Guild Wars 2

Having done some of the bigger Karma chains around Orr I have come to realize I have no true understanding of a how a mob is actually tagged.

I have noticed that the fewer people I engage a group of mobs with, the more likely I am to get drops from a higher % of the mobs we engage. In large encounters (read: ~20) it seems to change from “Tag by Hitting” to “Tag by doing Damage” – where I can hit all 8-10 mobs in a single spawn and not get a single piece of loot. The thing is, other people who hit those same mobs DO get loot.

I say this because I don’t think a single mob can drop loot for all 20 people who tagged it.

I have also heard that condition damage, i.e. aoe burning damage, does not tag mobs very efficiently. If true this would further tie into my belief that only the players dealing the most damage (aka the top 5 damagers on a mob get loot, the rest don’t).

So my question is… what is the best way to efficiently tag mobs in large DE’s? How is “tagging” calculated? How does it change from small scale DE’s to bigger DE’s?

Thanks in advance.

Best way to tag is with aoe direct damage spam while in a party with others. The party component is important, because if you are in a party you have to deal less damage overall to get credit for the kills.

Someone will say there is no “tagging” in this game.

According to pre-launch developer interviews, players need to do somewhere between 5-10% of the damage necessary to kill a monster in order to receive credit for killing it.

As there are only so many “5-10%” slices to go around, it should be obvious that once you pile more than X players on the same target, someone is going to lose out.

This was a huge problem during the Ancient Karka event. Many players received almost no loot during the entire 2-3 hour battle. Others were receiving drops consistently. In a recent AMA on Reddit, ANet claimed that was a “bug”.

Tagging while in a party works differently: Your entire group’s damage is compared against the mob to see if you TAG it. That is to say if 4 players in your party do 500 damage, but one does only 100 damage, they’ll still tag it, because as a group, you did 2100 damage.

PowerCat.5738:

Tagging while in a party works differently: Your entire group’s damage is compared against the mob to see if you TAG it. That is to say if 4 players in your party do 500 damage, but one does only 100 damage, they’ll still tag it, because as a group, you did 2100 damage.

That sounds more like a popular rumor, and I would love to see an official source for this, because my observations indicate otherwise nearly every single day.

I do my Daily Achievements nearly every day in a group, with friends. Almost every single time we end up with a situation where we have different totals on “kill type” and “kill count”, despite all of us always attacking the same mobs. The results we see every day would simply not be possible if parties worked as you described.

In fact, the lack of shared kill credit while grouped was a complaint that frequently came up on the forums during beta, and as far as I can tell nothing has changed. During our Daily’s we are always having to ask one another “did you get credit for that one?” only for someone to answer “no”.

PowerCat.5738:

Tagging while in a party works differently: Your entire group’s damage is compared against the mob to see if you TAG it. That is to say if 4 players in your party do 500 damage, but one does only 100 damage, they’ll still tag it, because as a group, you did 2100 damage.

Oh, so THAT was the reason why people looked for farming groups in Orr. I’ve always wondered why they’d do that.

Edge.4180:

Someone will say there is no “tagging” in this game.

According to pre-launch developer interviews, players need to do somewhere between 5-10% of the damage necessary to kill a monster in order to receive credit for killing it.

As there are only so many “5-10%” slices to go around, it should be obvious that once you pile more than X players on the same target, someone is going to lose out.

This was a huge problem during the Ancient Karka event. Many players received almost no loot during the entire 2-3 hour battle. Others were receiving drops consistently. In a recent AMA on Reddit, ANet claimed that was a “bug”.

I don’t think this is true.

I have literally gone to Jormagg/Tequatl/Shatterer, hit them a SINGLE TIME, and gotten Gold Medal + Chest.

Not sure about non veteran or non champion monsters though.

Edge.4180:

Someone will say there is no “tagging” in this game.

According to pre-launch developer interviews, players need to do somewhere between 5-10% of the damage necessary to kill a monster in order to receive credit for killing it.

As there are only so many “5-10%” slices to go around, it should be obvious that once you pile more than X players on the same target, someone is going to lose out.

This was a huge problem during the Ancient Karka event. Many players received almost no loot during the entire 2-3 hour battle. Others were receiving drops consistently. In a recent AMA on Reddit, ANet claimed that was a “bug”.

It can’t be quite that simple. The dragon events typically have a lot more than 20 players (which would be roughly 5% damage each). Yet everyone gets chest loot for the most part. The only time I did not get the chest was one time that I was late for Claw of Jormag. He was almost dead already but I jumped in and went all bursty but to no avail. I got credit for the event but no chest.

So there may be different formulas for random open world mobs vs. mobs in DEs.

