Talk: Guide to Aggro

This is rather objective and not factual. It will need a major clean up and a lot of unneeded sentences will be removed. The main space articles are meant to be factual and straight to the point, if you want to write a humourous article, see Project:Humor. Silver Sunlight 23:38, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Who says mainspace articles can't be funny? If it's both informative and entertaining, it's much better than a boring article that says the same thing.Entrea [Talk] 00:03, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

This is just a bit overkill. The guides are generally in a very bad shape and by allowing people to insert something just for the sake of being funny, will make them even worse. Silver Sunlight 00:11, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I hate to admit it, Silver Sunlight has a point. I'll see about giving it a more professional appearance. Professional doesn't have to mean no humor, professional does mean about 98% less humor than this has currently. (Imagine you were drawing up a paper for presentation to customers. You may include some humor, but as much as is here currently, no.) Besides, a partial rewrite will do it good. You are currently looking at the work from 3 sittings of effort, with a final once-over in the 3rd sitting. I can see I still missed a lot of tpyos and broken grammar, and that concept of aggro radius got left out of where it's most useful. It's mentioned, just not by name. Yamagawa 01:33, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Incase you aren't getting the impression, we still appreciate this guide, as it's the content which matters more than the presentation. (T/C) 01:36, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I got that impression. In fact I was hoping for others to tidy up the things I miss, or point out obvious errors on my part. I'd have even tagged it as 'needs improvement' if I hadn't been interrupted part way in 'publishing' it. I wasn't going to leave all the remaining work to others, but when it comes to editing my own work, I rate somewhere near imbecile. Yamagawa 03:53, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I'll help you to clean this up when I have a bit of time. The nice thing about Wiki is you can almost always get others to do work for you, if you ask nicely. (T/C) 04:07, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Corpse Camping

On corpse camping, this is something that I have seen to occur, I may have presented it in a humorus form, but it does happen -- unless the AI has been changed to remove this behavior. I suppose I'll need to send a party of 7 out make a pull and wipe, leaving one back at the shrine, to see if the pull resets or camps.Yamagawa 03:53, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Some monsters are set up to do this intentionally, where others it may just be bad luck - I know that much for certain. (T/C) 04:07, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Corpse aggro is another form of corpsecamping; You fight a group a bit away from where they normally stand. Some die, and you retreat. The monsters run back ~2 aggro bubbles and /afk again. When you "aggro" a body they made appear, the monsters will rush towards you and defend it with their lives. This can be rather annoying when you have Rez Chant/Restore (Alesia >.>" ), but doesn't affect spell-range skills, since the aggro bubble is smaller than spellcasting range :) --- -- (s)talkpage 09:11, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Can you cite a specific example of a foe that will corpse aggro? For corpse camping, I last recall seeing this in a HM dungeon after a pull of a charr group followed by a partial wipe. Yamagawa 01:54, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Types of Aggro and Fleeing

The edit to the types aggro has had me put a lot of thought into aggro, and particularly why foes flee -- The fleeing had been changed to indicate foes fleeing AoE, but fleeing AoE. Other than the foe moving, and stopping any attacking/casting while it moves, this is in my own opinion irrelevant to aggro. Between that addition to the fleeing aggro, and the elimination of the passive aggro, I thought it best to outline here my reasoning on the types of aggro and fleeing aggro both:

• No Aggro: Foe has no targets for aggro.
• Passive Aggro: The foe knows you exist. This is kind of like a queue, or list of all possible targets for the foe. We know this to exist because if the foe dies, you can get xp, even if you never directly aggroed the foe. We also know this because foes will aggro on the monk healing a tank, even if they cannot see the monk. The only speculation here is are the xp reward and the awareness 2 separate queues or one combined queue? I'd see no reason for them to be different, but I could be wrong on this, see testing as difficult/impossible, and the results of any testing moot in the big picture.
• Active Aggro: This is the single target the foe is currently attacking. Foes cannot attack multiple targets. Just like players, they attack single targets. When the current target for active aggro is removed, a new one will be selected based on a set of criteria (health, speed, distance, etc). There can also be things in he passive aggro queue and an empty active aggro queue. It may simply be that none of the passive targets meet criteria for being attacked (moving too fast, too far out, etc).

Here is where fleeing foes come in, and I where I get into a fair bit of speculation. This starts with another type aggro that can be held: (Bits in italics indicate speculation)

• Poisoned Aggro: This is like the passive aggro, it will hold a list of targets, but in this case it is a list of targets that can hurt the foe and the foe cannot hurt back.

Tack on how I might of programmed foes to flee things (if I were a programmer for ArenaNet):

• Caster foe experiencing more than one packet of damage that is flagged AoE and/or Damage over Time (like Meteor Shower, Savanah Heat, etc, which deliver multiple packets of damage over a period of time). Melee foes are also subject to this particular rule.
  • Caster moves in a direction selected to take it away from other allies experiencing the same damage source(spell). In the event of no other allies experiencing damage, move directly away from the damage source (person). This is AoE evasion.
• Melee Foe has health drop below threshold x (configurable?). Cause of the health loss is immaterial (do degen, time, or source factor in any for the cause or threshold?)
  • Until full health is achieved, aggro criteria include a prerequisite: Only attack targets that have 2 or fewer other melee attacking, or that attack this foe directly.
  • If the new rule precludes aggro against the foes current target, chose another target.
  • If no viable target exists flee the source of any damage taken. While fleeing in this manner, abort any patrols movement activity.
• Melee Foe has health drop below threshold y (Configurable), but is unable to path to the source of the damage.
  • Flag aggro as 'poison'.
  • Do not select 'poison' aggro targets for active aggro/attack.
  • Stop active patrol while 'poison' aggro exists. Flag current position as 'home'.
  • Whenever taking damage from a 'poison' source: Shift 'home' position one half aggro bubble radius, in a direction away from the source of the damage.

Questions: What can we prove or disprove? What is relevant to this document? Yamagawa 01:54, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Losing Aggro, sacrifice

This is a legitimate way to lose aggro, and if you've ever long distance pulled charr and lost their aggro this way you will realize it is significant to how aggro works: When you pull group A with a bow, and they break aggro, group A runs back a distance, resets aggro, and walks back to where they were when aggro was initiated. If you pull group A, and they stop to kill something, and are outside your aggro bubble when they do, the group immediately resets aggro, and walks back. They skip the running, and if you re-aggro them immediately, you will find the aggro radius they use is consistent for where you re-aggrod them, not for the original pull.

As such, I'm adding this back, but with an elaboration as to why sacrifice is significant from an aggro perspective. Yamagawa 02:27, 6 October 2008 (UTC)