mob and have it not turn at all, which I don't recall but I admittedly haven't play a tank at low levels on a real EQ server (AK or Live) in probably 10 years.
If you're level 10 and using low level spells and swinging newbie weapons, you are generating very little hate. It'll be quite different at later levels when your spells generate hundreds of hate per cast rather than, say, ten points of hate per cast. Initial proximity aggro is a small amount, and at later levels it will be easy to turn those mobs but at low levels it'll take a little while. Undead also follow undead aggro rules - they favor the closest melee player with yet another large multiplier.
this sounds to be in line with my experience on alkabor, even with shield of songs only so much agro you could generate.
You all have to understand, Torven has done extensive parsing and testing to reproduce many of the hate management mechanics as accurately as possible. If you play on other EQEmu servers and compare, you will find things behaving differently. If you compare mechanics to eqlive(if unchanged) they will be very similar to here. Takp is breaking new ground in accurate reproduction of mob AC, mitigation, resists, hate management, and many other mechanics. All efforts are done to reproduce AK mechanics. So many things may differ from you other experiences.
Thanks for the kind words Haynar. I replicated what I observed on Live. It's possible that they changed some things over the years, although I've not seen a clear example of this. However the hate per spell cast I think is likely the same or very similar at least. Generally Sony liked to leave that stuff alone. Hate per spell cast on non-damaging spells scales by NPC hitpoints. This makes sense as you wouldn't want a level 60 snare to piss off a low level NPC so much that he ignores 20 times his hitpoints in damage. The melee range bonus is much larger (relative to NPC hitpoints) at lower levels. This would actually make some sense if Sony wanted low level casters to not pull off tanks so easily. If you want to taunt a low level NPC off another player, get inside melee range of it first. Recall that hybrids did not even get spells in classic EQ until level 9, so it does make some sense for Sony to have done that.
I was the one kiting the train I fear.. I know that we made some hotfixes to prevent low hp agro kiting. That seemed to work when kurnark was released, never the less. I think the solution is that you need to be in range of the train. I am pretty sure it is possible to clear out those trash mobs in no time.. I know torven did this alot on AK.. But what is the thought of people pbaoeing zones on this server?
I merely tapered the low health aggro bonus from full down to nothing if the player was far away from the NPC(s), so it'll still work but it's harder to accomplish. What I did on AK however is abuse an invis to animals clickable item exploit to keep trains on my kiter. I did a low health aggro pull for a movie, but I still ended up with deaths doing it that way. I'm still not certain exactly why the NPCs decided to kill my wizards in that pull actually. They certainly aggroed much sooner than what the low health aggro bonus should have been. I sort of guessed that it might have been from the distance my kiter was to the train somehow. I had to put in something because clearly AK had some sort of limitation, and had I not put something in here, it would have been a balance problem. Certainly PBAoEing should be possible here. We have no desire to disable color stun PBAoEing if that's what you're talking about.
PBAEing should be workable. So should building aggro through legitimate means, generally healing or runes are the best way to do that for an entire train, and running them over your casters similar to Torven's videos. You just need some other way of building the aggro beyond the IvA exploit they didn't replicate here. But I think some trash may summon here in PoFear preventing this strategy for that zone? Not positive when they removed the summoning ability from trash in the zone though cause none of it summons on live now.
Ancient: Bump Pane's observations are mirroring my own. For example, I was pulling Nybright's to the zone wall using Cease on my paladin. My shaman would cast Sicken, a couple frost rifts, and occasionally walking sleep. The Nybrights would stay attacking my paladin and wouldn't run at my shaman. When my shaman entered melee range, they would turn and start attacking him, but he had to be within melee range. This does not reflect what we saw on AK. If the above example happened on AK, the Nybright would immediately run at my shaman at some point between one of the frost rifts. This happened regardless of mob type, as undead mobs would do the same thing. Another example can be illustrated in pulling situations. In Mistmoore last night, my bard friend was pulling mobs to the entrance and I would stun them as soon as they were in range/visible. I'd usually drop both a Cease and Desist. If the bard stopped short of camp, the mob would attack the bard and I would have to move into melee range. The mob would then begin attacking me. On AK, tagging was a common practice and, in the pulling example above, a pair of stuns would be enough to make the mob run directly at my paladin regardless of the bard's position. "Ping-ponging" (when a mob is constantly chasing casters who are overzealous) was a regular occurrence on AK. It's what made aggro management such an important part of the game and why a lot of casting classes couldn't just unload on a mob and not expect repercussions. Current proximity agro mechanics on TAKP are preventing that from happening to some extent, based on what I've observed. Sorry, man. Not based on my AK experience. When I was kiting HoH trials on AK, doing preliminary testing of threat generated by Shield of Songs for our kiting strats on future PoP encounters, it took 6-7 casts of Snare to pull agro off of me. Shield of Songs was a phenomenal agro tool, if given enough time to accumulate. Ravenwing and Ader can attest to this. There is no hate cap for bards, they just generate hate at a slower rate. I honestly don't know where this bard hate cap thing is coming from. They adjusted hate generated by regen songs and beneficial ae/group songs to prevent bards from getting creamed on every raid, but there was no hard or soft cap put on the overall amount of hate a bard could generate.
