Guide to Aggro

=Guide to Aggro=

Aggro, short for aggression, in it's simple form, is how AI controlled entities (heroes, enemies, etc) select what targets to kill. Knowing all the fine print can enable you to manipulate that behavior to your favor. To that end, lets start with the basics of aggro, then move more into how it can be manipulated to your favor:

Terms Used
Two similar but substantially different terms are used here:

One is Aggro Bubble, the small circle that is displayed on your minimap. Every enemy has a similar aggro bubble of its own. Once you enter an enemies bubble, or they enter yours, they will be "aggroed".

The other term is Aggro Radius, and refers to how far you need to travel before a foe will stop chasing and give up. For stationary patrols the radius is centered at the spot the patrol initially stood at. For moving patrols, the radius is centered at the spot the patrol leader was standing at when aggro was initiated.

States of Aggro

 * No aggro
 * Active Aggro
 * Breaking Aggro
 * Fleeing Aggro

No aggro : Put simply this is when foes haven't seen you yet. Typically this is because you haven't entered their aggro bubble, but other factors can affect this. For example, some foes are incapable of seeing you at any range until you attack them, and others may see you from an extended distance and come towards you to attack you. Without aggro, if a foe dies, you do not gain experience points, and the foe leaves no drops. You do however receive a morale boost if a boss was killed.

Active aggro : The monster has seen you and your party and will initiate attacks against you.

Breaking aggro : For whatever reason the foe has given up on killing you, and heads back to where he came from.

Fleeing aggro : Enemies will run away from area of effect spells after being in them for some time, or when taking a lot of damage in a short time period.

Target Selection in General Melee
Given a range of targets, there are a number of criteria that dictate which target a foe will pick. These factors include :


 * Health
 * Armor
 * Health Regeneration/Degeneration
 * Movement Speed
 * Distance from the particular foe
 * Self defense

In general, they work out to a factor of time -- How long will it take for the foe to kill you. The less time he needs to kill you, the more likely it is to try and do just that.

Health : The lower your health, the fewer hits it takes a foe to kill you. Thus, your foes will favor anyone with low health. Conversely, more health means you are less likely to be targeted.

Armor: How tough are you? The stronger your armor, the more work is involved in killing you.

Health regeneration/degeneration : High health regeneration will reduce your chances of being the monsters target, while the opposite is true for degeneration.

Movement Speed: How quickly can you be caught? If you are slower than your other allies, you will be less able to flee from attack.

Distance: This goes hand in hand with snares. If the foe moves very slowly, it will favor greatly any targets that are nearby.

Self defense: A foe may choose to switch from their current target to someone who is attacking them.

Acquiring/Losing Aggro
There are several ways to acquire aggro:
 * Enter the foe's aggro bubble. This works on most foes, however in some low level areas foes are oblivious to this particular rule.
 * Get near a foe's aggro bubble. Some foes (eg: Kournan Spotter) are aware of you at an extended range. Typically, this isn't an extended aggro bubble as if you had actually aggroed the foe, his party would charge you too.
 * Land an attack on a foe -- This works, if your attack lands.
 * Target the foe with a spell -- This triggers aggro when the spell successfully completes. The fact that aggro waits for the spell to finish can be exploited to the purpose of targeting the foes with powerful long casting spells such as Meteor Shower.
 * Aggro a party member of the foe.
 * Target an ally that has aggroed the foe -- If you cast a spell on an ally, the foe acquires you for aggro. This can be used as a simple exploit for earning experience when you aren't participating in the fight, of use if you have to work off death penalty.

Losing aggro is a rather simple proposition:
 * Die. Foes will not continue following your party after a party wipe.
 * Flee. If you move far outside the aggro radius of a group of foes, they will stop chasing you in most case. The faster you move in relation to your foe, the easier it is to break aggro by fleeing.

