Potential Change to Aggro Mechanics?

Just see this on the wizzy AA IRC chat

Are they changing how aggro works? This is the first I've heard about it.

I read they want to make agro count again, to make DPS pay attention...

As a raid knight, all I can say is "May you live in interesting times."

This is from the Warrior IRC:

Need to remember that Eli has been foreshadowing these upcoming changes to agro for quite some time now, months at the least, if not longer.

Soon people will remember why fights used to take longer..we were unable to go "full-out DPS" every fight or we would waste time needing to rez and med/rebuff...and while doing that is not as painful a process as it once was, its still bloody annoying.

Is a thread over in the tanks section about this topic as well in case you are interested in getting a plate wearer's perspective on it.

Edited to re-word a phrase from Tropic Thunder *Mutters something unkind about filters and overly-sensitive people*

It seems that they're planning to revert to the days when EVERYONE was responsible for agro management.

Tanks actually needed a bit of time to establish agro. DPS classes were responsible for managing their agro throughout the fight.

Back then, a wizzy (sorry, but you're the perfect example of caster BOOM) who nuked too much got eaten by the mob and, *gasp*, it was THEIR fault. They got rezzed, rebuffed and medded and didn't whine about the death.

If rogues (great example of melee agro back then, sorry) got eaten because they didn't evade and drop some agro, *gasp*, it was THEIR fault. Rez, rebuff and med then, rejoin the fight. No whining done.

On the flip side of that, I hope the devs remember to make fewer AE'ing mobs / encounters so that rezzed folks can actually med up if they get flattened for over-agroing. I hope they also realize that, with more agro management being done by DPS classes, fights will naturally last longer and shouldn't be designed to last an hour or more for ONE event. That's just tedious and NOT fun for anyone.

Also back then, the real AC values were a lot closer together between the classes than they are now. The mobs typically didn't one round the wizzy or rogue. It wasn't an automatic death sentence to gank.

Spoken like a tank, haha. You do realize that for dps classes to sit around doing nothing is not fun gameplay, right? Facerolling non-stop burn with no consequences for reckless actions is not necessarily fun either. So there needs to be a balance. Which is why I was appreciative of Elidroth considering more/hastened agro reducers in the OP's quote. It is fun to say, "oh snap, my agro is getting too high, let me stop dpsing and use this ability to reduce it." It is not fun to say, "oh snap, my agro is getting too high, let me stop everything for 30 seconds while the tank gets enough agro back so that I can play again."

There are other ways to make fights longer, and I don't mean requiring us to kill a bajillion trash mobs before we get to the boss (I'm lookin at you Neriak2). There are ways to elongate events with mechanics. PoS was a good example (at least during RoF era). The fight was long, but not because dps was sitting on their hands or that we had to kill 845 trash mobs.

Old school EQ's agro mechanics have great nostalgia. It was challenging, there were severe consequences for stealing agro, we had no idea where dps' agro was relative to tanks', etc. But realistically, it was not fun gameplay for dps classes to wait 20 seconds for the tank to establish agro before engaging a mob and then only casting one ice comet every 20 seconds for fear of stealing agro. God forbid you med, you might get sit agro, amirite?! /yawn

Furthermore, the competitive nature of dps parses are extremely fun. Are they the end all, be all? No, but it sure is fun to compete with the other members in your raid and talk some friendly smack.

OMG manage your own aggro? Aint nobody got time for dat!

They could just remove silent casting from the game, I'm sure that'd go over well!

Or do as my friend did to the EverBurn wizard. VoT him and let him tank, briefly.

We competed on parses back then too. We had to see who could push the agro envelope the furthest without being smacked. If you could push the limit and not die, your numbers would be at the top. There was some black magic to it. Arguably, it was more fun for mele than casters.

I have a pretty big problem with this whole shift.

Not the agro thing, exactly or directly. In my never-so-humble opinion, "agro as a real thing" is a fine model for EverQuest to operate on. Indeed, that's how it was for many years… many years in which dps classes only outdamaged the tank by +10-50%. I tanked through those years, and the line for which dps was good to recruit was "outdamages me". Over the past four years, dps gains have put them in the range of +200% of tank damage (+1000% of tank damage or more, if discing). Over that same four years, warriors have only gotten agro tools. Now Elidroth's stated intention is to reduce tanks' ability to hold agro - which is the only thing we have gotten abilities to do in the last four years.

I wrote a lot more at: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/agro-as-a-real-thing.213315/

I'm ok with active playing. As a chanter I enjoy it immensely. What I want to see though is not a system of "Ok you need to stop aggroing and sit on your hands" but a way in which the same amount of burn can happen but the wizard/rogue/etc have to manage their aggro in a offensive way. You know transfer aggro to someone else, aggro reducing nukes, etc. I don't want to go back to the time when I remember medding for half the fight in order to save up enough mana for the next slow.

Haha, silly Warrior. If you wanted to be able to tank and dps, you should've rolled a mage.

But in all seriousness, "that's how it was for many years" is not a very persuasive justification. This is 2014. We are in a completely different age of gaming now. Downtime is not good. This is an A.D.D. generation. EQ has learned that and has made substantial adjustments over the years to increase player activity and decrease downtime.

That said, agro should not be completely irrelevant. I just hope that if they scale back tank agro, they add more ways for dps to manage theirs. Managing agro and dps can be fun. Waiting to play until the tank has gotten enough Enraging Blow procs off is not.

They can change all the values of the aggro abilities as much as they want, but unless they fix the bugs in the system it is a moot point. Those that know how to keep aggro will still keep it and those that want to avoid aggro like silent casting is a passive ability still will.

Even in the long past, the better raiding wizards use to have a table that illustrated hate generation over time versus their current tank's setups as those calculations were very simple back then. That way you knew at what point you'd likely surpass your tanks and need to have a mage CoH you a bit before or something.

The only thing they can really do at this point if they want to keep aggro interesting is make stuff memblur itself.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out

Really all my group warrior needs for the most part these days is Phantom Agressor to keep hate completely off my raid ranger spamming summers and enraging kick while burning. I'm not sure how other DPS classes are doing on hate compared to warriors.

This. Did you read this, when you wrote it? As an adult you should be able to recognize that a cooperative game should be fun for everyone. Including that kind of fun, even! Speaking of not fun, how about being the toughest thing in the world, watching helpless while the outcome of fights is entirely in the hands of finger wigglers like yourself. To me that's not fun. I'm'a stand here & be tough, and if you let me, I'll do my job?

The "player activity" that's been increased on the tank side, for four years, has been entirely agro oriented. Any time any other class got a new thing, the warrior parallel was an agro tool. Wizard version: Improved Twincast -> agro tool; elemental forces -> agro tool; Claw nukes -> agro tool; Arcane Fusion -> agro tool; Arcane Destruction -> agro tool. All the passive damage increases? More agro boosts on the warrior side. And we really are good at it if we bring all those tools to bear. We'd better be, since we hold firm on our fewest-utility-abilities-in-game and relative dps is at an all time low.

This turn in design intention basically says that the last 4+ years of advancement along the only axis warriors have advanced needs to be reverted. Will the retcon include some other version of class balance? Last time we had "agro as a thing" it sure was a different version of balance. But we really don't know, and the absence of knowing troubles me. Trust But Verify, the saying goes.

Maybe you should play one of your other classes then. Doesn't sound like tanking is for you.

You think that's the appropriate game play for tanks? Just be tough, and hope the actions of others lead to the job getting done, that's what you're advising I get on board with? What happened to increasing player activity? Or did you really only mean your activity.