Aggro

[eq4me]

Sorry for the bump but I cant find anything so far that would indicate an loss of aggro from running away in the EQEmu code. Additionally I have not bee able to find an good description of aggro behaviour for EQLive. Anyone has an resource?

[ndnet]

Mobs seem to have an individual chase radius within which it will follow a targeted player indefinitely. If the player runs beyond this radius, the mob will run along some path. The path itself is hazy to me, it might be as if the creature were feared, it might be a path that leads to its spawn location, or it might resume its predermined patrolling path. I want to say the likely case is the fear pathing as it always seemed to be in the exact opposite direction from myself. In any case, the mob is running, and yelling for help the whole time (just like when you've got it engaged).

While running home, other NPCs can be alerted of the player and target them as well. They will even give chase if the player is within their particular range. If not, they will usually just continue their current action of standing still or patrolling until either they forget the player or the player comes within their chase range.

Mobs seem to attempt to reset themselves every 5 or 7.5 minutes after being engaged. If the player is still within their chase range, they will continue to give chase indefinitely. If none of their targets is within their chase range, they'll probably reset themselves and lose aggro. I wouldn't really implement this until after some lengthy discussions on in which instances the reset will succeed.

Mobs also seem to reset themselves (hp, etc) completely once arriving at their spawn point, if they're static, so it may not take as long. Roaming mobs tend to just resume their roaming after aggro is wiped. They might reset at their spawn points, too, but such a thing occurs so infrequently it's not readily observed.

The only ways I recall to force an aggro wipe are as follows:
zone (zone, camp, die, etc), feign death, memory blur, fading memories (and similar skills, e.g. escape), get far, far away and let everything cool down for about 10 minutes.

The latter of methods being difficult for anyone that runs slower than a Bard, mind you, with most zones not being large enough to pull enough distance with only a minor difference in speed.

Being invis has no bearing on mob behavior, they can always find you if you're on their hatelist, visible or not. Tired of rambling, some others can finish hashing it all out.

[Angelox]

Depends on the Era - at first, mobs never lost aggro , and you either had to camp out or zone the aggro, because they would always be coming for you. What did happen was, mobs would "freak" and run after you in the wrong direction (bad pathing or whatever)

Then on later expansions , you could "outrun" the aggro, but if you came back to the mobs area, the mob would remember (still had to camp the aggro).

[RangerDown]

Angelox's depiction is the most accurate from my experiences. In EQ, you simply do not lose the aggro by running away. Especially up thru and including Velious.

If the mob turns from its direct path toward you, it's usually because it lost line of sight to you and is now relying on pathing to find a direct line of sight back to you. Many a fearsome train has been caused by this mechanic, since sometimes its pathing logic has it turn and run back down into the dungeon, causing social aggro with all friendly mobs it runs past.

I've on occasion witnessed a mob stop when you get out of range, and I can't really understand why it does that unless it's searching thru its pathing and can't figure out a path to you. In those cases, from what I've seen, it continues to hold position until it either loses aggro by its hate target camping/zoning/dying, or it discovers another tasty target nearby and runs over to it.

I can't really speak for the aggro in zones past Luclin, and for some of the most recent expansions they very well may have coded in distance aggro loss. They also seem to code in aggro decay on certain boss mobs as a deliberate tactic to make hate management part of the challenge, but those are the exception rather than the rule. But for those of you new to EQ -- this ain't EQ2, and this ain't DAoC. If you aggro a mob and don't do zone/camp/die/use a memblur type spell, then the mob *WILL* continue to remember you -- INDEFINITELY -- until one of those things happens.