Professor Frink,Feb 22 2005, 09:18 AM Wrote:Thanks for the link, that's some useful information.
Is everyone sure that a mob deciding to change targets doesn't change anyone's aggro level? If that's the case, it should be possible to carefully balance two characters to have exactly the same level of aggro, and cause the mob to run back and forth between them using only a few points of ranged damage. Has this been confirmed? It would not surprise me if Blizzard added some histerisis to the aggro system, so that once a mob changes targets, it tends to "stick" with that decision. (for example, mobs could require another target to have a certain % more aggro than the current target to change, or changing targets could add aggro to the new target, or lose aggro from the old target...) If this were the case, it would skew their results.
Also, that thread claims that over-heal doesn't cause aggro, but the part where they describe their experiments doesn't show how they determined that (I didn't read every post, but I did search the whole thread for "over"). Did I miss something, or are they just assuming that?
-- frink
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I believe that a distance factor adds some hysteresis to aggro. That is, you can instantly bounce aggro if two party members are both standing right next to the monster, but it takes quite a bit of extra aggro to make a monster run a ways to attack somebody else.
I believe this from playing a Warlock. My impression is that my DoT's combined with my first Immolate pull the mob from my Succubus fairly readily when I'm standing next to her while she's attacking. If I'm at maximum range, sometimes the monster's stuck to her even through Immolate, Shadowbolts and Searing Pain, which can result in a dead succubus.
This is with her talent for aggro reduction, Soothing Kiss, turned off.
[edit to continue the thought]
Anyhow, my belief is that effective aggro (that is, the decision who to attack) is the result of the aggro list run through a distance filter (mult by n/(n+distance) say). Doing X still causes Y aggro, no matter what the distance. However, the monster may not act on that aggro, partly depending on distance.
Another way to look at this is ping ponging the mob:
It's hard to pull a mob off someone standing far away. If you apply enough damage/aggro to do so, that mob (if it gets to you) is likely to be "stuck" to you for a while, because it took a lot of extra aggro from you to get it over to you in the first place, and your ping-pong partner will have to overcome that extra aggro AND the distance factor to get the mob back over to him.
This makes sense from the mob's point of view, because time spent running around is time not spent killing the hated enemy.
From blizzard's point of view, you get realistic mob behavior for cheap, so that they're not always running all over going after the last party member that hit them.