Guild Wars 2

Trying to understand what I need to do to drop threat and how threat mechanics work.

The following is the reason I ask this question:
I was doing CM and a mob, while it was being meleed by other teammembers decided to shoot me.
Instantly I heal which helps, she keeps shooting.
After I dodged a couple of times, had 1/4th Health, I LOS the mob. I go hide behind a rock.
I wait for my personal heal’s cooldown and cast it, I’m at 1/2 health, if not a bit more.
I jump out in the open.

The chick shoots me twice, I’m dead.

The reason I hid behind the rock and LOS’d was due to the fact that a)my dodges were on cooldown b) my heal was on cooldown c)so i can drop some hate/threat/aggro.

I must have waited about 10+ secs before coming back out in the open. Obviously it’s hard to see a proper animation when it’s an instant shot and there is no cast time to the ability used by the boss…but after 10+ secs with other people beating on the boss, both in melee and ranged..a mob not dropping aggro is either intended or straight up silly.

So I looked this up and found several things:

First, monster aggro is primarily based upon proximity. They usually target the closest hostile thing that they can. However, dealing damage to the monster and its allies nearby increase the amount of aggro it has on you.

Certain abilities gain more aggro than others, and it is dependent upon the monster being targeted. AoE-DPS abilities tend to draw more aggro from trash mobs, and likewise single-target-DPS abilities tend to draw more aggro from bosses.

Unfortunately, that’s all I have been able to find, and most of it is pretty mundane. Although, from personal experience I can tell you that the above is nowhere near all of the aggro calculations that go on. For example, my friend and I play two Norn characters together, I’m an Elementalist and he’s a Thief. He’s about two levels above me at the moment.

When we compare stats, he constantly has higher armor & max life, even when I spec for Earth Magic and Water Magic (the two ele trait lines that give toughness and vitality, respectively). Yet, he always seems to have aggro, almost to the point where I don’t dodge in several large encounters and yet don’t take any damage.

Point in case: I was fighting three melee mobs and each was two levels above me, I get them all down to about 1/4 to 1/3 health each, my Norn Thief friend walks near them trying to get loot on the other side, and each of the mobs instantly uses it’s gapcloser and downs him from about half life, even though I was at less than 10% life and was the only person to ever do damage to them.

So even though he has higher effective max health and usually does about the same damage, he almost always gets aggro. So I really don’t know what’s going on with aggro.

Totally agreed.
I was under the assumption that proximity threat was how things worked in regards to aggro mechanics in this game, but obviously I was mistaken.

I’m all for aggro bouncing around but the total inability to drop aggro is terrible.

Someone on Guildwars2guru mentioned that in GW1 threat was also based on targeting the weakest member of the party. And rezz’ing also seems to cause quite a bit of aggro as well.

A lot of people are also using Control T to focus down one target at a time.