Guild Wars 2

With time, some very dedicated players tend to write some sort of ‘PhD Essays’ on a particular ingame matter. I say PhD essays because they cover a very specific subject with great scrutiny.

As of now, aggro seem completely random for me. I haven’t been able to establish proper causality relations between player behaviour and mob behaviour (aggro) nor am I qualified to examine the coding of this game (‘techspeak’ equals Mandarin for me).

Thereby, I ask you folks: Has such a thing been done already? If so, where is it? And is it reliable?

It seems mobs have differnet rules for aggro and there is really no way to control it or know how it works. Which is fine since there is no such thing as tanking in GW2 and their isn’t meant to be.

That being said I’ve noticed that there are four primary behaviours.
1. Attack the closest thing
2. Attack the thing doing the most damage
3. Attack the thing doing the most group buffs and heals.
4. Attack the weakest enemy

There are variations on these that I’ve noticed, like the converse or going for pets and minions first. Its impossible to know before the fight what sort of logic they might use, and even after you’ve fought them its hard to pin down what logic they were using. In my opinion this great as it has made fights a lot more dynamic and surprising as it always seemed the enemy was attacking in a smart way.

RaptorSpectre.3271:

It seems mobs have differnet rules for aggro and there is really no way to control it or know how it works. Which is fine since there is no such thing as tanking in GW2 and their isn’t meant to be.

That being said I’ve noticed that there are four primary behaviours.
1. Attack the closest thing
2. Attack the thing doing the most damage
3. Attack the thing doing the most group buffs and heals.
4. Attack the weakest enemy

There are variations on these that I’ve noticed, like the converse or going for pets and minions first. Its impossible to know before the fight what sort of logic they might use, and even after you’ve fought them its hard to pin down what logic they were using. In my opinion this great as it has made fights a lot more dynamic and surprising as it always seemed the enemy was attacking in a smart way.

I agree with you that unpredictability is interesting. Makes for quick thought, you can no longer plan your battles ahead of time, because you do not know how to act.

People are still adapting though, most people seem not to know exactly what they are doing, they just do and pray

However, what I am really interested in knowing is how to lower your ‘threat’. Sometimes it seems some mobs just go after you on a personal vendetta.

RaptorSpectre has a good list there and is probably close to the truth of it, but for all practical purposes, consider the system completely random.

I’ve fought and done the same champs/mobs well over a hundred times and the aggro is completely random in practical terms. I’ll take the shaman Champion boss in Wayfarer Foothills as an example since I have literally killed him close to 200 times now:

he targets me about 50% of the time. half the time he does target me, he will chase me and me alone the entire fight. the other half, he will target me then decide to focus entirely on a lowbie and I can just stand there and wand him to death. The rest of the time he doesn’t even bother with me.

If I use various melee
I usually only get hit by AOE and a lowbie is getting his attention. i can’t get his attention whatsoever. It’s rare at least; even with mace which has healing strikes.

Sometimes, I’m chasing the boss while it’s chasing a lowbie around. Most times he’s just standing there switching at random. It’s rare to see a range toon get aggro but it does happen from time to time.

There seems to be a system in place but in practical terms, it effectively is random. that is to say, from a player’s POV, it’s not a controllable element in combat. Maybe that was their point – not that I agree mind you.

Testing and verifying it is going to be very difficult and very time consuming. Players would have to switch to every permutation of builds and gear types and activities during combat to even do the test. It can be done but it isn’t practical to test.

On top of that, it could very well be that different mobs/bosses have different priority so testing against one mob could still end up only yielding correct answer for that mob and nothing else.

In Orr, some of the mob behavior seems to suggest a certain randomness not exhibited elswhere either. i’ve fought a normal risen mob and while engaged in melee combat with him, he’ll run away and chase another player sprinting by. Completely disengages me and just runs after the other guy…

In my expierience, it works in this order:

1. Target Necro Minions, attack until it’s dead.
2. Target a player or non-Necro minion more or less at random, attack until it’s dead, or it dodges/kites a lot and the mob gets tired of chasing it.
3. Repeat Step 2.

ounkeo.9138:

RaptorSpectre has a good list there and is probably close to the truth of it, but for all practical purposes, consider the system completely random.

I’ve fought and done the same champs/mobs well over a hundred times and the aggro is completely random in practical terms. I’ll take the shaman Champion boss in Wayfarer Foothills as an example since I have literally killed him close to 200 times now:

he targets me about 50% of the time. half the time he does target me, he will chase me and me alone the entire fight. the other half, he will target me then decide to focus entirely on a lowbie and I can just stand there and wand him to death. The rest of the time he doesn’t even bother with me.

If I use various melee
I usually only get hit by AOE and a lowbie is getting his attention. i can’t get his attention whatsoever. It’s rare at least; even with mace which has healing strikes.

Sometimes, I’m chasing the boss while it’s chasing a lowbie around. Most times he’s just standing there switching at random. It’s rare to see a range toon get aggro but it does happen from time to time.

There seems to be a system in place but in practical terms, it effectively is random. that is to say, from a player’s POV, it’s not a controllable element in combat. Maybe that was their point – not that I agree mind you.

