Bard - Pulls to much aggro

Doing Tartarus Zombie Room. I am with a level 140 fire spec mage (Isshi) and only casting 3 bard skills and I pull aggro off him. I am casting heal and Sttagnation, This should not happen.

 

/facepalm
Bard isnt pulling to much aggro.
Aggro is broken and they refuse to fix bugs.
Aggro is applied on every dot/hot/buff/heal. They refuse to look at how aggro works. The issue isnt bard. The issue is DoTs HoTs Buffs and Heals.
That is why taunt is not effective. Reported countless times. But instead of listening they banned the reporters.

 

so very true, they can not handle the truth

 

I think Aggro in general needs a complete rewrite. It's just that bad:

Their person that does balance should work on this.

I would use a bitbucket with coefficients taking into account a wide variety of things utilizing enemy class based coefficients.

Zombies should particularly be angered by melee and other direct attacks, as well as being territorial. Pretty much all undead should be territorial but territorial aggro should apply equally to all people in the their territory.

Only smarter enemies should be too concerned about non-damaging status effects.

 

Some questions for you @Loaffer :
1- You begin by saying that you're a Fire spec mage ... Are you using your fire ? (If not, then why mention it ?)
2- You say you're casting 3 bard skills, but only mention 2 of them... What's the 3rd.
3- You say you're pulling aggro off "him"... What is "him" and what is "him" doing ?

 

He's not a fire mage, he's with a fire mage. So I'm guessing that is what "him" is and at least sort of what "him" is doing.

 

Aggro is weird in this game. I often get a lot of aggro if I heal others a lot...
Also I get aggro if I am closest to enemies...
The Ring of the mouse and the Escape skill work only sometimes. I usually have to cast GM escape skill twice to get rid of aggro, so that my pet with way over GM passive can get the aggro without doing anything other than getting too close to NPC while chopping trees.

 

Thread Resurrection: "Arrgo, are it's calculations still a mystery ?"

I looked everywhere and there doesn't seem much on this subject that is not pure guess work, assumption or vague.



What gives what amount of aggro?
What makes passive aggro and active aggro?
When using "escape" skill, doesn't aggro just pop back up?

~Time Lord~

 

Chris' Daily Work Blog | Page 8 | Shroud of the Avatar Forum

On this page of Chris' Daily Work Blog, he goes into detail on how he balanced Aggro generation the last time, might be worth a read (or possibly re-read).

Bard songs generate insane amounts of aggro, especially Atonal Aria, Melody of Mending and Psalm of Stagnation, because they are 3 songs that tick every 2 seconds doing either damage, heal or debuff. Playing one out of the 3 can easily steal aggro from many things!

 

Here's what I got from those Chris comments...

~START~ Chris, Aug 21, 2018
Back from my trip. Monday was a day of meetings and planning.

Today is real work. Started by fixing a bunch of code rot in the system I use to dump all information from all skills into a spreadsheet format. This was get ready to overhaul the aggro generation for all skills. As expected, the aggro values were all over the place. Quick brain dump on what I'm targeting. Damage skills already come with aggro from the damage so these should be zero in most cases. Buffing yourself or others should produce mild aggro (10), moving a target should produce modest aggro (20), healing a friend should produce aggro proportional to amount healed but at a lower rate than would be generated by doing that much damage, debuffs and stuns should produce large aggro (40). Modifying that, heavy armor skills should generate extra agro and setting a handful to certain values outside these guidance numbers, like coup de grace for instance.

Cruising on these and expect to have them cleaned up and normalized

Rune aggro adjusted for 121 different skills. The standout issue will probably surprise no one... Rapid Fire skill in ranged was adding significant aggro PER ARROW. So a normal high level archer with decent bow could generate significantly more aggro with a single rapid fire than a tank could generate by taunting multiple times.

Heavy armor skills use the numbers I mentioned above but x2 so if you want to hold aggro, use heavy armor. Shields use the above numbers but x1.5.

