Aggro Management: damage vs. hate vs. healing

[JeffBship]

<DIV> Bottom line for those that don’t want to read a long post: <P> One damage = One hate = One hp of healing</P> <P>I have been looking throught these forums and could not find a good post on aggro vs. damage vs. healing.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Maybe someone has already posted about this but I couldn’t find it among the clutter.<SPAN>  </SPAN>So I did a few experiments.</P> <P> For my experiments, I two-boxed my Guardian and my Templar. Mobs were Rivervale crows.<SPAN>  </SPAN>I used the combatstats (<A target=_blank href="http://www.combatstats.com/">www.combatstats.com</A>) for parsing.<SPAN>  </SPAN>I took off my imbued pants to keep them from doing any dps.</P> <P>Experiment One:<SPAN>  </SPAN>Body pull with the guardian.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Melee with the guardian until 500 damage is done, then turn off melee and turn my back to the mob to keep from doing any riposte damage to it.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Wait for the crow to start hurting me…doesn’t happen.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Take off all my armor…turn off all my buffs…now the crow is hurting me.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Wait until the crow has done about 1k damage to the guardian.<SPAN>  </SPAN>At this point I start healing the Guardian using instant heals.<SPAN>  </SPAN>As soon as the amount of hp healed goes over 500, the crow turns and attacks the Templar.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Did this a couple of times.</P> <P>   Conclusion:<SPAN>  </SPAN>Each hp healed counts for the same aggro as each point of damage done to a mob.</P> <P>Experiment Two:<SPAN>  </SPAN>Same as Experiment One, only using reactive heals.<SPAN>  </SPAN>As expected, I healed the guardian up to full health and continued for 10 min, total healing was upwards of 5k, and the crow never turned to the Templar.</P> <P>   Conclusion:<SPAN>  </SPAN>Templar reactive heals do NOT add aggro to the Templar (at least not yet)</P> <P> </P> <P>Experiment Three:<SPAN>  </SPAN>Instead of using melee, the Guardian uses taunting challenge and such.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Hate isn’t shown in my parser, so I just examined the spell and assumed that one hate was equal to one damage and added these two numbers.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Did a couple of the taunting attacks and turned around.<SPAN>  </SPAN>The crow turned to attack the templar when the total amount of healing was equal to the Guardians damage plus the advertised hate of the CA’s.</P> <P>   Conclusion:<SPAN>  </SPAN>When stacking up aggro in the spell description, one hate = one damage</P> <P> </P> <P>Experiment Four:<SPAN>  </SPAN>This time, all the guardian did was body check the crow, run back next to the Templar, and use Commanding Presence.<SPAN>  </SPAN>This time the crow turned to attack the Templar at about 450 healing from the Templar.</P> <P>   Conclusion:<SPAN>  </SPAN>Commanding Presence adds 450 aggro to the Guardian.<SPAN>  </SPAN>This is with a level 45 Guardian…I’m sure it changes some with level, until it’s grey at least.<SPAN>  </SPAN></P> <P> </P> <P>Note:<SPAN>  </SPAN>This was with a single mob.<SPAN>  </SPAN>I will repeat the experiment with different sizes of grouped mobs to find out if it’s 450 to every mob in the encounter, but I suspect that it’s 450 divided amongst them.  If anyone has already done this, please post your results.</P> <P> </P> <P>It's easy to calculate how much aggro/second you can put out.<SPAN>  </SPAN>I did the following:<SPAN>  </SPAN>for each taunt or taunting attack, take the total amount of damage + hate and divide by the recycle time for that CA, giving a aggro/second for if you spam that CA everytime it comes up.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Turns out that most of them recycle about every 8-10 seconds, take about 2 seconds to cast, and there are 5-6 separate timers.