The One Man Bandit
It's you versus the world. Or well, every foe in the area you care to try killing. What possible tricks can you employ to make aggro go your way? First, you may notice you have two general types of foes, and they handle aggro differently:
 * Melee foes -- These are your axe warriors, your hammer warriors, your shambling horrors, and such. Anything that needs to get into touch range to cause you harm.
 * Ranged foes -- Anything that doesn't need to touch you to hurt you. This includes rangers, spellcasters, and the odd spear chucking paragon.

Mano a Club
Going up against your non-ranged attackers presents several advantages, and drawbacks. For advantages, things will run right up to you so you can use AoE skills to kill them en-masse. For drawbacks, these are more prone to flee if you start hurting them, and they are more prone to block your movement. You have to be careful to not stand still during initial aggro with a group of melee attackers, or they may restrict your movement. If you are going to kill them in place, that's fine, but if you want to gather several groups together, this becomes a hindrance. Because these foes are more prone to flee, you may find that you need to either snare them to hold them in place, or use techniques to keep them from getting away. One technique is to block their flight path, make it such that when the foe tries to run directly away, it is running into a wall. Another technique is to snare him. You can use spells, but in a solo build a snare is a precious skill slot better used for buffing your damage, or simply staying alive. Not to worry, there is the low-tech snare: The wand snare. This doesn't have to be a wand, it can be a staff, spear, or even a bow. The argument can be made strongly for a spear: This lets you carry an enchant mod on the spear (required for some solo builds), but throw a mastery mod on an offhand, a combination not possible with a staff or wand. So long as you are banging on a foe, it won't flee. While swords and axes could be used for this, if you want to pull back a foe that has already fled, but are yourself boxed in and unable to chase, a sword or axe won't suffice. You want something with range for your wand snare. An interesting mechanic becomes apparent here: three foes will always remain to attack you. If you have four foes attacking you, at most one will flee. If you have 400 foes attacking you, at most 397 will flee.

Mano a Spear
Your foe has range to attack you with, so it won't clump with all its allies nicely on top of you, and if you try to bring the fight right to it, it may back off. This can render melee and AoE attacks of limited utility against some casters in a 1 vs 1 scenario. This can be dealt with in a couple of ways. You can find a bottle-neck to clump the foes together in, or in some instances you can drag them against a wall -- Since they often spread out in a specific pattern around their target, the wall can be used to force your foes to pile up in one spot, as near as possible to their desired positions, but happily all in one spot for your own nuking needs.

The designated caster: The designated caster is harmless compared to his comrade, you just bang on him till it dies, then his comrade comes in to fill his shoes, and you can bang on the replacement.

The designated kiter: This guy can be a pain. He'll run from you, it won't even bother to wand you (an unpleasant thing for you Smiters using Shield of Judgment). It may contribute spells, but otherwise all you can do is snare and kill him, or kill the designated caster. Once the designated caster is dead, the designated kiter changes roles and starts wanding you.

The Hit and Run
As the name implies, this is a hit and run farming tactic. You hit the enemy once, and run away. Your goal with a single hit isn't to kill them, but to injure them graudally over time. A common build for this involves the use of splinter barrage and 3 fast recharge run skills. It works thusly:
 * 1) You attack the enemy once.
 * 2) You run away, using a run skill.
 * Since you are moving faster than the enemy, you make for an impossible target, and they ignore you.


 * 1) Proceed with step 1.

The Many Man Band
When you have more than one party member, it's not a matter of getting aggro or keeping it. It's a matter of keeping it where you want it. Sometimes people go for the general melee, where your monkage and damage is sufficient to not require special treatment, but sometimes things hit a tad harder than your monks can keep up with in a general melee, and so has evolved the role of the tank. The tank: Your tank need only survive all the attacks coming against him, however it still should to look appealing to your enemy. Whether that's low armor, low health, a self-snare, or no regen, your tank will be more effective with one or more of these in place. Another tactic is pulling, so that you can control the size and shape of your aggro, making it harder for your party to goof fataly, and easier for your tank to keep aggro..

