Game Mechanics: Heaing aggro is bugged

[azxten]

I've generally noticed healing aggro seems "off" while leveling a cleric. Then lately I've been PLing and I noticed that I seem to "randomly" get aggro from healing.

The person I'm PLing can be at 0 health and I dump 500 health into them from superior healing and they have no other aggro than proximity. Two things happen intermittently:

1. The mob turns and attacks me. This seems normal. Healing generates some amount of aggro and it overcomes the proximity aggro the target had.

2. The mob acts as if nothing happened. I can immediately sit down after healing as well and not even that provokes the mob after a massive heal on a target with no aggro generated.

This should be easy to test. Just have someone get proximity aggro who is missing health, heal them, and repeat. Sometimes the mob will ignore the heal. I don't know if this is just healing aggro. I've tried testing LOS or anything else but it just seems "random" that on some occasions I get no aggro from casting a heal.

[Ligma]

There's a check to see if you get agro from a beneficial spell

http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=39819

NPCs can fail a 'witness check' (Sony's term, mentioned in patch notes) in which case they will completely ignore a beneficial spell cast by a player which is in their hate list.

This means you can cast a heal on somebody tanking a NPC and have a chance to not get on the NPC's hate list at all. This is why healing is less effective than hitting NPCs for getting faction hits in groups/raids.

My data suggests that witness check rates are not affected by distance or angle to the target. Levels of the caster and target also seemingly make no difference, however I have not tested every possible combination of level disparity due to the difficulties involved. I did run some tests involving characters that were lower in level from the NPC, which produced the same success/fail rates, although the tank was still a higher level. (I had the casters usually casting on themselves however, not the tank)

The data does indicate that rates are not the same for every spell. Endure Fire for example was witnessed at a lower rate (about 40-45%) than most other spells I had tested-- those were around 50%. Minor Healing also resulted in the same lower witness rate as Endure Fire on a level 68 NPC casted by a level 65 character. I have not tested many spells due to the significant amount of time required to gather the data.

An old cleric thread from early 2004 has some clerics running tests, and they also came up with the 50% chance for heals to aggro, testing on low level NPCs: http://www.eqclerics.org/forums/show...t=17872&page=3 however their sample sizes are small.

See the pastebin link for my data.

[vossiewulf]

Originally Posted by Ligma [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There's a check to see if you get agro from a beneficial spell

http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=39819

That was an interesting read, thanks.

[azxten]

Originally Posted by Ligma [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There's a check to see if you get agro from a beneficial spell

http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=39819

Cool thanks

[azxten]

So I just need to bump this again because it still seems off.

A person can get body aggro with 15 mobs on them and I heal and none of them aggro me. Is this "witness check" being applied to the spell cast and not per mob? Should it be?

Also is the rate it is occurring at intended? I mean honestly I basically never get aggro from healing. This does not feel classic at all.