<SPAN>  </SPAN>This means that you can cycle through 5 of them and continuosly be casting a taunt or taunting attack until you are oop.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Depending on your situation, you can choose the 5 that are most power efficient for you, or the 5 that generate the most aggro for you…which ones these are depends on what you have App4 or Adept3 and your level.<SPAN>  </SPAN>When I added up my max aggro this way, it came out to 202 aggro/sec. (at level 45 Guardian, all at least App4, a few Adept3's)</P> <P> </P> <P>This was later tested in a group with an assasin.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Basically what I did was ask her to start out easy and slowly increase dps each encounter.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Validating the theory, she pulled aggro when she hit about 210 dps.<SPAN>  </SPAN></P> <P> </P> <P> </P> <P>So here’s what I’m thinking for standing groups, guildies or raids or whatever:</P> <P>1.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Calculate your aggro/sec, validate with experiments if you want to.</P> <P>2.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Strongly urge all heavy dps types in your group/raid to use a parser.</P> <P>3.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Tell them what dps you can hold aggro against (i.e. I tell them to keep dps under 200 if they don’t want aggro)</P> <P>4.<SPAN>  </SPAN>It’s THEIR JOB to watch their own dps and keep it under your stated limit.</P> <P>5.<SPAN>  </SPAN>It’s YOUR JOB to crank out the advertised hate/sec.</P> <P>I think that this method may be a lot more exact that the generic advice of keeping the mage's power on par with the mobs health...and if the mage can use power faster then things die faster which I think all would agree is a good thing.</P> <P> </P> <P>Advice for healers:<SPAN>  </SPAN>Combatstats does not show amount healed…if anyone knows a good parser that shows heals with realtime heads up display please let me know.<SPAN>  </SPAN>All I can think of is for HoT’s simply examine the spell and calculate the healing per second…stack up all the HoT’s you want while keeping the healing per second below the advertised hate/second.<SPAN>  </SPAN>For Instant Heals, take the amount it heals and divide by the Guardians hate/sec.<SPAN>  </SPAN>This gives the frequency that you can use this heal without getting aggro.<SPAN>  </SPAN>For example, an instant 500hp heal vs. 200 hate/sec….<SPAN>    </SPAN>500/200 = 2.5sec.<SPAN>  </SPAN>So you could use this heal once every 2.5sec without getting aggro.<SPAN>  </SPAN>(I know, the timer is probably longer anyway).<SPAN>  </SPAN>For reactive heals…stack up all you want and don’t worry about aggro until they change it in some future patch.</P> <P> </P> <P>Before you say there is no way that you can spam 500hp heals and not get aggro, remember the entering argument is that the Guardian is spamming out 200 hate/sec.<SPAN>  </SPAN>This is most likely NOT the case in most xp groups.<SPAN>  </SPAN>It’s hopefully the case in a raid.<SPAN>  </SPAN>If you want to have less downtime, just pick the two or three most power efficient taunts and calculate those.<SPAN>  </SPAN>You’ll end up doing 3 CA’s, waiting for them to recycle, then doing them again…I get about 110 hate/sec this way.<SPAN>  </SPAN>In this case, I ask the dps’ers to limit themselves to 100 dps, and the healer can cast the 500hp heal every 5 seconds or longer.<SPAN>  </SPAN>This level of effort seems to work pretty well for xp’ing when you are basically sitting in one spot and pulling mobs to the group and want to minimize downtime….my PGT can just about keep me at full power at that level of effort.</P> <P>So there are my recent experiments and conclusions.<SPAN>  </SPAN>Any discussion would be welcome.  Hope my logic isn't to twisted and confusing.</P> <P> </P> <P>Glubb (46 Guardian, Toxx)</P><SPAN>Oddo (40 Templar, Toxx)</SPAN></DIV>

