Has aggro been fixed?

Here's the video, the above-mentioned dragon death is around 2:58:30 - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/317333609 . Alphaine was indeed the host, he used blades, not bludgeon, he also used the corpion poison while I used the festering death. I also used blind/fireflies/disabling/blinding shot for debuffs and healing ray for heals. Plus meteor shower for extra damage. Heh. Probably the poison DOT that did me in. Thanks all for your thorough responses.

 

I was just kinda joking around after the only auto attack and aimed shot comment, did not mean to offend, sorry. Well, whatever Sara does to tank ( rends for non undead and then just lots of damage ) works extremely well. I buff sara with everything I can, 5/6 stack all my hots on him and try and do all the healing for him ( he will use pots on a big hit sometimes ) and usually dealing my own damage with polearms and puncture does dots too, and even sometimes have a ring of fire and meteor shower going as well, or sometimes just pure fire and tons of dots, and he STILL holds agro. Like I mean many times over and over sara will pull boss trolls, dragons, anything we are killing and I never get the agro.

I remember when we started to duo the dragon in grunvald over and over and I was trying to get the agro cuz sara does not cast magic and therefore no death shield, so I can take a better hit, so I figured it was safer but he just gets agro right away, and beneficent blessing makes my heals bigger on him anyways, so I gave up and just let him tank now LOL. So lets see if maybe Sara can give some tips @Sara Dreygon .

 

Hey, I get it, Mac. Before, the aggro was a lot worse, I learned to dodge and cover, a lot. Not sure what I was expecting after the aggro change, probably a fight that is a bit more fair. My tanks are totally spoiled with debuffs and heals though, so maybe that has to change lol.

 

Ok, watched the video, and the times he was running around not dealing damage and you were, and healing him, thats what got ya. When he flys, you gotta still be hitting him. If you just follow the fireflies you can see where to hit to keep hitting him while hes in the air. As well, he only got 1 rend on before he ran around the first time and didnt get another on for quite a while after you already had the agro. Just watch this video, and see how fast sara gets the agro from me, and see how fast he is to follow the dragon and be hitting it while hes in the air. As well, that dragon pretty much constantly has 3 rend ticking on him. the first 48 seconds are me buffing.

 

I watched the video and here are the points I could Identify:

• He is using a slow 2h weapon with an instant DD poison which isn't optimal.
• No taunt was used during the whole fight.
• When you had aggro no Escape was used
• He is wearing light armor
• The dragon flies up imediately and he runs lands and flies up fast again, responsible DPS stop shooting
• Rend wasn't stacked 3 times and wasn't on the dragon for a long time

To be fair it was an unlucky start, but it is kinda common for a dragon to fly at the start of a fight. The fight started and he attacked the dragon 4 times, with no rend or any other damage over time effect. Than he was running away while you were nuking him with ignite weapon, poison, meteor, disabling shot aimed shot and blinding shot (?). He landed again and he managed to get 5 attacks in this time but at the cost of eating one fireball, which you healed in addition to the damage you were doing.

And I can not see if a troll belt was used.

 

Taunt early and taunt often

Phlunk

 

I feel we are still missing the point here... it is still hard for a "tank" to maintain aggro without dealing a great amount of damage. And not just damage, the specific kind of damage. Taunt is better now, but still not effective - in pretty much every other game Taunt puts you to the top of the aggro list + a % more - here it adds 100 somethings. I know there is more talk of aggro generating abilities.

 

It actually isn't, thats What @Mac2 and @Xeng are explaining. Sure, you can DPS a lot, but your tank should not be worrying about that. First of all if you want to truly be tanking super efficiently, Heavy armor should be basic. Body Slam should be generating 80 Base agro + Damage (40 for a stun, x2 for heavy armor skill). Taunt will generate tons of agro too. Next off, your tank should try to take care of most debuffs : Fireflies, Blind, Debuffing poisons like Festering or Spider, stuff like that. If your tank can't add them all to his deck, split it amongst members of the party. Next, you tank should try to get a DoT. If he is using a bludgeon, then make him use a DoT poison instead, this will help heaps.

The fact that Tila's tank is using light armor, no poison and bludgeons means he has very poor agro generation, meanwhile Tila is using all the debuffs and DoT's that she can, generating heaps of agro. The only time I lose agro when tanking for my team is when I die (forgetting to unequip lich ring vs undead bosses is VERY stupid...) or when another Heavy armor dude spams Heavy skills & debuffs/CCs.

 

Finally responding, was traveling:

• Alphaine was not wearing light armor - the chest piece is chainmail. He usually generates a ton of aggro - just look at that same video.
• Alphaine used a 2h sword.
• He also used a corpion poison. He didn't use Taunt or Troll belt.
• Not sure how effective Taunt is - people still complain, I don't use it. Should he use taunt or troll belt when we party up? Probably.
• I don't use Escape or Ring of the Mouse because in practice they didn't really work for my avatar before R58. Please correct me if Escape has been fixed.
• Archer auto-attack: I was hoping for DPS and heals so didn't really care to turn that off. Auto-attack helps with keeping focus in check, so unless we have an ashen bow for archers, I will keep using it. (And yes, I'm leveling aetheric feedback to 120, use focus on the armor, etc.)

Cheers!

 

It was just the dragon getting away and not getting the rends on right away. He might want to try a locked rend and start with a 6/5 stack, then do a 5/4 stack, then do a 3/4 stack. During this time when he will be stacking up the rends, its best not to attack and let him build up agro. Once those 3 rend are ticking away, you should be good to go as long as he stay hitting him as much as possible.

