When this game was in beta I listened to an interview where the ANet dev stated that enemies will tend to target the closest player/pet dealing damage to them as a priority target.
I thought this was a great idea, it allows people to rush in, grab aggro, and throw up some blocks or blinds and protect their party before rolling out to let someone else pick up the torch and help buffer the damage from enemies.
It turns out, obviously, that this was not true. It seems that many monsters now have their own behaviors of who to attack when, and this is alright except that the player has no idea what that is.
I really want enemies to have the system of focusing closer targets. I think if monsters would do the prior where they focused the closest(highest damaging if tied in distance) damaging target to them it would feel more structured in dungeons especially and be easier to make interesting boss/pull mechanics because the aggro is somewhat predictable, we have a baseline. This isnt to say that all enemies should do this, but the ones that dont could have it is their description:
“Targets high damagers”
“Targets healers”
“Targets defensive enemies”
While i like the chaos of dungeons i feel like if this were implemented you could really make interesting encounters because players would have an immediate sense of control and understanding in the aggro system. Positioning becomes more important. Everyone would have to contribute, watch their attack ranges, and be generally more aware of what was coming at them and what was happening to everyone else since they wouldnt just get randomly attacked for no apparent reason or randomly ignored for no apparent reason.
I’m not saying things are too hard the way they are, just that I dont like how every pull is just ZERG AND MAYBE PUT UP PROJECTILE REFLECT, EVERYONE JUST DO UR OWN THING.
I just dont like mechanics hidden from me, I like to know what i’m dealing with so that I can formulate a way to deal with it.
Thoughts?