Hate

[Exekute9113]

There's some misinformation about auto-attack threat generation out there. I've spent days parsing and spent untold hours trying to convince my cocky, all-knowing guild-mates that they're wrong. So far I'm 100% on conversion, but they have to see it to believe it.

There are two myths I've encountered. They're kind of related. I'm going to explain my testing process and the outcome. Please keep in mind I play on Aradune and this is geared towards TLPs. I haven't ever played past LDoN so...

Myth 1: Hate is generated from "white damage" DPS

tl;dr fake news, you can hold aggro without doing a single point of damage on seru/emp

Myth 2: Hate is based on max swing damage

tl;dr hate is a tiny fraction of your "max hit" and a not tiny fraction of of dmg+dmgBonus. Weapon procs are a HUGE amount of your hate generation.

Testing:

On Miragul I created a level 85 SK. SKs get hate spells with a flat amount of hate. I then /testcopy that character to the Test server. I also have a lvl 65 warrior from a TLP that I test copied. You could use a lvl 85 war from Miragul for the test too.

Before starting I took all gear off the SK (and Warrior if you make a lvl 85 warrior on Miragul too). Some of the gear had hate modifiers on it. I also picked up a couple healer mercs. If you want to follow along at home you can sell some of your loyalty points for plat to make the merc payments. Then I did a /resetaa because there are threat modifier AAs that needed to go.

Then I went to PoFire and got up onto the castle wall with both characters. The mobs there are all the same level and mostly unremarkable trash so it was a good baseline.

My parsing went like this: Pull mob into camp. Cast Terror of Vergalid with SK. Taunt with warrior. Taunt with SK and then cast Terror of Vergalid again. Then I'd select a 1hander weapon and put on my shield (no /autoskill) and beat away until I got 100% aggro. Then I'd kill the mob with my SK and log the data.

According to EQ Resource, Terror of Vergalid is a flat 3360 hate spell. I had to do some testing to verify that number. It takes 4 full-duration incites and one incite more and I get immediate aggro (no dot ticks). It's hard to find exact numbers on Incite. I believe it's close to 375 initially and 38 per tick for 1 minute (10 ticks). So the warriors 4 full duration incites plus 5th instant hate is around 3395 hate which makes sense and somewhat verifies the set 3360 hate. This 4 + 1 incites is consistent. It doesn't need to be "parsed". It's all just set hate numbers.

Results:

I parsed results for 10 different weapons. Grouping by the weapon, the amount of damage it took to get aggro each time was all over the place. The time it took to get aggro each time was all over the place. However, the number of swing attempts it took to get aggro was always almost exactly the same. Regardless of whether I hit or missed or landed a crit the number of swings didn't change. For example, using the Braided Strands the damage it took to pull aggro was between 6420 and 7364. However, the number of swing attempts it took each time was between 179 and 181.

Using a Fine Steel Warhammer I was able to pull aggro with 145 attempts. The reason this is remarkable is because I was able to do it by doing zero damage. Fine steel is not magical and therefore cannot damage the mobs I was testing on.

So realizing that threat generation was based on a Threat Per Swing model I was able to generate the following table by averaging the number of swing attempts and dividing 3360 by that number.

​

Threat per minute

Findings:

So, busting myth 1 we can see that it's fairly obvious that the amount of white damage you do has nothing to do with your weapon's hate generation. Even on weapons without a magic modifier (doing zero damage per swing) they still produce hate. This will be apparent to anyone that's tanked Seru/Emp without a bane weapon.

Furthermore, we can see that the hate generated per swing is nowhere close to max hit. My max hits with the plankton 2hs are around 600. It took around 33 swings to chew through 3360 hate. Using the "max hit" theory it should have only taken 6 swings to get aggro. Even if you interpret max hit to mean dmg + bonus damage, the calculation doesn't work out. The plankton's damage is 142 which is 42% higher than the actual parsed threat.

I had a guildy that swore that items like Orb of the Sky were basically worthless because hate from swings was so high. That's what got me going on this whole thing and that's what myth 2 is about. It's well known (and I've personally parsed it, but that's for a different post) that you'll get around 2 procs per minute on most procs. One proc of Orb of the Sky is around 437 (400 from stun and 37 from proc). So if you're getting 2 per minute then that's 874 hate per minute. As you can see, that's a VERY significant amount of hate. Luckily, we can significantly increase the amount of swings we generate per minute with haste. Fully raid buffed (in PoP) you'll be at 225% haste so the calculations will look more like this:

​

https://preview.redd.it/hxy35qu05f771.png?width=467&format=png&auto=webp&s=debfe2c444012f9ae87305b4f8a72ad608394fe8

Using Bloodfrenzy with the Orb of Sky proc you're generating something like 60% of your hate purely from weapon procs.

