Game Mechanics: Sit agro not working properly

[CupcakeValkyrie]

Currently, sitting itself generates too much agro.

Originally, in classic, sitting down would do two things:

1. Effectively makes you level 1 with regards to agro radius and mob willingness to attack you.

2. Modify your existing hate towards any mobs that currently have you on their hate list.

However, on P99, I've seen mobs that I've already inflicted damage on leave melee with me to go punch a sitting caster that hadn't even done anything to them yet. That's not classic at all. While casters did have to be wary of sitting after casting spells that anger mobs in classic, the act of sitting itself didn't generate that much agro if the mob was already engaged with someone. The only time mobs went on a caster-punching frenzy was if the puller pulled the mob back to the camp with body agro, thus generating very little initial hate, and even then only mobs with "frenzy" style agro (undead, primarily) tended to do this.

It seems like on P99, sitting is coded to generate agro instead of simply modifying existing agro as it did in classic.

[Dolalin]

Torven has researched hate mechanics exhaustively for TAKP and I'm pretty sure they've been implemented here.

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

The sit bonus is different depending on if you are inside or outside of melee range.

The inside melee range bonus is thus:

Up to around 13k hp, the sit bonus is equal to a non-damaging detrimental spell (hitpoints / 15) with a minimum of 15 instead of 25.
After ~13k hp, the NPC's sit bonus actually starts to decline down to 0 at 100,000 hitpoints with the function bonus = -hitpoints / 100 + 1000.

The outside of melee range sit bonus is also equal to a non-damaging detrimental spell (hitpoints / 15) but it caps at 1000 and stays there.

So if a mob you are fighting has 1000hp, someone sitting down on the hate list is going to get 66 hate added to whatever their existing hate is. That could cause the mob to turn.

Might want to review that and see if it explains what you're seeing.

[CupcakeValkyrie]

What I've been seeing is casters that haven't done anything to generate hate yet still being attacked by mobs that will leave melee with me after I've done damage to them in melee to go punch sitting players that had yet to engage in any way.

I've seen it happen often enough that I've determined that the mere act of being seated within detection range of a hostile mob - even if you're seated well outside of melee range - not only adds you to the mob's hate list (even if it's not a "frenzy agro" mob) but also generates enough hate to override someone in melee range that is actively dealing damage to the mob. Sitting isn't merely adding to existing hate, it's putting you on a mob's hatelist and generating quite a bit of hate in the process - more than it ever did in classic EQ.

Classically, there's a threshold wherein even if you're not at the very top of a mob's hatelist, if you're in melee range and the person above you is not, the mob will still refuse to leave melee with you. It wasn't uncommon that this threshold was small enough that sitting would override it, so you'd have a scenario where a mob would leave melee to smack you if you sat down, but as long as you stayed standing after you nuke/slow/heal/etc. and gave the tank enough time to rebuild the agro threshold, you could sit down and be fine. That mechanic seems mostly intact on P99, with the only issue I can see is sitting generating a disproportionately large amount of agro compared to classic, especially on mobs you haven't done anything to yet.

[PabloEdvardo]

might be classic

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/his...es-2001-1.html

------------------------------
March 6, 2001 3:00 am
------------------------------
...
-- Fixed a bug that would cause NPCs to add too much "temporary hate"
when a player would sit down in front of them.

this is about 4 months into velious

[PabloEdvardo]

also, sit aggro feels VERY classic in its current implementation

I recall these being common while leveling in kunark on Live, and seem to be in place today on p99:

- needing to stand while mobs were incoming (social/body aggro isn't enough to keep a mob from adding a player in camp to the hate list and then running over to them)

- needing to stand for a while after casting a high aggro spell, or after a root/mesmerize breaks (e.g. casting tash or snare and then immediately sitting almost guaranteed aggro versus casting it and then waiting a few seconds while other players generated hate first)

[CupcakeValkyrie]

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

also, sit aggro feels VERY classic in its current implementation

I recall these being common while leveling in kunark on Live, and seem to be in place today on p99:

- needing to stand while mobs were incoming (social/body aggro isn't enough to keep a mob from adding a player in camp to the hate list and then running over to them)

- needing to stand for a while after casting a high aggro spell, or after a root/mesmerize breaks (e.g. casting tash or snare and then immediately sitting almost guaranteed aggro versus casting it and then waiting a few seconds while other players generated hate first)

Right. As I mentioned in my initial post, pulling with body agro was often insufficient to keep sitting from overriding you. My issue is that I would sometimes pull mobs after dealing quite a bit of damage and still have them leave melee with me to attack random sitting people, including people that hadn't healed me nor attacked the mob yet. The issue appears to be that sitting is generating way too much base agro, rather than modifying existing agro.

To give an example: In Cazic-Thule, I would sometimes pull with an arrow, then crack the mob with a 2H weapon before bringing it in. I would deal in excess of 100-200 damage to a mob, drag it to camp, and it would still flit around the camp smacking every sitting caster before finally turning back to me.

I know sit agro was worse before the Velious-era patch that reduced it. The issue with sit agro on P99 seems more with how much initial agro is generated by people that aren't yet on the mob's hatelist, not so much the amount generated by sitting after you do something hostile towards the mob.

Edit: To clarify, sitting by itself shouldn't generate enough agro to pull a mob out of melee with someone that is actively beating on it.

[Dolalin]

Just a comment. The amount of damage you do to a mob in melee has no bearing to the hate you generate. You build hate on each swing, hit or miss, according to weapon damage/delay.

[CupcakeValkyrie]

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

Just a comment. The amount of damage you do to a mob in melee has no bearing to the hate you generate. You build hate on each swing, hit or miss, according to weapon damage/delay.

I know, I'm just making the point that I'm attacking mobs for a lot of potential damage and they still leave melee with me to punch sitting casters, which they shouldn't be doing.