The Sticky Factor
Your tank should (in most instances) be sticky to aggro. Simply put, if a foe is given the choice of banking on your invulnerable tank or your squishy monk, it should feel that his time is better spent banging on your invulnerable tank. Low armor, low health, snares, etc... It ultimately doesn't matter how, just have something about your tank that is appealing. Using other tanking methods to control aggro can make this moot, but only if your tank is perfect, and your nukers are perfect, and your monk is perfect... In short, if anyone does something wrong at the wrong moment, aggro can slip around the tank and onto you.

The Body Block
The age old tactic of the body block. How this works is your tank aggroes a foe, and gets him up against some obstacle. Your squishy allies come up behind the tank and either heal your tank, or do rude things to the foe. The foe, fed up with banging on an invulnerable target now aggroes on one of your allies and paths to them. This path was designed in advance by the tank -- it takes the foe through the tank or obstacle, with the result that the foe just walks up to your tank and stands there.

A typical body-block aggro start to finish works something like this:
 * 1. Tank annoys a foe with a bow, then finds a good spot at a corner to stand.
 * 2. The foe bring his friends along, and the melee portion of the group walks right up to the tank and stars banging away, while the enemy casters stand back and wand or cast spells. And this is how things will stay until something changes.

That change, typically is:
 * 3. Some caster in your group either casts a direct heal on the tank, or a spell on the foes around the tank.

In either case the result is the same: Every foe now takes aggro on your caster and starts moving to him.
 * 4. Your caster (if wise) will back up a few steps.

The tank has blocked the straight path to your caster, and the foes are not sharp enough to realize they need to walk around your tank (ever try walking to something in town by clicking on it and get stuck? Same deal here, except the AI keeps clicking, and where you manually steer around it). After a few seconds, you have all your foes standing in on spot. Now, you could cast spells on a single target there and work him down to death, but most people favor this:
 * 5. Each caster in your group hits their big AoE spells.

After hitting all 4 or so spells, dealing ~300 total damage every foe by the tank, multiplied by 3 to 5 casters, there remain only two steps:
 * 6. Loot the pockets of the dead for spare change
 * 7. Decide what dies next.

The Open Field Tank
This is a bit trickier than a simple body block, and in truth your tank isn't body blocking the foes,it isn't doing a thing to keep them from aggroing your party, but through the magic of aggro manipulation, they never target your party. This works best with melee foes, but caster groups work too, and a good tank can ball up mixed groups for the nuking pleasure of your casters.

How this works is actually quite simple. Find a stationary group of foes (patrols can do this too, but AI mechanics make it trickier... see pulling below). Annoy them. Run! That's right, run. And keep running until your enemy turns around. Then go back and annoy them again. Do this until you can find exactly where to stand so that if you take a couple steps back the enemy cuts and runs. Just short of that cut & run spot is where you sit your tank. Your casters all stand behind it. Because your casters are far enough away from the initial pull spot, the enemy will ignore them. They have eyes only for the tank. So get them in a ball and kill them.

A problem: The balling technique used for the traditional tank won't work here. That because foes don't properly aggro on the casters in back, and you lack a choke-point in the open field to bring all the foes together. However, if during the initial pull, your tank zigzags, all the casters will ball up. If he then pulls the casters to one side, walks behind them and pulls them to the other side, he can get the enemy casters at the edge of their aggro radius, then walk up to (or behind them) to bring the melee together with the casters. Some casters are given a stand-off spot, a spot to stand at a distance from the tank. Walls or obstacles can be used to get these foes to stand where you need them, but in a truly open filed you need to kill them individually.

The Open Field Tank, v2
This is trivial compared to the normal open field tank, but only works with enemy groups of 3 or fewer.

Have your tank run up and gather them up, then stand perfectly still. As long as the tank does not move, 3 foes or fewer will remain on him until they are dead. This only works with 3 and fewer, if there are 4 foes, one will change targets, if there are 10 foes, 7 will change targets.