For what it's worth, Del, the oddities you describe in the first section of your post disappear at higher levels. Once you're fighting mobs with a decent number of hit points, hate will operate the way you remember it operating on Al'Kabor. (I'll admit that the low-level proximity mechanics strike me as odd, too, but my experience is so top-heavy that I'm inclined to trust Torven's research on EQLive over my instincts here.) As far as the bard "hate cap," I assume this is a cap applied to a single pulse of a song, not to bard hate in general.
The bard hate cap applies to non-damaging detrimental spell effects. It doesn't apply to damage done, heals, or buffs.
That makes sense, but that's not something I would have ever thought to bother testing. You're looking at HoS/OoS, Requiem, Druzzil's Disillusionment and other cancel magic types, Mezzes, Charms, Snare+Slows, and the low level AE fear. I can't say I ever tried chain casting any of those to generate hate. Although I definitely should have given low level fear a shot. That's good to hear things change at higher levels, but I definitely don't remember that from my early paladin days. Granted, it was a long time ago, but I don't remember life as a paladin tank in a group being that easy.
It sure was on live. Once a pally (or Mage Air pet) got off a stun, aggro was pretty much locked. Based on my experience, it took a wizzy casting a nuke on Inc and getting a crit to to pull a mob off a pally, once stun was cast. Heck, stun was such good aggro back in the day, TSW had page after page of argument about which was better weapon proc aggro - stun or hate. In fact, the guilds I was in were never big on using mallets for a War to lock down aggro...we'd often have a Pally cast a stun on Inc then the War would taunt off to get the jump on the hate list. Aggro was pretty much set after that with the War on top and the Pally (usually with DA hammer) as Ramp tank.
You are talking DA hammer which means you guys already had Luclin + AA. This also means your warriors already had AE taunt, which makes agro extremely simple. AE Taunt is guaranteed and it allowed knights (or WS rangers) to build up a ton of agro and dump it all on a warrior with 1 button press.
I think we're comparing apples and oranges, Mikayah. I do trust Torven did his research (and his research has been consistently excellent), and my days on Orc highway were a long time ago, but I can't help but remember how often I had to chase mobs in low level groups when someone sat down or was trigger happy. Regardless, if the behavior really only exists at lower levels, I can see how it would smooth out the learning curve of this game and make it more inviting for newer players. Which is a great thing, considering how challenging the game already is and considering our low population (compared to AK and especially compared to live servers).
Both the hate per spell cast and melee range hate bonus functions are very simple and linear, so I think it unlikely that Sony changed them over the years because doing so would change spell hate for all level ranges or would have made the theoretical original functions more complicated. I suppose the +100 could have been lower.
Out of curiosity, how confident are we that the current hate bonus for initial aggro is accurate to AK?
The guilds I was in used the same strat long before Luclin, I just mentioned DA hammer...well just because. At any rate, I think I am just going to stay out of the aggro/hate conversations in the future. I have no proof or testing for the fact that hate definitely appears to behave differently here than what I experienced on Live (particularly related to stuns - Pally and Mage pet). As I've said in other places, I did not play on AK and to be quite honest, I'm getting used to the way it works here, so it's just fine. By and large, I think the aggro system works great, a testament to all the testing that was done to get it to this point. So h/t to Torven.
I did zero hate tests on AK, so the confidence level is not high. There are currently two 'initial aggro' bonuses. One grants an absolute +20 or +25 when you 'body' aggro something-- i.e. run up to it and let it see you without you attacking it. The second is the more noticeable bonus where the first player in melee range of the NPC on its hate list gets a +35. I did find some old taunt research with some guy using "Tashnia" (assume he means Tashina) needing two casts to pull an NPC off the first aggroer. Tashina is 25 flat hate. There is a lot of old research indicating that taunt should be 4 uses to overcome the first-to-aggro bonus. So the taunt skill was (presumably) doing top hate + X with X being anywhere from 1 to 10. Most people say it was +1 but I'm having trouble finding proof of that. To agree with the 35 bonus, it would have to be 9 or 10; and even then it could possibly not apply if you're the top hater. I'll have to patch in something for that X here. Sony kept changing that damn skill.
I have a question regarding Taunt, ive tried so many times now just pressing taunt without having autoattack on while a mob is hitting another player that is not doing anything, I have yet to see any mob snap aggro on me by just pressing taunt. Am I missing something? Isnt only Taunt alone supposed to put me 1 ahead of lets say an enchanter on a success? It seems like there is a function here on AK that makes taunt not work properly unless autoattack is on? I might be wrong tho, but this is how it looks to me.
Taunt was +1 in my experience. Reason: Taunt didn't cause mobs to turn - you had to do one other little thing. If Taunt could have been Hate+10, you'd have turned mobs regularly with just a taunt. When a single stun (or slow or snare) is ~1,200 aggro the difference between a bonus of 60 hate or even 600 hate from initial aggro is quite small. We all should have good reason to believe the initial hate bonus was not as high as 600, even on high level mobs (it would take a Warrior many, many, many swings without a successful taunt to pull aggro off, say, a monk who body pulled if the hate bonus was ~600 - I recall a couple melee rounds getting the job done).
I've had taunt work multiple times turning mobs on TAKP with no auto-attack active. I'm doing this at relatively low levels, though (15-25). It could be a case where the linear nature of agro generation means the actions you're dealing with are being too quickly overcome by the agro buffer created by taunt. Or it could be a case where you have a ridiculously low taunt skill that's failing all the time.
