Taming and Aggro

Anyone else having and issue with their pets holding aggro? I can be naked with a -10 aggro cloak and a -33 aggro ring and I will still pull aggro healing normally.

 

Yup, I have had multiple occasions when I send my pet in, it hits the mob then the mob aggros onto me and that is without me doing anything. I have even ran in circles and mobs refuse to aggro on my pet and my pet ends up killing them without ever taking any aggro.

 

Pet holding aggro + you only healing = all reward and no risk

All reward and no risk means an unbalanced state of the game. Every play style needs an element of risk. For tamers that is a mob deciding to attack you instead of just attacking the pet.

Doesn't seem to be broken in any way.

 

I will have to disagree as that is the whole point in being a tamer.....

Just look at UO for example one of the best taming in any game I've ever played.

 

A tamer with good combat skills can kill off 3-4 mobs before your pet kills off 1 mob. Anyone using a pet for all his damage is playing the game wrong.

 

the UO taming people keep saying all taming should be like, for those who dont know, was like this:

Some of the strongest mosnters in the game could be tamed by tamers, and then trained to be stronger than they were in the wild. The tamer would then have their pet fight some of the strongest things in the game (usually dragons and wyrms and demons) with the only attention on thier part having to heal thier pet also with no chance of pulling any agro while doing so

Taming far far outclassed any other way of mass-killing end-game mobs in UO which is why there are folks who dont agree that in a game where everyone can have every skill, taming should be the end all be all of PvE liek it was in UO.

Having a pet that is nothin special in damage but has an ability to generate alot of aggro i wouldnt see a problem with, but NOT like they had in UO.

 

Pet agro needs to be boosted, right now pets do crap for damage at high levels. Damage = agro and so the pets can't hold agro. If we can start taming these new bears it should get much better depending on how far they scale down.

 

Tanky looking pets could do with a aggro bonus

 

hmmm I never pulled the aggro by using "pet healing" but I know that healing with life tree magic skill pull aggro like it does in every group.

 

We have done some testing with only pets fighting a dragon; (lots of fun btw, group of pets killing dragons like it's nothing)

When you 'solo' (Tamer + Pet) the dragon, the aggro will jump over super easy to the tamer. This will take a few life spells for the aggro to switch. With only Pet Healing it does not seem to happen.

When you 'group' (Tamers + their pets) the dragon, the aggro will stay on the dragon aslong as there is 1 pet doing more dps. (makes sence) example on this: when we fought with only bears VS dragons, the aggro was allover the place but when we added 1 corp in this mix, the extra dot from poison would keep the aggro mostly on the corp.



we found this very fun to do, i would advise to try it cus you might think it's a blast aswell

Tamer Party!

 

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.

 

I also found this...

Pet attacks Mob A.
Player attacks Mob B.
Player doing damage on Mob B only, pulls aggro on Mob A.

Pet and Player were separated as to not hit each others Mob, no heals on Pet as well.
Pet lost aggro on its Mob just by Player doing aggro on a different Mob.

I am going to test this again later.

 

I will also like to add that I don't think aggro is just a tamer/pet issues.

-Scenario 1: Me and my brother killing a mob I am doing all damage yet it chases my brother and vice versa.

-Scenario 2: Me and my brother and his pet killing a mob me and his pet doing all the damage yet still chases my brother and vice versa.

-Scenario 3: Me and my brother killing a mob I am doing all the damage and constantly casting taunt yet still chases my brother.

I think overall there is a aggro issues and don't quote me on this but I believe weeks ago Chris did mention that there was a issue with aggro between players.

Another issue I have with mobs is aggro range/mob reset.

-Scenario 1: Enter zone mob aggros from across the map ( little exaggerated ) but that is how it feels.

-Scenario 2: Fighting a tough boss type mob(normal mob works too) you have it almost killed but you take one step back and boss/mob gets reset and goes back to full life.

"which is why there are folks who dont agree that in a game where everyone can have every skill"

That is a whole other issue completely but I will say that I thought the whole classless system was cool at first but I am no longer feeling that I am missing the UO 7xGM style of game play.

 

I almost never use pets, but it seems like if they generate very low agro, you could use ice field and neither one of you would get hit much.