Pulling
Sometimes you don't want to fight the enemy on his home turf. What you instead want to do is pull your enemies them to your home turf. It may be that you don't want patrols joining in your fight, or that you are worried about getting other nearby groups dragged into the fight, or perhaps you don't want to trigger a hidden group of foes that you suspect may be present.

There are some tips and tricks to doing pulls.

Basic Pulling
This typically starts by giving picking a spot to fight at, then giving someone a longbow or flatbow. These bows have the longest range of any weapon, and so are ideal for plucking a foe for 1 pt of damage. Having thus annoyed the enemy, your puller runs back to the party and a normal fight ensues. You may have the tank pull, so that he can arrange the aggro such that none of it leaks onto your party, or you may have a ranger pull, as these have a history of occasionally carrying a bow.

Long Distance Pull
Lets say that you are at one end of a zone, and have an enemy you want to fight. At the opposite end of the zone is the spot you want to kill it at. Lets say this is a modestly large zone too, like Snake Dance. Some people would think that foes won't pull that far. They'd be wrong, but there are aspects to it that make it difficult.

First, you need a target to pull. Something that can be distance pulled. Stationary groups won't long distance pull, their aggro radius is fixed. So you need a patrol, and not just any patrol, but one that patrols slower than you run, or you'll have problem catching up to them for each cycle of the pull. It'd be impossible to long distance pull a patrol that moves faster than you, difficult (at best) to pull a group that matches your speed, and relatively trivial to pull a patrol that normally walks. What you are going to do here is exploit the patrol aggro process.

When you aggro a patrol a singular thing of import happens, with respect to the long distance pull:
 * The patrol leader's current position is marked as the center of the patrol's aggro radius.
 * This doesn't happen for stationary patrols, only for moving patrols, which is why stationary patrols cannot be long-distance pulled.

It's important to understand the de-aggro process, or you may never get anywhere with your pulls:
 * 1) The patrol has determined that it cannot reach you before you leave the aggro radius.
 * 2) The patrol runs toward the center of the aggro radius for a distance.  (The distance varies based on how far it was pulled)  During this flight they may occasionally stop for a brief moment, but they resume flight almost immediately.
 * 3) The patrol stops and stands still a slightly longer moment than seen during normal flight. At the end of this stage, the aggro radius is reset.
 * 4) The patrol proceeds at patrol speed to where the patrol path was initially interrupted
 * 5) The patrol resumes the normal patrol pattern.

What you are going to do is come in at step 4 and re-aggro the enemy group, after the aggro radius has reset and before they get all the way back to their patrol path. This lets you pull them again, but to a new, more distant spot. If you pull a radar or further and to a spot where a return to their normal patrol is blocked by an obstacle, they can become unable to return to their patrol, and will instead stand stationary, staring at their obstacle. Used judiciously, you can cause them to become scattered this way, letting you pick a single isolated target to kill.

Now that we have the mechanics out of the way, lets describe the actual pull

You take out your trusty long bow, and tickle an enemy patrol. Next, you run away. If you can survive it, you will zig-zag back and forth, the end result being that you effectively move slower. This gives foes a chance to catch up after stopping to cast a spell or an attack, so they don't fall behind the rest of their allies, and you really don't want them falling behind, due to the singular element of aggroing a patrol mentioned above. Eventually, the enemy opts that you have run too far to interest it, so it breaks aggro and starts running away. You don't chase after them yet. Once the patrol pauses for about a half second, you chase in after them. They will start walking back after that pause, so be ready and get an arrow in the air as soon as you can. Wait for it to hit before you run away, and as before, if you can survive it, zig-zag again. You can then repeat this cycle until you are satisfied.

Why the heck would you want to pull a patrol across the map? What possible purpose could it serve?

Well, two:

First, it lets you get a particularly nasty group to a favorable spot for tanking. Sometimes, those big open areas just arn't equipped with walls for your tank to use to keep them in place, so being able to pull them to a handy wall helps.

