Well you guys should know by now the only thing sony is really good in is ******** people.... after ******** and nerfing druids for 7 years its about time you guys feel a bit of that yourself
rasi
Changes to NPC Aggro AI
Rashere breaks the news: "Pet pulling" and "tick pulling" will be strategies of the past come September 19th. From EQLive:
Over the course of beta, we've identified and corrected a number of issues that have been around for a while but were being exacerbated by the downtime changes we are making. There are two particular changes with the "call for help" routine that I want to draw attention to since they close loopholes that allow some questionable tactics that some of you may be using currently. I want you to be aware that they will no longer work after our next patch to save you the potential deaths from attempting them. These will also be in the patch notes.
- When most NPCs call for help, they will only call for a small, set number of NPCs to respond to keep from swarming people with dozens of NPCs at once. There was a problem in the call for help routine that caused an NPC to not call for help again for a few seconds if it had already called for help and enough NPCs responded that they had met that maximum number the first time. This is what was enabling the so called "tick pulling" phenomenon whereby you could aggro an entire room, drop aggro, then immediate re-aggro a single NPC and it would come alone. This is now fixed and NPCs will now properly call for help every time they are aggro'd from a non-aggro state.
- With the above problem fixed, we also had to address another bug in the same area to prevent just shifting the loophole form one tactic to another. This one had a similar effect, although for an entirely different reason. When a player sends a pet in to attack an NPC, the NPC uses the pet's leader to determine how the NPC reacts. In one part of the "call for help" routine, this check was missed and it was causing an NPC to not call for help if it was attacked by a green con pet of a PC. This particular bit of code is there for NPC vs NPC combat to keep NPCs from ganging up on each other, but the missing check for a PC leader caused it to not call for help if a PC sent a green con pet to aggro it. This is now fixed and the NPC is properly using the pet's leader for this check as well.
Again, both of these fixes will go out with our patch next week.
Rashere