Guild Wars 2

I run, as probably everybody who looks at any of the various threads I post in knows, a straight turret build – as far as I’ve seen, one of the specializations considered sub-par.

With that in mind, I have one question: Why does everything hate me so much? In parties, solo, wandering rendezvous-es, if I’m on the battlefield, everything, or at least every boss, turns its attention to me. I’ve kited Harathi Overlords through gangs of warriors, kept the attention of Bandit Chief Foremen (in and out of suit) despite the gang of other people beating on them, been mistaken for a charr by Ascalonian Ghosts (who simultaneously seem to have mistaken the charr in the party for a human, so little did they attend him).

In and out of dungeons, my heels are hounded by the hateful horde of -every kitten monster I see.-

My question is: Why? Anybody know? ‘cause this is by turns hilarious and frustrating, depending entirely on whether victory is earned by my being, apparently, the GW2 equivalent of a mad clown in the brightest of garb charging across the no-man’s land between trenches in WW2.

…because we’re the only anachronistic steampunk elements of the game and all the Tolkienesques want their genre back…?

Steampunk… the Eurotrash of Nerdom.

Run faster.

Sometimes I hate the profanity filter on these forums; all I can imagine now is a horde of kittens chasing my asura.

Try not to get too distracted by that mental image to help try to figure out why it is that the aggro is so extreme (though I’m not sure if it’s just me).

You know, I think it could be as simple as the DPS you do relative to other people. For example, if I just stand back and plink with my pistols, I do good damage and tap most mobs, but don’t really get much aggro. This is in the DEs.

But when I go absolute ape with grenades and bombs – especially right after Grenade Barrage, I usually get horrendous focus hate coming my way. Mine #4 helps, but there were a few times where I basically got “1 shot” when it wore off. That is, I had so many mobs trying to pummel me that when blinds finally stopped, even half of them whacking me once was more than enough to drop me.

And, to be fair, between grenades, mines and the conditions they apply, my AoE damage is bordering on absurd and is more or less spammable. So it makes perfect sense. If I was one of those mobs, I’d try to kill the Engi too.

I have no idea but I could swear it too. The only thing I can think of that makes any real sense is that CC pisses off mobs far more than damage does, and that’s by far my biggest strength.

I’ve had this happen a lot when I’m playing a warrior, and my brother is using a thief. Everything wants him dead. I even did (as a glass cannon, not sure on my current build) more damage. At the time I just figured they were designed to off the lighter armour classes first or something. If you still have this happen with light armour around then idk…

The other day I was doing a DE in orr. It was a kill a champion event. The champion chased me through a mob of people for TEN.MINUTES. It actually killed me once and moved on, when someone ressed me it turned right around and made a b-line for me. Everyone in the event was laughing and telling me to keep running. But yea. I know that feel bro.

Might be partly the turrets. Playing a ranger, mobs will often enough go for me even if I’m harvesting potatoes while my pet just ran ahead and aggro’d

I actually thought all this ‘omg, mobs hate me why!’ stuff for Engi’s was just out of proportion, but after doing a story mode today i’m not so sure anymore :P

Couple of times I just let myself auto-attack 1 trash mob (with rifle) and all 3 trash mobs decided to turn me into kindling in favour of punching our melee range Thief in his ‘oh so smug’ face rant

Yep. Everything seems to hates my poor engineer.
About half of the group fights i’m in (dungeons or overworld) have me playing the lead role in “catch the engineer” by running in circles and jumping on and off objects and trying my best to stave off the horde of angry mobs or the big bad boss that want a piece of my unfortunate engi.
This usually isn’t too much of a problem when fighting melee mobs as my team can just dps them down while they chase me. Its when the ranged mobs show up the things start to get problematic.
My guess on all this is that different conditions have different aggro ratings. As a condition engineer i apply conditions almost continuously and some of them (like weakness from tranq dart) are quite crippling so i build up hate very quickly.

I seem to recall people suggesting that kits could possibly be acting as aggro magnets since they are bundles, and bundles might be getting different aggro priorities?

Normally i’d say no not a prob for me, but the one frost boss in hotw or whatever from beginning of the fight to end was charging only me and i did practicly nothing to it. Dunno if he just finds someone he likes and never leaves till they’re dead or if i was sending off some kind of signal that says “kill me, i’m the REAL threat”. Too lazy to research this though.