Moving on to loot table updates now...

~END~ Chris, Aug 21, 2018

Great thanks as always @Violet Ronso !

I'm guessing this is as close as we cn currently come to understanding aggro values.

The following is an old comment from a player on arrgo I found which seems interesting...

~START~
Theory: If i understood it right, damage has a multiplier of one. So each hit point of damage given add one point to aggro. Escape remove 100 points, taunts adds 100 points. For me this means: as long your damage is less then 100 per hit, taunt will help to keep aggro. When your damage is more then 100 HP per hit the taunt becomes useless. Same with escape, as long your actions adds less then 100 aggro points you can escape.
~END~

Here's another dead thread which has some reports from Sep 6, 2018 ,which is just after Chris's Aug 21, 2018 aggro adjustment.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/taming-and-aggro.140823/


One very note worthy comment from that thread comes from @kaeshiva ...

~START~
I've been playing around with my tamer alt a lot recently and echo some of the above sentiments.

Initial aggro -

who the mob saw first, me or the pet - seems to be one of the largest deciding factors. If the mob saw me first, even if I do absolutely nothing -and am not even in combat mode, it is coming for me and it seems no amount of my pet chomping on its ankles will move it to the pet. I actually had my pet completely kill something on its own while I ran in circles, never hitting it, simply because it saw me first.

Heal aggro -

I find that unless I go overboard, usually if something is attacking the pet, it will continue to do so. I have to actually make a conscious effort to pull aggro off by healing. My life magic on this character is not -great- though.
This is mostly fine, assuming you have no intention whatsoever of helping your pet with DPS. As in Vero's tests above I participated in the "pets vs. dragons" event where we nailed down the main problem, which is....

Damage aggro-

The pets. vs. dragon things came about as a kind of whimsy, to see if a pet could tank it. And it can, with sufficient attention to healing said pet. The problem was, nobody could help it - the second an avatar did so much as an autoattack, pet loses aggro and its almost impossible to get it back, unless the target of the dragon's wrath runs out into the hallway for example. So the idea was hm, if avatars can't hit it or pet can't keep aggro, what about other lesser pets? So the experiment was to have 1 "good" pet (we used Minerva's "Arkstarr" for this, I don't know her relative levels, but everything relevant is way over 100). Arkstarr was set up as the tank. We did a few iterations of this to optimise the pet helpers, but most the rest of our group had no taming specialization at all, we just were handed whistles.

The result was, if avatars do NO damage, and all damage is done by pets only, and we all helped heal Arkstarr a bit so no one person was spamming life magic - the dragon would die. This whole process of course took considerably longer than it would have for Vero to just go unleash on the dragon and kill it, but it was fun, which was the point.

But it brought up a kinda important point about taming.

While the pets are capable of being tanks - ie, they have the mitigation for it if properly healed, aggro is a real problem. The pet has no way to taunt, and while the pet can keep aggro on its own over a small amount of heals, the moment the tamer actually tries to participate in the fight, the pet becomes little more than a mobile damage-over-time spell with questionable pathing. In most games that have a dedicated "pet class" the entire purpose of many of the pets is to 'save the squishy ranged and/or mage type character' by using the pet to TANK. The pet didn't need to have impressive damage, or even any damage, what it needed to have, was impressive hate generation and, hopefully, some sort of active 'taunt' skill. Our pets don't even have functional controls,much less a combat bar or activatable skills of their own.

I find that despite how much XP i have in taming, one attack from the avatar and you can forget about the pet holding aggro.
It takes far longer to watch the pet kill something without your participation than if you just shoot it a couple of times.
Then you realize that you shoot it for 5x the damage the pet does.
And then you realize for most things, you actually have it mostly dead by the time your pet actually gets in range to hit it, if you pull rather than sending the pet to mosey in first.
And then you ask yourself, why am I sacrificing my neck slot and half my focus pool for this? I'll just shoot it.
And then you say, why do I have all this XP in taming, when I could just make my shooting skill even better?