Testing and verifying it is going to be very difficult and very time consuming. Players would have to switch to every permutation of builds and gear types and activities during combat to even do the test. It can be done but it isn’t practical to test.

On top of that, it could very well be that different mobs/bosses have different priority so testing against one mob could still end up only yielding correct answer for that mob and nothing else.

In Orr, some of the mob behavior seems to suggest a certain randomness not exhibited elswhere either. i’ve fought a normal risen mob and while engaged in melee combat with him, he’ll run away and chase another player sprinting by. Completely disengages me and just runs after the other guy…

Loved your post.

Specially when you stated on how there could be a plethora of ‘threat mechanics’ so specific mobs. I’ll try to notice that further.

That would make the combat in this game even spicier.

In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to make my illusions more effective as in mob-distraction.

People will figure out the aggro mechanics no matter what. Even if they are 100% random people will eventually determine that they are. Any PvE content in any game will always be learned to the letter and people will develop the absolute most efficient way to beat it. It has never not happened in forever.

You can add two more to the list: “Puller” and AoE.

On my Ranger I have noticed that sometimes (at random, sometimes it’s different on the exact same pull) if I pull a mob of enemies, they will attack me exclusively until I’m dead. Not downed, dead. All the while ignoring everyone else.

On other occasions, I will have not fired a single arrow, waiting for my party to gather the mob together before unleashing a Barrage… which causes everything to drop what they’re doing and attack me. Again, this doesn’t happen all the time, but it has happened often enough for me to notice it.

Still other times, I can unload everything I have into a target that completely ignores me.

I think that, unlike most games which have a standard threat table, there is an index of tables. Each critter has a selection of tables from the index and randomly uses a table when it spawns. In other words, there might be ten different versions of threat priority, each monster has access to five of those and is randomly assigned one when it spawns.

RaptorSpectre.3271:

It seems mobs have differnet rules for aggro and there is really no way to control it or know how it works. Which is fine since there is no such thing as tanking in GW2 and their isn’t meant to be.

That being said I’ve noticed that there are four primary behaviours.
1. Attack the closest thing
2. Attack the thing doing the most damage
3. Attack the thing doing the most group buffs and heals.
4. Attack the weakest enemy

There are variations on these that I’ve noticed, like the converse or going for pets and minions first. Its impossible to know before the fight what sort of logic they might use, and even after you’ve fought them its hard to pin down what logic they were using. In my opinion this great as it has made fights a lot more dynamic and surprising as it always seemed the enemy was attacking in a smart way.

Yup, was gonna post something like this basically I have noticed most of those patterns, and hurting it more does tend to pull aggro relatively reliably but some mobs seem more… I dunno, intelligent than others maybe?

Another thing worth noting is that certain pets definitely have some hidden “tanking” mechanics, I noticed this very clearly on some Ranger’s pets, the bear for example (traditionally) is very talented at pulling big guys off us, he just seems to do this automatically and has saved our tail more than once on Champion mobs.

It seems to be different based on mobs.

I do know that almost all Champion Risen Abominations have a tendency to fixate their aggro on a specific target until that target dies or runs away beyond aggro range. If that target goes stealth, the Abomination will target something else until the old target returns back from stealth, then it will go back to the old target again. I actually Fraps’ed this occurrence at one point as I spotted it running after one target for more than 4 minutes (we were just a small party of three, so that Abom took quite a while to kill). It was actually kind of hilarious.

What if all of the actions/states were randomly weighted for determining aggro when it is spawned? It would keep each encounter dynamic.

From my experience aggro builds when buffing and damaging, decreases when going far away.

These two informations are enough for me to handle aggro.

From the studying I’ve been doing on them I think the aggro rules are based on mob type and inteligence. The dumber the creature the easier it is to lock aggro; whereas say an intelignet mob like a human type mob seems to have several aggro rules and uses what is best at the time.

So say an animal type mob picks an aggro rule and sticks with it regardless. These fights seem easier to control as soon as you recognize what its doing. Like kill the buffer. I’ve seen this when my friend is on his guard. Animal/stupid mobs will sometimes just attack and chase him forever no matter what. This allows me to just burn them with impunity.

Now with say a human mob, like the Asura in CoE I’ve noticed a far more inteligent aggro behaviour. The seem to be able to target the most important player at the moment and sense targets of opportunity. The guard might be buffing the hell out of the team and really making a differnce for the team, but if the mobs can’t seem to really hurt him bad they will suddenly switch targets and start dropping the DPS. The guards buffs are useless if the rest of the team is dead sort of thing.

Humanoid mobs seem really fond of icing the weakest player in the group. Kill the target of opportunity sort of logic. This I’ve noticed on my ele who’s spec’d healing and support. I almost never get touched fighting animal types but humanoids will bypass everbody to come kill me the instant I lay down a buff on the group regardless if the guardian is doing far more buffs. What I’m seeing there is that AI treats buffers as the highest threat target in the grand scheme. Then they choose from those targets doing the buffing which is the easiest to take down and go after them.

As an final note I’ve not noticed any threat behaviour related to control skills, like knockdowns, blinds or cripples.