 

I do not mean any offense or disrespect to anyone here, this is just a topic I have a bit of passion about, as I've been tanking in Video Games for around 20 years now... I can't hold myself back

Your video shows an encounter where the tank deserved to lose agro, nothing is broken there. Looks like its working as intended to me.

You complain agro is completely broken but you have never even tried the number #1 agro generating tanking ability in the game? Ok then... wonder where we could start to fix things

Because people love bullet points:

• Taunt is extremely effective.
• 2h swords are very slow. He even says himself "I am hitting too slow" as his justification of losing agro and he is right! 1 hand weapons for tanking - 2 of them if no shield.
• Try Deadly Poison instead of Corp for a DOT (Damage over time) instead of DD (Direct Damage) poison, like others suggested.
• Again, taunt is extremely effective.
• You can leave auto attack on, but if I engage a Dragon and he flies immediately, and my Archer starts using special attacks while its in the air and I lose my initial agro because I can do nothing in this time, I will watch them die and explain to them why that was there own fault
• Try taunt!

Doing exactly this, works great.

 

It's the tank's fault, gotcha.

It's the archer's fault, too, because how dare the archer use the auto-attack using leather armor. Better switch to mage armor to ensure that the focus is alright.

 

I wonder if you can sneak some constatine pieces in? The boots and pants dont give much more fizzle then leather, you will get the weapon damage like hard leather, but you will also get focus. Can even use fustian straps to make it even more focus. Sara, vespers and I are all about the constatine armor now, cuz zerker stance kills your damage res anyways, and the extra focus is awesome for boss fights.

 

I'd also like to reiterate that Escape is not a "use once, lose aggro" button. The mob doesn't just forget you when you use it. Each use will only give you -100 aggro points, but it's a nice chunk of aggro reduction.

All of your attacks, heals, debuffs, etc. will be building up more than that -100 points of aggro back (and then some for someone with as many GM's and skills such as you).

You need to lock it on your hotbar and use it as often as you can squeeze it into your rotation.

This, along with your tank spamming rends, Taunt, poisons, any debuffs they can add... will allow the tank to hold aggro better.

 

The point here is that in the video you were showing there is no tank in there. There is a dps who tries to hold aggro by doing more damage than you do and due to 2 quick flight phases you did more damage.
I was under the impression that he was using light armor but even if it is heavy armor, if he is not using any heavy armor skills in order to generate aggro it makes no difference.
There was no effort by the "tank" to hold aggro and you did no effort to not get aggro, it is a bad situation and a bit unlucky but has nothing to do with the aggro system provided by this game, as no aggro changing mechanics were used at all. Just 2 dps where the one who wasn't supposed to did more dps than the other.

 

I will confirm that Taunt works great nowadays, so that can be a clear option to add in his deck when he plays in a group. Like others said, the poison he uses is not optimal, so you two could change poison types and that would increase your chances. Also have him stack Rend like Mac said before you jump into the fight will help so much. All in all it's not your roles that are messed up, it's just the way you attack it that isn't optimal. Get him to add Taunt to his bar, change poisons, and give him time to use rend at least once or twice and you guys will fond the fight SOOOO MUCH easier.

 

My groups have been seeing some weird aggro issues. We understand the use of taunt, rend, troll belt, escape etc. In most fights these work great for tanking. (In fact in most fights just using taunt is all you need to do to get/hold aggro) However there are 2 fights that lead me to believe something is messed up with aggro.

1) Taming Obsidian Destroyer. As soon as these were actually added to the game we went out to tame one. Taunt was 100% useless. The dps from auto attacks immediately pulled the bear off of me while I was spamming taunt. When all dps actually turned their backs to the bear then the healer pulled aggro. (Note: Using this same build, with the same dps, and same heals, we can do fight like the two big trolls in the lost vale with no aggro problems.)

2) The Lich in Ravenmoor Dungeon. The swordsman in our group has been tanking this and we are having crazy aggro problems. He swears he is taunting non stop but the lich doesnt seem to know that he exists. He thinks it is the room/zone. (When we camp the lich platform in the rise he is able to hold aggro on the lich and all the adds with no problems.)

I dont think it is is based on who is hosting the zone, because our tank was not hosting in any of the examples I mentioned and in 2 cases (obsidian destroyer, ravensmoor lich) he could not hold aggro and in 2 other cases (lost vale, the rise lich) he could hold aggro just fine.

 

To be fair we have the same issues and always when it happens it is when our tank isn't the host. When he is not the host that does not mean that it is always bugged, but everytime it is bugged he is not the host, so we are fairly sure that it has something to do with it.
Just yesterday we killed an Aether Dragon in open and there was someone else hosting, mid fight i got aggro and got killed, after i got resurected I healed my tank and quickly got aggro again, that really never happens when our tank is hosting the instance.

 

You say the tank was not the host in your 2 examples, and that is exactly my point.

If he was the host he would not have lost agro.

Seeing the exact same behavior on these 2, and if I as the tank am not host, its exactly like you say... I taunt 1000 times and its like I am invisible.

Please test it out Try it one with the tank as host and one without and you will very clearly see the difference I believe.

 

Also, please avoid using the infuriating language such as "complain." I am trying to figure out what went wrong and sincerely ask for input from people who have played enough video games to know the difference. My mother does plenty of "I told you so."