To the point....i am a lvl 8 warrior trying to group in Blackburrow. I grouped with a lvl 4 and lvl 6 cleric the other night for an hour. Multiple times the lvl 4 cleric pulled agro meleeing and i tried a 2hander then bounced to 1hander with parrying dagger for better tanking but noticed that when anyone pulled agro from me it was hell getting it back....i never did. Only way mob would leave them was if they backed off a ways then they would turn and focus on me. Is this just a "Hey, your really low level, it'll change" situation or....if i had an SK with spells plus the MUCH needed snare....whenever they get it.....would my holding agro not be such an issue? Just remember my warrior being epic at lvl 47 in 2000.....all i did was grouping never raiding. Just wondering if i should reroll to a SK before im in another 30 levels. I like being able to rip mobs off group members and "saving the day". Starting to think thats a SK/RANGER/PALLY gig. Thanks in advance for the advice and safe hunting!
There are augmentations available from tenth level that will help, but warriors will struggle for agro compared to the other tanks for some time. Even with the augmentations being available, I imagine other melee will be using them, too. It sucks, but unless they make the newer warrior disciplines available early, I'm guessing you'll have to get used to beating a mob to 70% or so before the rest of the group can engage.
Thanks for the info Agrippa, in a weird twist, I rolled a Monk tonight...only played him a few levels but i got to thinking that back when I played...I was always totally envious of Monks with their haste and insane non-stop DPS beat down of mobs. If i recall correctly, when you seen a monk with red glowing hand(s)? you knew they had some epic haste + dmg going on and it was always a sight to see. Sooooo, figured my time spent in the day was maining a tank then rolling a million lowbie alts till I quit playing finally. Thought id dive to the opposite spectrum of the melee board by rolling a DPS class. I have a feeling im going to enjoy this monk quite a bit, I will keep what you said in mind though. I might roll a Shadow Knight just to fill that desire to lead and tank sometimes.
Agro is MUCH easier overall for knights through ... hm, HoT (expansion 17)? VoA is when hastening AAs kick in on Roar, Shout, and Burst. Afaik, there are no augments on prog. Being a warrior in Classic was ... a challenge. Took determination, and there wasn't much payoff. The upside is that in six months when Kunark releases you'll get the very poorly implemented Defensive disc that breaks raiding forever. Woot! Probably the only real answer to agro over there is Taunting over a pet. That'd beat any player.
Weapon augmentations are available on the progression servers in the home cities. I haven't looked at all of the types available, but I've seen a dps proc and self healing ones.
Did not know the Gemcrafters were on there. Definitely stun aug from them, then. They're called Wulfenite.
Being a warrior in classic is tough. You have very few tools available to you to generate lots of hate. In classic knights and rangers, while having lower hp/ac end up filling the role of main tank better than the warrior simply because they are much better at holding aggro. Worse yet there aren't many weapons with good hate procs available at low levels. The best you can do until like 37ish is probably save up your coin for a blackend alloy bastard sword and put a wulfenite aug on it. At 37 try to get in a camp for A ghoul lord is lower lord is Lower Guk and try and get your hands on two Short Swords of the Ykesha; however they don't proc until level 37. The best you can do until like 37ish is probably save up your coin for a blackend alloy bastard sword and put a wulfenite aug on it. Two handed weapons generate much better hate per swing and since you don't really have access to any good proccing weapons at this point that's going to be the way to go. Two handed weapons also generally deal better dps which is a roll you might be better suited to focusing on and letting the ranger or knight tank instead simply because they, unlike you, will be much better at managing aggro. Wulfenite augs give a Strike of Opportunity proc. Strike of Opportunity is a DD+Stun and there are 5 ranks with the lowest dealing 10 damage and the highest dealing 70. The amount of hate generated from the DD portion should be 1 hate for each point of damage so Strike of Opportunity I would generate 10 hate from the DD portion and Strike of Opportunity V would generate 70 from the DD; this hate will be the same whether it's resisted or not. Then there is the hate generated from the stun portion which is harder to figure out since stuns generate an amount of hate the scales with the mobs hp; the more hp a mob has the more hate it generates. The formula seems to be about 1 point of hate for every 16hp a mob has up to a maximum of 400 hate. So against a mob with 640hp the stun would generate about 40 hate, against a mob with 3200hp the stun should generate about about 200 hate. Generating the maximum 400 hate hate from a stun would require the mob to have 6400+hp which are actually fairly uncommon in classic but in 40+ grouping situations you can generally expect your stun procs to generate in the ballpark of about 200-300ish hate which is pretty significant.
Aggro becomes better when you get dual wield, double/triple attack. It is still a struggle, but that's pretty much all you do in groups so you have to kinda like that niche for a while. Save up for some proc weapons and haste item ASAP. You should also pick up the aggro melee disc, Provoke I think. If you're in an area where you can pull that will increase your initial aggro, giving you a bigger buffer. Your casters should also almost never sit down after casting on mobs. Knights have it a tad better earlier because they have dot/stun aggro.
The yaks & FBSS are multiple Krono for now on TLP servers. "Saving up for them" is a sketch proposition for a while. Knights are totally fine thanks to spell casting. Their model for agro basically doesn't change all the way to 105
Use taunt on cool down. Use beg on cool down. Be the puller, this helps more than you know. Use the DD augments. Use duel wield with faster weapons (yaks) with procs. Gnoll Hide Lariets are cheap and very good. Use the warrior tomes "elbow strike" from level 5 to 20, post 20 use Provoke instead.
^^^^ This. Outside of splitting a camp the first time through the spawn cycle, or a group that is well versed in chain pulling and not requiring significant stops that would ruin broken/split spawns, I don't see much of a reason for a warrior to not pull in classic xp groups. I am unclear on the mechanics of how / why it works, but when I pull multiple mobs they always come to the warrior first - for a while at least. Bard songs left running seem to create aggro problems with multi mob pulls more than anything else even with the warrior pulling. My guess is it has to do with direct aggro versus social aggro, but I don't know enough to be sure.
at the end of the day, classic warrior have very few tools... atleast provoke is in. heck, you don't get much until PoP. classic aggro generation is more about DPSer ( mostly caster) waiting before nuking than the warrior doing much ( and if you have multiple mob at the same time... well, that's why chanter and bard were highly sought after in classic).