I don’t even use kits, as using a kit would mean I had one less turret I could place. Things have also decided that I absolutely had to die when I was doing nothing involving my turrets, except perhaps using the toolbelt skills in short skirmishes. The Guardian I often run with was even getting a little frustrated with the attention I got.

Then again, there was…precisely one situation wherein I was not immediately targeted for elimination by every enemy in the room, with my turrets actually managing to kitten them off instead – until, of course, I take a step forward to use Blunderbuss. Then, suddenly, all three enemies (Kohler, his Ascalonian Monk and Ranger cohorts in Explore Mode of the Ascalonian Catacombs) suddenly remember this one time I ran into the hospital and slapped their mom in the face when they were born. And that one time my group beat the hell out of Caudecus’ Manor (still not entirely sure how it got so easy, from being nigh-impossible) and I didn’t die a single time, things absolutely hated the Thief.

In short, I’m completely baffled as to how everything decides I need to die.

So far, I’ve noticed one thing: Enemies will completely ignore melee enemies if there’s ranged characters in the field, whether that ranged character is an engineer, ranger or thief; this is probably so you can’t just tell somebody to tank and then peck the enemy to death from a safe distance. Not so bad for most classes, which at least have some type of melee weapon, but for Engineers, that’s a Utility slot you sacrifice for a wrench to hit things with.

Odd, I never have this problem. Seeing as it is so hit ore miss between class’s
(other classes have threads swearing their class gets all the agro)

Really makes you wonder how the aggro system really works or if the system is even the same between mobs or if they have a system that varies depending on the type of mob or its rank.

Allegedly, it’s supposed to be sort of specific to each mob – certain things will set particular types of creature off more than others, etcetera. Or, that’s what I’ve heard; I’ve yet to see it demonstrated, aside from whatever it is that I’m doing that apparently checks all the boxes in their ‘does that guy need to die?’ list. Party members were actually going “That’s kind of weird and unnerving, that whole bum-rushing you thing the gang does.”

I think this is an internal problem with how monsters decide who to attack in this game; bosses just seem to latch on to a single person, even through multiple wipes.

Doing explorable Arah last night on the Forbidden Ancients path (I think that’s what it was called; the one where you have to perform a ritual on an undead chicken for the final boss fight, lol) the giant dog boss that spawns the undead grubs in his first phase just WOULD NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.

Like seriously, during his second phase, he charged me 9 times out of 10, even on different attempts. In the attempt we killed him, I had to have Elixir R, Elixir S, and Rocket Boots on my bar just to avoid all the consecutive charges and poison bolt volleys, and I STILL got one shot (well two-shot… knockdown from charge + consecutive melee) by the last charge before we pushed him to his final phase.

During his final phase, I was kiting him at least 75% of the time.

All of this was over at least 5-6 attempts before we finally downed him, and each one was the same: he wanted my blood.

I know I couldn’t possibly have had legitimate aggro; my guildies outgear me (and most likely outdamage me) by a large margin. I was only playing a Firearms/Gadget spec, so no kits either.

It’s just bizarre.

Specific dungeon bosses seem to solely focus on me, regardless of my efforts to get off their radar.

Oh man, tell me about it. Yesterday, I was with maybe 40 others fighting Balthazar. I must have kitten him off big time with my grenades. He teleported to me and one-shot me. Immediatley upon being rezzed by someone, he teleported again to me and killed me again. This happened maybe 5 or 6 times in a row after being rezzed. shrugs

The monster AI is really strange. Sometimes they beeline me (quite often actually) and I can run them around in circles while the other players take them down without risk while other times I get completely ignored.

Just yesterday I attacked a monster close to a waypoint. The monster aggroed me and came towards me like normal while I got it down to 50% health. Then it reached my but instead of starting to melee it actually went directly through me and attacked a player which was standing some distance away at the waypoint. The player was AFK and has not done anything to the mob nor was he buffing even passively.

I think each monster has a list of which classes to attack first. Engis are often near the top but some classes are higher.

couldnt be that the toughness stat is one of those boosted ie mobs go for those with boosted toughness?

hit more enemies, they aggro you

I get the same feeling since like RaCast the Champion Abomination in CS was chasing me whole fight xD
Was funny since he could not get to me no matter what since im specced to kite and cc.
Medkit speed boost+rifle knockback and jump and elixir gun jump made the poor fella just trying to hit me then see me jump the moment he stoped xD
And not just this similar thing was yesterday evening in SE where every dredge was shooting me <.<
I know it was only me since i was only guy going downed most of time luckly it happened only with trash mobs.
And i use mix of kits and weapon but mostly weapon and often change wich ones so im don’t think it was the kits.
Maybe AOE?But then again there was fire staff ele there :/
I find it fun atm not rly that stressfull.