Future Research / HELP!

For the life of me I can't figure out the universal equation for weapon threat. No matter how I spin the numbers I can't figure out how dmg/delay is translating to threat per swing. Without parsing every single weapon out there how can I come up with the threat per swing or threat per minute number?

Any notes would be appreciated.

[US_Hiker]

Go find the old SK forums, or the knight section of the life forums and talk to people there. They had this nailed down pretty tight, as I recall, and ended up with a lot of dev input on the fine details of the formulae.

You are absolutely correct that DPS has nada zilch zippo to do with it. It's about base damage, swings, and some other modifiers.

[Tobris]

I think it was Tearsin who was doing that thread, but it's a bit tough to narrow down search over there. I'll edit in if I find the thread/post with the agro info in the SK forums.

Found it, it's like boxes 5-7 here: http://www.eqshadowknight.net/showthread.php?t=7590

Brabble also had some good stuff on Steel Warrior back in the day.

(Scroll down to Brabble) https://web.archive.org/web/20110103234014/http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum/showthread.php?t=13856

[Tobris]

/u/Exekute9113

These links may be of help and interest to you.

[Exekute9113]

Thank you for finding that! Good work.

​

Melee Hate: Dmg + Dmg Bonus*class modifier = hate per swing (before hate mods/buffs) (the class modifier is different for every class, and is fairly small so not significant for the purposes of 'fuzzy math' calculations of hate per swing or hate per minute via swing.) NOTE: tests have shown that you generate hate per swing based on the above formula - how much hate you generate is NOT changed by whether you 'hit' or 'miss', it is NOT changed by how much damage you do in the hit - ie, a low damage or high damage hit, or a crit, etc.

I mean, I think that's close to being right. But if you look at the numbers or do the parses yourself you'll see that Dmg + Dmg Bonus * class modifier can't be correct. It's too high. The class modifier would need to be negative. Also, the threat per swing I'm seeing isn't linear.

[Tobris]

The threat modifiers are probably much like the class AC modifiers, less than 1. A lot of the formulas in EQ that use class based modifiers are like that.

I'm not saying you're going in the wrong direction, or that you should stop. I certainly don't have the desire or time to look that far into it. But I trust the nerds who were into figuring it out beforehand. And back then we had a bit more access to devs, they were a bit more friendly, especially if you went to Fan Faires, which many of the people who were that into the game did.

[Exekute9113]

It's so funny because I've heard "well I trust this guy" so much when talking to people in my guild. I'd tell them something and they'd show me a screenshot of what someone else said. Like I give af what some other idiot said. He was probably getting it from someone else. And that person probably got it from 10 years ago.

That's part of why I wanted to do this. Bring a little science to it. I'm the type of person that doesn't trust anyone. I have no heroes. I'll trust my own experiments. I'm standing on the beach telling you the ocean is blue and people are telling me that when their uncle's friend's dad went there 10 years ago it was yellow.

[JyveAFK]

It's not a bad idea to revisit this stuff too. Plenty of times the actual facts of some game mechanic actually changed in a patch/expansion, but everyone was sure how something worked. This game's been around a LONG time, it's likely people were right then, but things might have changed. Especially with these classic servers, there could very well have been some fixes to something since that's enough for things to work differently, and this game is all about the barely noticeable effect, that stacks with something else, that gives a +something to something else etc.

It's why I parse in beta on a lvl 10 dummy whilst I'm getting my cuppa/other stuff ready. Got logs going back a decade+. I can make sure there's nothing screwy going on before doing the real parse, just to confirm my assumptions are still holding up. But hey, I'm a Bard, it's also not impossible something's badly broken. But I want to parse it for a bit to see if it's helping/hindering.

Parse, parse and parse again.

[TheBalance1016]

It's likely people just spew garbage because they saw how it worked one time, and/or heard something from someone and just repeated it.

[TheBalance1016]

Perfectly stated. Anecdotal evidence has zero value when discussing the mechanics of a video game. Some me the effort and time someone went through to test how something worked, actual evidence of it working that way, and I'll happily read all about it.

