Game Mechanics: New Form of "Lazy Agro" seen: deagro after time.

[Toomuch]

I believe there's some strange de-agro coding that has gone awry, at least with a certain type of mob in a certain zone. Yes, I'm a bard, and yes, this has to do with PBAE Kiting, more commonly known as "swarm kiting" here (which, *tangent alert*, is a misnomer itself, because swarm kiting on live had to do with charming 1 mob in a train and purposefully getting that mob jumped by the train). This bug is really imbalancing the established risk vs reward.

Specifically, I've seen skeletons in Burning Woods drop agro after a certain amount of TIME, not distance. I've died a few times to this, but didn't truly have my theory proven until I watched it happen to another bard.

What happens, is that in Burning Woods, the mobs you want to kite are Bees, Skeletons (minus Slixin Klex), and Gorillas (minus the various Gullerbacks). Most bards pull their train of these mixed mobs to Skyfire zoneline, and kite there. It takes time to wear the mobs down, and if you have enough mobs, the "Max 25" rule comes into play, where the game decides which of the 25 mobs will be taking damage from your PBAE spells/songs. What I've seen happen again and again, is that if a skeleton mob has not taken damage after X amount of time, it will simply drop agro, and start walking away. The problem for bards is that often the mob will de-agro, saunter across the center of your kite-circle, and then stun you when it re-agros on the other side. Super fun, let me tell you.

With the bard I was observing yesterday, I watched 3 different skeletons drop agro in succession, NOT all at the exact same time, which is what makes me believe that there's some kind of timer ticking. I've also never seen any mobs other than the skeletons in Burning Woods behave this way.

Did someone have some experimental coding in there with how Lazy agro was going to be implemented (mobs lose agro if mot damaged after X amount of time), but forgot to delete the incorrect code for the skeletons/undead mobs in Burning Woods? Or possibly in more zones? I've started avoiding pulling any skeletons because of this, which sucks.

I've seen this exact thing happen enough now that I'm 100% certain I could replicate it, if a dev like to see it. Undead mobs shouldn't lose agro after X amount of time, whether or not they have been damaged.

[branamil]

Patch Notes: Monday, February 13th, 2017

Haynar: Entities will be dropped from an NPC's hatelist after 10 minutes of adding no additional hate.