Killed a group event champion with two people just now because it only cared about me. I just ran around a tent until it died. It was an idiot.

engineers are slow and not tanky, its a no brainer why things chase you.

I get a fair chunk of aggro if I use the condition-y, CC nades. Insane aggro some times.
I have kited large groups of mobs or bosses for MINUTES while doing less damage than my group was doing to them (since they could turret) when I was nade kiting.

I hardly ever get much when I go FT even if I focus hard a single mob while the group takes care of another, and my damage is comparable.

I’ve given up trying to figure out the exact aggro parameters in the game. Number of separate hits (not accumulated like the FT) and CC seem to have very high weight though, much more than proximity or overall damage.

Strangely enough, I find that I often get focused down in WvWvW as much a I do in PvE. Maybe people are paranoid that I’ll overcharged shot them off of a cliff or something… or they hate my toughness + flamethrower build. :-P

I’ve noticed this too. Just today I ran HotW and CoF story modes, and of all the bosses and minibosses I encountered with my flamethrower, only 1 decided not to chase me for 90% of the fight. The only time I caught a break was if I tossed Elixir S and got stealth. Even then, 30 seconds later he’d be after me as though I insulted his momma.

In GW1 the AI almost always attacked those with lower HP first if they were in aggro range, plus chased them longer before switching targets. Very noticable if someone had much lower hp than the others.

Not sure what stat combination that makes the AI do that in GW2 yet. But I’ve seen many cases where a single person gets “called” often, very noticable in CM when one player gets chain sniped. Kinda hard to miss as well.

I have the OPPOSITE issue.
In certain fights, I’m the best tank option.
Most PuG’s just fail at avoiding damage, so somewhere along the lines I became the “tank”.
But I can never hold a boss’ attention.
Just the fact that I’m the only shield user should be enough to grab the boss’ attention.
But nope, he decided to wail on the afk idiot who didn’t even join the fight.

:I

I also feel I am being targeted a lot compared to other friends in party. I use mostly grenades and AoE spam is quite powerful. Even elementalists are less targeted than us. We do not make burst damage but total output dps over several mobs is quite high. I think mobs little A.I. is designed to target the biggest threat which is an engineer.

This is pure speculation, but I think it is a bug that of things not dropping combat properly. Or maybe healing has aggro, who knows?

One thing I notice though, is that after clearing a group of mob, the respawn WILL charge me from across the map. I had a couple of people already who was quite surprised to see mobs aggroing on me (even quest mobs) for no apparent reason. The bear quest in Queensdale, for example. I was sitting there, minding my own business when the bear spawned, and proceeded to ignore 5 other people in the area and went for me…5 times in a row. And I wasn’t even sitting that close to the spawn point. (I was trying to chat to a friend, but the kitten bear kept coming for me every time it spawned!)

Do you have condition procs on crit? I also regularly notice drawing a large amount of aggro, both from mobs and bosses. My current theory is that AoE draws mobs, and procs or a combination of direct damage and conditions adds up to more aggro from bosses.

I wish I knew. I have read on this forum over and over how we suck but yet in many boss fights I end up kitting the boss all over the place. and I am using pistol and shield right now and switch between elixir, gadget and turret.

The funny one was in the Catacomb dungeon. We got Lieutenant Kohler and the Troll in a fight. Our Necro pulled and I did nothing but block two hook attacks from Lieutenant Kohler to test some theories. (I can block and reflect them but I cannot stun him with my shield.) any way the fight continued and once Lieutenant Kohler got to 1/3 health left a long time after my test. Lieutenant Kohler decides I am more of a threat then the troll. Remember I just blocked two attacks where the Troll took 2/3 of his health..So the LY comes after me where I had to jump in the water to break the aggro.

Bosses hates us

Flamethrowers aggro the crap out of everything. Cone AoE and crit like a mof o. With my current build I apply weakness, burning, bleed, and poison (if mobs hit me) with a single burst. That’s good enough reason for them to kill me fast.