Ahlen.7591:

Edge.4180:

Someone will say there is no “tagging” in this game.

According to pre-launch developer interviews, players need to do somewhere between 5-10% of the damage necessary to kill a monster in order to receive credit for killing it.

As there are only so many “5-10%” slices to go around, it should be obvious that once you pile more than X players on the same target, someone is going to lose out.

This was a huge problem during the Ancient Karka event. Many players received almost no loot during the entire 2-3 hour battle. Others were receiving drops consistently. In a recent AMA on Reddit, ANet claimed that was a “bug”.

I don’t think this is true.

I have literally gone to Jormagg/Tequatl/Shatterer, hit them a SINGLE TIME, and gotten Gold Medal + Chest.

Not sure about non veteran or non champion monsters though.

Thanks – but I don’t mean gold medal / chest eligibility on big events like Dragon or Temple’s. I mean specifically groups of regular mobs and what consitutes tagging in those situations.

Does anyone have anything official they can point me to, like a quote from ANet on this?

Ahlen.7591:

I don’t think this is true.

I have literally gone to Jormagg/Tequatl/Shatterer, hit them a SINGLE TIME, and gotten Gold Medal + Chest.

Not sure about non veteran or non champion monsters though.

Well, there’s a difference between getting credit for participating in an event and getting credit for a kill to the point where you’re earning XP for the actual monster being killed and a chance at a drop off the corpse. How many times have you received credit for an event just because you ran through the circled area, or killed a different mob within the event area? Personally, I’ve lost count.

Chillwinds.1290:

Does anyone have anything official they can point me to, like a quote from ANet on this?

If I remember correctly, there were a couple of links in this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Kill-credit-is-breaking-during-big-events/

Edge.4180:

Ahlen.7591:

I don’t think this is true.

I have literally gone to Jormagg/Tequatl/Shatterer, hit them a SINGLE TIME, and gotten Gold Medal + Chest.

Not sure about non veteran or non champion monsters though.

Well, there’s a difference between getting credit for participating in an event and getting credit for a kill to the point where you’re earning XP for the actual monster being killed and a chance at a drop off the corpse. How many times have you received credit for an event just because you ran through the circled area, or killed a different mob within the event area? Personally, I’ve lost count.

This is true, and honestly in the 400 or so hours I’ve put in this game I’ve spent less than 10 of it in a party with people that wasn’t a dungeon. So I’ve never had to consider what tagging is/isn’t.

Edge.4180:

Chillwinds.1290:

Does anyone have anything official they can point me to, like a quote from ANet on this?

If I remember correctly, there were a couple of links in this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Kill-credit-is-breaking-during-big-events/

I dug this out from following the link-trail:

IG: How does the nitty-gritty of XP and loot sharing work?
EF: For just a monster.., each monster has a threshold of a percent of its health whereby if someone deals that threshold/percent of damage (it’s about five to ten percent), you get full credit for it. So, if a monster usually provides one hundred XP and I deal sixty percent damage before you come along and finish it off then we’ll both receive one hundred points. We never diminish it, you always get the full amount.

I seriously doubt even a single Anet employee can answer this question truthfully. With the responses we have seen and the mechanic behind the “bug” as they state, coupled with player feedback that is wildly different from all angles. The simple answer is this…..you get what you get. And not a single person can state otherwise.

Anet certainly cant. They could only state “How it should work” but doesnt. Do not look to see a developer stick their neck out stating something on paper as fact, they are not kept to high standards such as zero defect or time in prison for wasting money on bad programming like military contractors are (my previous specialty, fining programmers). But then, that would motivate Anet employees to make sure things work and give them the ability to post facts and not guesses so the community is not lost in an open loop of guessing like it is now.

On a side note in regards to these questions, Anet also feels it is not important or needed to stay in constant contact with its customers, i told them it was foolish to think this way. Something for customers to think about when they ask the questions like the OP did.

Since I regularly get drops from mobs I start attacking when they are at <10% health, I don’t think you have to do a lot of damage to get a drop. That said, in zerg events, mobs die so fast that probably only the first 2-3 attackers per mob are getting any damage in at all.

I’ve gotten very good results in zergs using: Whirling Axe on a Warrior; Burning Speed followed by Ring of Fire on a D/D Ele, and both Wells and Marks on a necro. With the wells, though, I have to be positioned properly right from the get-go. If I have to move very far at all to drop one, the mobs are dead and I get nada.

From personal experience, I’d say 5% should usually be enough to tag a standard pve mob, ymmv of course. Also bear in mind though, that even though they don’t tell it in the tooltip, aoe abilites usually cap at 5 enemies, so you might hit an individual for less then it might seem at first glance if they really pile up.