Second, it lets people who want to death level (the act of letting foes level up by killing you multiple times) get numerous patrols to a res-shrine for leveling.

Pear Shaped Aggro
Up until now, we've discussed what happens when aggro goes well, but aggro doesn't always go well. Sometimes, for whatever reason, something goes wrong. The term used for this here is Pear Shaped, and if sufficiently out of round, you may need to have your party flee. There are different ways aggro can go awry. You need to be alert for them and how to deal with them.

The Deceased Monk
Your monks keep your party alive. Typically groups run with 2 or 3 monks for healing and protting, if one or more die, your non-monks are going to have to res that dead monk. Yes, resurrection skills are classic monk skills, but when you have a dead monk, you are now short 33% or 50% of your healing capacity. Your surviving monkage is too busy keeping the rest of the party on it's feet to bring up a dead member, and it will eventually fail without that dead monk helping. To avoid this, make sure at least 1 non-monk has a hard res to use whenever a monk or other party member dies. That leaves your remaining, over-worked, under-paid monks the singular task of tending to the living until the resurrected monk has recovered enough energy to be effective again. If your dead monk isn't up promptly, it may be best for the party to just cut and run. One or two dead party members is a small thing. A party wipe is not.

The Overzealous Ally
One of the more popular forms of pear-shapped aggro, this is where your ally, in the heat of fighting the foes in front of him, charges forward far enough to aggro another group of foes. Minions and henchmen are popular for doing this, although allies such as dwarven ghosts or helpers for quests can also cause this to happen. With a sufficient force of minions and decent monks and damage, you may even be able to survive double or triple aggro from this, but unless you plan to kill the enemy groups enmasse this way, it is suggested you simply pull foes a full aggro bubble away from other aggro before letting allies/minions enter the fight.

The Other Monk
In the scenario of the other monk, the other monk is not your monk, nor is it the enemy monk. It is simply, the other monk. The monk from a nearby group of foes who notices one of his allies (the one standing in a meteor shower) could use a heal. That monk will happily stroll a short distance and drop a heal on the wounded ally.

Where this goes directly from bad to worse is when something aggroes that monk. It doesn't take much. It doesn't take casting a spell on it or plucking at it with a bow. All it takes is something (your tank, your minions, an over-zealous dwarf ghost) to enter its aggro bubble, and you suddenly have a very different problem form moments ago. The other monk, once aggroed, calls over all his buddies to help out in the fight. Now instead of an extra monk healing the foes you were trying to kill, you have two entire groups of foes trying to kill you, and if both groups have similar composition, they have two monks that will heal any foe in that group. What you need to do when that first monk starts walking over to heal is kill any monks in your current group of foes, and try your best not to aggro the other monk. If your current group of foes has a monk (and in this scenario it typically does), and there is an outside monk healing it, it's going to be hard to kill anything, so it becomes a priority to make the first monk die. Without it dead, you won't be able to easily kill anything else. With the first monk dead, you can then go about normally killing the first group, and then promptly turn on the other monk, exposed by having walked a short distance from his party members to heal. A snare and big heavy rocks can work, but how you thank the other monk is up to you. If you wind up aggroing the second group while the first monk is still alive, its usually best to cut and run, as you now have double the monkage, double the damage, and if they had time to aggro you before you killed that first monk, you arn't killing things fast enough to stand a favorable chance of killing both groups with both monks quickly.

To preemptively prevent this problem, you can pull the first group away from any other nearby foes before attacking it.

The Leak
Your tank has everything balled up, and then a single foe of the one hit one kill variety steps around him and decides to play tag with your monks. This foe is called a leak, and is handled by:
 * 1) Having a secondary tank.  Often, this is the prot monk as he is often well equipped to serve in this role, and often has under 400 HP, making him one of the squishiest things in your party.
 * 2) Targeting the leak and announcing 'This dies now'.  Unless you have a secondary tank that can handle the foe well, you need to kill it promptly.  If that foe happens to be a nuker, it really doesn't matter how well your secondary tank can handle it, it needs to die.

