Aggro mechanics / Sheathe weapon through DoT

This is a request for devs to look and change Aggro mechanics to allow a weapon to stay sheathed while taking DoT damage.

What is happening is that damage over time effects are counting as new aggressive moves by the creature that placed the effect on the user. This causes an Avatar that has sheathed their weapon to pull their weapon back out, which cancels the timer for leaving combat.

I submit that the aggressive move was to place the effect on in the first place, and not subsequent damage over time resulting from the effect. Gameplay will be much smoother if DoT no longer counts as aggressive, making the mechanics more user friendly.

One downside could be that, in some cases, the affected Avatar might start non-combat regenerating before the DoT effect has run it's course, causing the attacker to need to maintain aggro in order to prevent this, which actually adds a dynamic to PvP cases of this that might be interesting. If anyone can think of any longer lasting DoT's that would qualify in this situation please post them, but I can't think of any DoT's that are long enough for the Avatar to still be affected by the time the leave combat timer would be over anyways. Let me know!

At any rate, I don't enjoy the current mechanics. I end up putting my weapon away only to have my Avatar pull it back out again due to simple rend or fire effects all too often.. Pulling my weapon back out to defend myself from often dead creatures no longer moving..

 

I agree with this. Even without taking DoT damage it takes far too long to exit combat even when there's nothing around you to 'disengage' from. This delays your out of combat regen kicking in, which just means more standing around waiting for focus after a fight. With proposed movement speed in combat nerfs this is only going to be more critical.

I understand not letting people disengage while they are actively being attacked or engaged in a fight, but once you've killed or put significant distance between you and what you were fighting, sheathing should take you out of combat - the act of sheathing here is basically saying "I am not going to fight" but it takes the game far too long to react to this.

 

Yes, I also have the same problem with rend, I have to keep putting my weapon away to get out of combat and get focus back.

It may be a known bug, but does not seem to be fixed yet.

 

Yup... agreed.. +1

 

+1 to this, how many times have I attempted to sheath my weapon to open a chest and be forced back into combated 3-5 times before finally being done due to a last second fire arrow from a skeleton mage which does the second after, leaving no one in sight, simply forcing me to wait for no reason. Sure, I could use douse or something, but I actually just feel like a Skyrim NPC when this happens...
"Pants still a bit on fire, take a bit of hurt from that fire, take out weapon looking for the enemy"

 

i wouldn't even mind that except that before they put autodefend in, you would eventually go out of combat when the dot finished. being kept in combat by the dot is fine, having it re-draw the weapon is something else entirely and was only introduced in r40.

 

As of build 790, the time to drop out of combat mode once sheathed has been virtually eliminated, which I'm sure is making DOT redraw more noticeable now. So I figured I'd give this thread a little bump. Not sure how much work is involved with this fix but I still feel as though it would make combat a bit smoother.

Removing the delay for dropping combat on sheathe is nice though and I'm enjoying the change immensely. This I would call the icing on the cake if it gets implemented.

Again the idea is to make DOT ticks no longer cause Avatars to unsheathe their weapons. Only direct aggravations should warrant such action.