[Pa]

<P>Nice info, thanks for taking your time to do it.</P> <P>Buffs definitely add more hate per person it hits, so commanding presence hitting 6 people instead of 2 should be in the neighborhood of 1300-1500 instead of 450'ish.</P> <P>Theyre going to have to add tons more hate to our taunts when they fix reactives heh, not to mention toning down the stuns, stifles and power drains so we can actually use them, reactives are such a crutch right now its not even semi-amusing anymore.</P>

[Nazo]

<P>Excellent work ! I am dreading the day reactive heal agro is fixed :smileyvery-happy: </P> <P>Attack based agro generating spells are nice but still plain Taunt should be our main agro generation tool.</P> <p>Message Edited by Nazowa on <span class=date_text>07-06-2005</span> <span class=time_text>11:56 PM</span>

[pharacyde]

<P>Hi, </P> <P>Nice post</P> <P>but, there are other ways to keep agro, and to loose agro, I know that a grp buff in a full grp makes alot more agro then in an half full grp. Rangers, mages have hate lowering spells ... It's not a straight formula, unless you just use heals, dps and hate</P>

[JeffBship]

<DIV>Concerning 'pure' taunts vs attack taunts...</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I think the attack taunts are worth using in almost all situations.  I currently have Deafen Adept1, Vengeful Strike Adept3, Taunting Assault App4, and Slate's Invigorating Threat.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Deafen, the 'pure' taunt, costs 47 power, adds 426-521 hate, drains 31-32 power, and slows target 2%</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Slates costs 48 power, adds 411 hate and does 57-96 damage (essentially the SAME aggro as deafen), but also buffs my mitigation by 126, slows target 5% (don't know if they stack)</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Vengeful strike, for 62 power, adds 484 hate and 69-115 damage (so a little MORE aggro than deafen), increases my sta by 23, and slows target 5%.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Taunting assault costs me 87 power, adds 463 hate and does 102-170 damage...so this is the MOST aggro i can do in a single CA but also is the least power efficient and has a 30 second timer.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Based on all that, if I only need 100 hate/sec i'll alternate Vengeful strike and Slate's...I get both the buffs and kill the mob faster.  In that situation I only use deafen once per encounter due to it's range, I can add some hate as the mob is inbound.  If I'm maximizing hate, I'll hit the highest hate generating spell each time one comes up...I put them in order on my hotbar to make this easy.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Also, while I haven't experimented enough to swear to it, I'd say that the added buff/debuffs on the attack taunts cause some extra aggro.</DIV><p>Message Edited by JeffBship on <span class=date_text>07-07-2005</span> <span class=time_text>02:55 AM</span>

[Nazo]

<DIV> <DIV>Concerning 'pure' taunts vs attack taunts...</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I think the attack taunts are worth using in almost all situations. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>There are lots of mean monsters out there that will riposte you for 6K damage :smileyvery-happy:</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Trust me when I say that you will enter fights where you will only be taunting and hiding behind your tower shield with attack off...   :smileywink:</DIV></DIV>

[RafaelSmith]

Nice post. You might wanna try out EQ2 Companion parser.  It can track heals, etc.  Might be able to use its triggers/custom variable feature to jury rig up something to track taunts. http://p067.ezboard.com/feqcompanionfrm1 <div></div>

[Baldaena]

<P>mmm, I think you should check two points in your test :</P> <P>- Existence of a special aggro bonus for your first atk (it was the case in eqlive) </P> <P>- aggro decay (it was something like 100pt/30sec for T2 mobs 4 month ago) </P> <P>These two points can modify the meaning of your test</P> <P> </P> <P>Balda</P>

[aislynn00]

<P>I don't think you should rely entirely on attack taunts.  As far as I can tell, avoided, parried, and blocked taunt attacks don't generate their taunt component hate, so against mobs with a great deal of avoidance, such as monks, you could end up missing repeatedly and thus lose aggro.  With straight taunts, such as Deafen and Protect, conversely, there is no risk at all; they represent guaranteed hate every time you are able to use them.</P> <P></P> <HR> Khayne Darkmere<BR>Leader of Elysian Dawn<BR>Lucan D'Lere