Game Mechanics: Only four pets should be able to attack a mob at once, throughout Green/Blue timeline

[Wallicker]

Makes chaining fearing classic dragons much easier imho this way when 4 get feared 4 more rep them automatically without having to rely on player skill and patience

[soronil]

We must prioritize this change to restore trains to their former glory!!

[whitebandit]

am i misunderstanding? Trains to their former glory? If this would apply to PCs as well, are you saying that Mobs 5-8 are going to be attacking people NEAR the Trainer instead of just focusing on him?

[Sunderfury]

There's already a bug report on this in the main bug section, video was linked showing 5 or 6 pets attacking in at least Velious. So it's skeptical how it all worked.

[Dolalin]

You're right Sunderfury, there seems to have been a stealth change at some point in Kunark perhaps to alleviate or remove this limit?

From the thread:

Pre-kunark.. getting more as 3 pets on a mob was hard.. because verant had 'fix' a bug which would allow only 3 pets on a mob. (this was done for players, only 3 mobs would agro the player now, with pulling.. that was the idea behind it)

After kunark, it is no problem at all getting 4 or 5 pets on a mob.. just arder pet to attack and it's on it.

Myself i play VERY often with necrogroups (4+ necros in a group).
Being on raid.. well besides we are mana-bateries, we can throw in a dot once or twice, but our main damage is our pet.. he does very good damage.

http://web.archive.org/web/200101231...ML/000930.html

So I'll climb down from my soapbox on this one and admit I am probably wrong on the "whole timeline" bit.

Nevertheless I think there's a strong case for vanilla era. All the quotes I posted are from vanilla or very early Kunark, and this one corroborates them.

[DMN]

It's actually an interesting mystery. only 4 mobs attacking a player was certainly something everyone saw back in the day if you ever pulled. only 4 pets attacking the same enemy was probably not seen as often as that would have rarely been happening in groups and generally pets were not bothered with for a lot of raids back then since they just created lag and got feared. Lag/server instability were a major issues of raiding back then. often times, less was more.

[Izmael]

I do distinctly remember "extra" mobs standing around and attacking you only when you killed one of the currently attacking mobs.

I wanna say it was after Luclin launch though.

I'm not sure we want that for Green or even Blue. People are supposed to get shredded to bits by trains in BB.

[yraapt]

I don't know that I recall NPCs not attacking players if they had too many on them, but I definitely remember my pet not attacking if we had too many pets on the raid target. I thought that was fixed in kunark sometime.

[Rogean]

I also recall the 4 mob limit in classic, when they were attacking the same player. Mobs outside the 4 would kind of pace back and forth just outside melee range. In order to code this in, in an independant way where it affects the hate list of all NPC's (therefor it affects NPC's attacking players as well as other NPC's, like pets attacking a mob), there's tons of considerations and lots of ways it could go wrong and be exploited. It is definitely not as simple as whoever posted that other code in this thread, that is laughable. The mobs would have to be treated as if they have the entity on their hate list but don't engage because there's 4 other npc's in melee range already.

I'd like to see about putting this in but I definitely can't promise anything. This would not only take a bit to code, but it would take a lot of testing as well. There's still a lot of stuff to get done before a week from now.

[Sunderfury]

Papa Rogean, here is the original thread with this evidence:
https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=113187

Page 4 is where more of the compelling evidence begins. Definitely can be exploitable.
https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...=4+pets&page=4