Having an experienced tank can limit how often this occurs, and letting him set aggro where he wants it before beginning a fight can help. Another tactic is to hit&run groups that the tank has balled up. Essentialy: Your nuker targets the foe. Walks up. Uses a single skill, and then backs up outside of spell range. This does two things for you:
 * Things in the middle of an attack on the tank when that spell completes will find the caster out of range when they are ready with their next attack. Deprived of the nuker as a fresh target, they stay with the tank and continue wailing on it.
 * Deprived of your nuker as a target for spells also, they don't target your nuker. It may be surprising to some, but with a group of nukers doing this properly, your nukers can almost completely avoid getting hit by enemy spells while still turning the enemy into a pile of ash.

If the leak does sufficient damage, you may need to cut and run. If the primary or secondary tank say run, then run. Don't wait around to kill one last foe, cast one last spell, or res a dead ally. Get away and do it quickly. The purpose of the tank is not just to ball up foes, but to also keep you alive. Dying is in his job description, if he decides it's time, let him die. It's not in yours so get the heck away while you still have a non-zero health. There are some settings where running is not an option. If you are in that setting, knowing if you need to kill, res, or dodge attacks is key. Experience is vital, seconds count, and even then the seconds you have may not be enough.

The Pop
You've picked a patrol to kill and charge in to kill it, when suddenly, from the ground beneath the foe charge up eight more foes to kill. You now have twice as much foe as you had moments before. If needed you can cut and run then do so. To avoid this is simple. Just pull groups to you whenever you know pops are around. If something pops on your puller before he gets to the intended group, then have him pull the pops.

Back Aggro
You are merrily wailing away on one group, when something from behind, be it a patrol or just a wandering foe, aggroes you and starts wailing on your back-line (read: killing your monks).

To avoid this, you need to watch patrol movements and pull whenever you are uncertain of what path a group will take or how far an individual might wander. That said, this still sometimes happens. When it does, if there is room past your tanks to fight without aggroing still more foes, you can have your casters run past your tanks and minions. With any luck, you've killed enough of the group you had started with to make them largely a non-issue in terms of breaking to attack your casters (see Open Field Tank v2 above). Running may not always be an option here, as the new group of foes often blocks your path of escape.

Grand Central
The worst of the aggro situations you can reasonably expect to encounter:

You pick a patrol to kill, and walk up to it. Suddenly, some pops come up out of the ground to help the patrol. No worries, you've got good monks, good damage, you can handle it. While you are beating down the first of several enemy monks however, two more patrols come in from different directions, and now you are out-numbered four to one.

If you aren't already killing things in droves, you really ought to just run. It doesn't matter how good your monks are -- If the enemy has any monks of its own, they can (and often will) help each other out in healing and you just won't have the damage to kill anything. Break aggro and pick a single group to pull and kill.

The Cowards
Sometimes foes will run from you. This can happen in a solo tank scenario when too many melee foes take damage, but this can also happen if you are attacking past an obstacle (through a wall, down a cliff, etc) and the enemy is unable to attack back. What happens is he eventually comes to the conclusion that standing around for the slaughter is unwise, and he runs away, and will even avoid his normal patrol location as a result. This flight can make killing them past your obstacle difficult, you may have to go around and confront them directly, or you may have to get him to de-aggro and resume his normal activity. Sometimes having the person with the active aggro standing as close as possible to the obstacle will have the coward come forward. As an alternative, you can try getting everyone off its radar completely. Also, by working together to spike down individual targets, you may be able to avoid triggering this behavior, and by picking where to attack from, you can control where the foe flees to.

Epilogue
Whatever happens out there in the game world, remember that your opponent works by rules, and those rules are designed to make it possible to kill you as quickly and efficiently as possible. A true aggro artist will exploit this to the maximum benefit of his own needs. It is hoped that this document helps you do just that. Best of luck in your hunting.

It is hoped that others will extend this as needed, and perhaps fix my poor tpying and grammar.