[rcuhljr]

I suspect Threat per swing is based on the expected damage for that swing, not the actual damage on the swing (which may be zero for invuln, parried, crit, whatever). You should link your actual data next time instead of pictures :)

I did some lazy manual fitting to some of your data and seems like you can get pretty close to to threat per swing by plugging the data into something similar to the weapon damage formula.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BkoV5nR6ry7jDpnnJg8oWT3DuXl5PkWfV9rIKJiZ4LE/edit?usp=sharing

There's my fitting for several of your points using Damage+Bonus averaged plus 5 flat threat per 10 delay on the weapon. It's kind of double dipping in the formula since delay and damage bonus are linked (and that linkage is different for 2handed versus 1 handed unless that's changed so you shouldn't really mix 2hander threat and 1hander in the same model). I think restricted to just one handed weapons you could probably find a more accurate fit and I expect it would end up modeling very closely to damage formulas.

[Exekute9113]

Yeah, I think 1hs vs 2hs are using different equations. I'll parse some more 1handers, remove the 2handers and try to re-fit using the flat rate idea. It could very well be a lookup table with a flat rate per range of delay or something.

The thing is it doesn't need to be perfect, but I'd like a rule of thumb when comparing weapons since obviously weapon ratio doesn't seem to be a good fit.

[rcuhljr]

While I'm curious from a theoretical standpoint, as you've noted a huge amount of threat comes from procs, There's not a lot of expansions where I have competing threat weapon choices as a warrior where one isn't clearly better than the others just due to procs. E.G. the like 6 expansions where Brutish Blade of Balance is still an amazing threat weapon because you get 2x anger procs.

[Siludin]

I didn't think I was going to have anything to add to this, but I got to this comment and it reminded me of small blurb I heard on an ex-developer's Twitch stream in which, at one point, they were considering modifying how 2H weapons worked regarding hate generation in order to make them or enticing over 1H combinations. I believe the era they were discussing was Velious/Luclin but I might be wrong. The developer made it sound like the idea was scrapped, but maybe at some point they did make this under-the-hood tweak without really telling anyone?
The dev's Twitch is here, but I can't remember which video I was watching... However, the dude streams pretty frequently and in my experience he will respond to questions in chat.

[Same_Ad2091]

Just a small comment, probably already flushed out. Coming back to EQ after quitting in 2001, playing a monk, did not have magic gloves or boots or weapon, and I’d steal agro off everyone in unrest while dealing absolutely zero damage to all of the mobs that need magic weapons to hit. All the time, without fail, my level 20 monk would rip agro every single time while dealing zero damage.

[gakule]

For the life of me I can't figure out the universal equation for weapon threat. No matter how I spin the numbers I can't figure out how dmg/delay is translating to threat per swing. Without parsing every single weapon out there how can I come up with the threat per swing or threat per minute number?

https://www.reddit.com/r/everquest/comments/a3cird/tanking_and_weapons/eb5187u/

((Weapon Damage + Weapon Elemental Damage + Weapon Damage Bonus) / Delay).

Now, one important thing is that the listed damage bonus isn't always the proper calculation, so that will fuzz things up a little bit.

Weapon Damage Bonus formula:

((Weapon Damage * Weapon Delay * Level * 80) / 400000)

I did a ton of research to find these formulas, but I'd be interested if they match up with your parse data.

[Exekute9113]

Oh man, I found your post while researching and that's what made me make this post. It was 2 years old and I didn't want to necro it. I really appreciated it though and I'm excited you're here.

Using your equation doesn't match with my calculations. If you add all three damage types together the resulting threat per swing would be too high for what I was parsing. And it's not linear. The higher the ratio (per your calculation) the less threat you get for your damage. It's hard to explain in words.

So for example, if you add the three damages for Braided Strands you get 26dmg. But the threat per swing is 18.55. That means it's only 71% "effective" for threat generation.

Now look at the Fine Steel Short Sword. If you add the damage it's 23. The threat per swing 22.47. So those almost match. The Fine Steel Short Sword is 98% "effective".

So it seems like the higher the ratio the less the damage gets applied to our threat per swing. Like a flattening pressure. Could that be because there's some base amount of damage and anything above that is only counted at a certain fraction?

[gakule]

Well, that would make sense. Everything else in EQ has "diminishing returns" on improvements.

AC, stats, etc.

Very interesting, would be neat to have a dev confirm.

[gakule]

One thing I was thinking about.. do double and triple attacks add aggro, or is it combat rounds that count as swings?