Don't get me wrong. Taming's come a long way. But without tank utility, the whole dynamic seems off.

I'm not saying the pets need to be -stronger- I think we're in a good place with their relative hardiness and damage output. But I think we do need to either give some pets, like bears, a significant hate generation buff per hit to give the player/pet dynamic that needed utility. At the moment, for normal play the best use of the pet seems to be as an interceptor to grab initial aggro when you're trying to harvest something, or, to keep one target busy if you're engaging multiples. Of course, the minute you use an area of effect attack, its all coming after you anyway, and then the pet is reduced to a low dps anklebiter that isn't accomplishing a great deal. I do a lot of parsing of my overall damage output with the pet, and the pet usually does about 10% of the damage that my avatar can over a set period of time. A 10% damage boost is not -crap-, not by any means, but the cost for that 10% is very high - giving up a gear slot, giving up half your focus pool, the XP investment, and the distraction of having to look out for, heal, and try to navigate said pet in combat - etc. etc. But it remains the case that the main reason I keep the pet is so I don't get interrupted as often mining cause sometimes the monsters see the pet first. (My pet's name is actually "Elysium Security" I think taming has got a LOT more potential than this. And I think aggro is the key.
~END~

The above comments from other players resurrected by: ~Time Lord~

 

Does the "Escape" skill help at all?

 

It does, but depending on how many targets it can end up being useless. With my Pet I can transfer aggro back to it when I do pull, but in a group healing or against hordes with Atonial it's useless.

 

I found that "Escape" has a very useless distance it effects. Unless what is seeking you as it's target is right next to you, Escape provides nothing at all in the way of escaping.
~TL~

 

At 120 it has a radius of 17. How is that "useless"?

 

While running through instances, I found that ranged mobs would still pursue and attack me.
I'm also not sure what a ... 17 means.

I must not be using it in the right way, or in it's best ways.
~TL~

 

Escape must be used to transfer aggro you have accumulated over to another target, so if you are playing solo, the aggro reduction is useless, unless you have a pet.

 

i was just typing that someone mentioned that in another post. must have been you question. do you have to target a friendly in order for that to work or is the transfer automatic.

 

No, basically mobs will attack the target with the most Aggro, so if I build up lets say 150 Aggro per second, and my ally builds up 125 aggro per second, I will be the one being attacked. Not I'm up to 750 Aggro and my ally is up to 625, and I use Escape once or twice, not my Aggro is lower than his, so the mob will now target him. Escape is an AoE around me, so any enemy that I've built up aggro towards and is inside my Escape radius will see their hate towards me lower, and potentially change their attention to someone else.

 

The only time I use Escape is in groups when I get the attention of one or more boss level mobs. Basically, if someone is tanking and the mob starts going after me then I use it to shift it's attention back to the tank.

Escape is useless solo.

 

When I was using Escape, it was on a "leather armor melee tank", which worked if there were other players around me that had heavy armor.

My wife saw the movie "Free Guy" and got interested in making a healer chr and so we started experimenting using enchanted cloth armor, which gave every impression that the cloth armor greatly reduced aggro.


(Anytime and in any way my wife shows even the slightest interst in SOTA, I always jump at the chance to get her in-game. So we made a chr named "Guy" and set ourselves to tag teaming his level-up).

Guy uses seceral different suits of cloth armor that's all enchanted a bit different depending on what Guy is doing: one suit for Health, another for armor endurance and another for Intel+Focus.

Guy uses Life, Sun and Water Magic on a melee swords build... and she likes the summoned Ice Element though she hasn't used it much. When I asked why she wasn't using it, she said she wanted to use it when solo hunting.

But what I've been most noticing, is that using basic X3 times enchanted cloth armor seems really low aggro in groups.

Does anyone know what what effect, if any, using cloth as opposed to Heavy Armor in solo hunt will mean as far as aggro?

~TL~