Pets and "sight aggro"

This is something that has bothered me for a long time, and while it's not exclusively a problem with pets, it's important when soloing with a pet, whether summoned or tamed, and improving taming has been important lately.

Here is the scenario:
- Monster sees you
- Monster starts running to you
- Command pet to attack monster
- Pet attacks monster while it's still running
- Monster continues to run to you
- Monster attacks you
- Pet keeps attacking monster
- Monster continues to attack you (at least for a while) even if you don't fight back

Basically, the point here is that aggro should be about the level of threat posed by an enemy of the monster. In this case, the monster is considering you just standing there to be more important than the pet trying to bite its face off. Making up some arbitrary numbers, it's as though the pet attack is worth, say, 100 points of threat, while seeing you ("sight aggro") was worth 1000 points of threat, which is way out of line with common sense. You might argue that it could think that the pet master was more important, but that assumes that the monster is smart enough to know or even understand that your pet is depending on you to control it.

In my opinion (and my experience with the FFXI aggro system), sight aggro should be worth the minimum number of threat points. FWIW, commanding the pet to attack could be worth some threat, but again, that assumes that the pet is sufficiently intelligent. A kobold might understand this, but (say) a small spider shouldn't be that smart.

This can also be a thing in a party if the first person seen happens to be a light-armor type, and it takes a few attacks for someone else to get the mob's attention. I don't have enough experience with that situation to know how the game behaves.

(In FFXI this was called "enmity", and some crazy people even managed to reverse-engineer the math and find the quanta size. There were also two kinds, cumulative, which always increases, and volatile, which has bigger spikes and decreases with time, requiring the tank to work to keep the mob's attention. A big problem was they only used 16-bit math and it was too easy to saturate and max out CE. Healing someone in the party also generated enmity. Some monsters had special attacks that would reset these values while doing damage the main target, so the tank would lose a lot of HP, the healer would heal-bomb him, then the mob would suddenly turn on the healer, who if a noob, would start running away and nobody could catch up with the mob to pull it off him. Fun!)
https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Enmity

 

I have noticed an issue with pet commands.....i try to use the default key to get a pet to engage....critter pet not summoned.....and they sit there and do nothing. By the time they do attack i have the mob killed or almost killed. Just for testing purposes i even took my weapon off so that the pet would do its job. Nope still kinda buggy. I changed their demeanor as well to aggressive and still no change in its behavior. I been working up the other skills they just put in and its still a bit aggravating that it doesnt do what it should.

 

The delay that a pet takes to move into attack position and the time it takes to attack once in position isn’t really a bug, the ai is taking that long to determine what to do. It is a pain point that has been recognized by Chris and a Mira was created for a dev to look into what can be done to speed up the reaction time in both situations.