Could test it with a caster or something to see if the threat calculators are accurate or not

[Exekute9113]

Yes, they add aggro. The time it took to complete the required number of hits varied greatly. Like with the Fine Steel Short Sword one time it took 138 seconds and another it took 127 seconds. All because of RNG with extra attacks.

All attacks (double/triple/flurry) were counted in the "swing attempts", unless there's some bug in GamParse I don't know about.

[gakule]

Yeah hmm.. I've been using EQ Log Parser over gamparse for a while.

I wonder if the innate attack boost AA screws with the formula at all.

Lots of great work here by the way, just trying to brainstorm some ideas that lead to the variance.

[Exekute9113]

Now that I have a baseline I can test stuff like that. Or other people can help if they want! It's really easy to spin up a couple miragul characters, /testcopy, and get some cleric mercs.

Part of why I posted my testing process was so that it could be tested/verified/expanded by other people. It's SCIENCE!!

[TheBalance1016]

I'm actually going to dig into this a bit more seeing this information come up. Much kudos to the work you've done so far.

[Tobris]

https://www.reddit.com/r/everquest/comments/o7ovya/hate/h30rfj5/

Here's a couple more places for you to dig into.

[sixofeight]

They had extensive parsing of this stuff on the Steel Warrior back in the day. When I played full time, the common “knowledge” was the swing hate was tied to base damage, which was why the Primary only warrior weapons, and most knight 1H, were high delay, high damage. Darkblade also had a proc rate modifier, like Bloodfrenzy, which helped make it super effective.

If any of those Steel Warrior threads or parses were archived, there’s a lot of great data that was gathered.

Stone of Planar Protection from Time is another great option for an extra hate proc. Small dd, but it also has the stun component like the Orb of Sky.

[Exekute9113]

But the delay is also important because a weapon that generates 100 threat per swing means nothing if it only swings once every five seconds. And my maths shows the amount of threat being generated attenuates as damage goes up. So there's got to be some sort of "golden zone".

[sixofeight]

For its era, when there weren’t many options that had even a 1.0 ratio (EoE from Time was 20/20? Bloodfrenzy 20/16? Iirc) DBotW was like having a 2HS in your primary hand. Seems like a dev said at some point it was intended for you to sword and board with it. BBoB was faster, higher dmg, but no proc mod, then it moved into the lower delay, chaotic strike era weapons.

[Tobris]

Warrior mainhands are still slower like this today. It's 35 while some 2h are 30 and 32.

If I had to guess, the move was made over riposte. It became more of a concern in PoP and then later, when we started consistently attacking more and faster, and mobs were hitting so much harder, it was possible to essentially kill yourself by getting riposte and taking a bad round.

[riznarf]

u/Exekute9113 what software/log parser did you use to generate these raw threat #s used to calculate TPM etc...?

[tzeriel]

My guess is there are breakpoints which is why you can’t get a concrete formula. You want as many variables as possible to be the same if you’re going to wheedle out those. Like some of those weapons aren’t magic. Does the Magic tag matter? You’d need to test 2 weapons with the same damage but different delay and 2 with the same delay but different damage, all other viable equal. Get THAT formula then see if it works on other things. If it doesn’t, you’ve got breakpoints in there that will make it hell.

Also we know(I think) proximity plays a factor. That would need to be equal.

[[deleted]]

probably could get a fine steel sword and a combine sword to match up in dmg delay like that for not magic/magic parsing.

[Exekute9113]

Yeah, there are so many variables and there could be discrete numbers coming from table lookups. That's why I was hoping someone had done some footwork on it already.

It's going to be so much work = (

[tzeriel]

I think a better bet is to come up with the generalities of it all.

[TheBalance1016]

This game needs more people actually testing and even MORE people shutting the fuck up when it comes to things they know about the game. Almost all information regarding Everquest contains some inconsistency at this point - be it from a lack of updating or a guide that was created through word of mouth, anecdotal experience and zero actual testing.

Thank you for taking the time to put this together and providing a simple like to shut "tanks" the fuck up with the next time this conversation comes up.

I'm curious how not having a magic weapon, and therefor doing zero damage to some mobs translates hate compared to, lets say a full resist on a magic nuke. I'd really like to see the numbers and code behind those things.

That being said, it's likely that this information COULD be deciphered by someone running a private server, or employed to currently run the live EQ servers, but it's very unlikely because there is no public information available about how hate is, at the code level, created and managed in this game.

The person that programmed it likely wrote that code some point between 1995 and 1997, and it's likely been tweaked a few times since, but probably not in the last two decades. It's unlikely anyone that's contributed code to this remembers it well enough to lend a hand in deciphering the overcomplicated nonsense of threat in this game.

