Question: Can a bear save a life? When a hostile 5-target AoE lands on a group that consists of 5 players and a bear, will the bear (if it is closer to the center) take a hit and one of the players be spared? Do pets have an equal chance of being hit by an AoE?
I know for a fact that ally buffs prioritize players in the buff radius over pets and npcs (this is easy to test yourself.) I’m not as clear on enemy attacks so any confirmation would be nice, but seeing how fast pets/minions/clones melt in WvW, I’ve assumed so far that they have an equal chance of being hit. I’d like to know for sure.
If a pet is hit by a projectile instead of a player… isn’t that helpful to that player? If part of the AoE damages pets instead of players… isn’t that helpful to those players?
Do bears provide a useful, if largely invisible service? Can a bear save a life?
I’m pretty sure AOEs target pets after any players. When fighting subject Alpha in CoE, we’d stack and dodge his AOE. The first couple rounds the AOE didn’t touch my pet (AOEs have a 5 target limit, and 5 players + 1 pet = 6). Then one of the players missed a dodge and died. The next AOE took out my pet.
My post was a response to the OP, not a contradiction of what you wrote. Your post wasn’t even on the board when I started typing my reply. Your theory is certainly possible too.
It’s not my theory really, it’s community common knowledge and what’s on the wiki. I just have never had an opportunity to test it or know how it got to be common knowledge, so I can’t say with certainty it’s true.
I’m more interested in WvW and PvP where players have a known 5 target aoe limit.
As for PvE… I’m not so sure that all AoE’s from monsters have a 5 target limit. Icebrood Elemental in Frostgorge Sound was able to hit 5 spirits, me, and my pet at the same time.
Between myself and an npc engineer in the mists, I put down 4 spirits and a bear. I took no damage while the spirits were still alive. The bear had aggro and the aoe hit the bear and the 4 spirits, not me. If players were prioritized by default, I would have been hit.
The official word I found on AoE target priority was that your selected target gets priority first and then the rest is based on proximity. That indeed appears to be the case. Screenshot 3 shows something weird. The storm spirit on the very outside of the circle gets hit and the water spirit nearer the center is spared which would seem to indicate proximity to the attacker not proximity to the center of the circle. But when I went and threw AoE at the clustered golems in the mists it seemed to be proximity to the center of the circle which is what the wiki says. Maybe player and npc attacks are different in some ways.