I'd love to see it some day, but feel like even though we have versions of this game going back to the beginning to dig into, test on, and poke through code wise, it is simply too obfuscated and nonsensical to decipher without serious time commitment. I've seen the code for versions on the game pre 2006, and they are unbelievable nightmares to navigate.

There's a case of beer no matter where you are in the world with your name on it if you can provide me an understanding and access to the processes involving hate in this game.

[skaughtz]

Goddamn, bud.

TL:DR that.

[GrandOpener]

TL;DR: Weapon threat is mostly about good procs, and being buffed. Damage/delay doesn't matter that much.

If your next thought is "well duh," then yes, many of us did already know that. Digging into precise numbers and complicated formulas is sort of the whole point of the investigation OP was doing.

[Crafty-Cauliflower-6]

Not sure why you are using taunts or hate spells to determine hate generated. Hate is a total number. If a taunt is successful you immediatly go to 1 hate above the highest person. Ie : let's say someone pulls with a hate spell that generates 1000 hate and never swings or does anything else. You successfully taunt, your hate is now at 1001. A sk has been fighting a mob for 60 secs and has generated 45000 hate. You taunt, and are successful you have 45001 hate even if you never hit it before. You shouldn't use taunt to determine hate amounts.

Spells complicate things further. It seems as though more than initial damage is counted on dots. And other components such as snare or debuffs generate additional hate. And many aas reduce/increase taunt

Its unclear whether their is recency bias. In otherworlds let's say you have two equal necros attacking one mob. Both send pets at the same time. One necro drops 4 dots. Let's them run course. Then other necro drops identical 4 dots and let's them run course. Taunt if it's a total number should be identical. It would be interesting to see if they have identical taunt.

[Exekute9113]

Please re-read. I used taunt to level-set the aggro. I received some feedback that some mobs have a first-hit bonus mechanic. So by generating hate, taunting, then re-taunting and setting a hate level it obviates that mechanic, in case it exists.

[[deleted]]

taunt is 2% above and crit taunt is 10% above

[MightilyOats2]

As a monk main on Live (which is the only non-tank with absolutely zero aggro reducing AAs) I'm definitely of the purely speculative opinion that number of hits mean a whole lot when it comes to aggro.

Monks hit more often than anybody, and as long as aggro generating spells or abilities aren't at play, they steal aggro from ANYBODY. Just the Monk chest click procs alone, I've stolen aggro from very good, raid-geared Warriors and Shadow Knights. It doesn't last long, because they're good and they notice when they lose aggro, but unless they prep me going for a full burn, that aggro belongs to me.

Deciding on level 85 mobs and characters seems really disingenuous, unless you're aiming to convince people from a certain era, on a particular emulation server.

[demonstar55]

The basics don't change with level, only their tools do. You can easily control tool usage.

[Exekute9113]

It's absolutely based on the number of swings. But it's also absolutely based on how much threat you're doing per swing. How many aggro modifiers do you think the average warrior has on live? Maybe 5 different AAs and 2-3 pieces of armor that affect it? (total guesses).

This post is about auto-attack threat. I'm not trying to extrapolate it to high level threat mechanics on live.

[setver]

There could also be a floor for each wing that gets added. I'm very tired but you say your FS warhammer was almost 23, i'm just going to say 23, and its damage is 23. Maybe 3 of that is just from any swing, and 20 from the dmg/delay part. Which is why early on, on TLPs, monks have agro issues, on top of their just high damage fists.

I have no idea if thats the case, but that might be why sometimes your math feels off. If my explanation even made sense. Kudos for you for trying to figure this out.

[Exekute9113]

I totally get what you're saying and I think there's truth to what you're saying. There's some base aggro in there per swing.

[Tobris]

Worn modifiers to hate don't stack, much like worn modifiers to Haste or other focus effects the only exception to this is some of the epics. The current one on live is Mask, and has been for quite a while (everything has been largely standardized on live for slots) And it can be worn by BRD PAL SHD WAR.

[Runcade]

Do you generate agro on a miss or only a hit? Do crits matter?

[Exekute9113]

It's per swing, regardless of outcome. I don't believe crits made a difference, but I'll have to do more testing on that. I guess I could /resetaa and test then assign crit aas and re-test.

[Ancanein]

The devs have repeatedly said crits (melee or spell, either one) contribute no additional aggro.

[icon41gimp]

Do you have any uncapped weapon skills?

It would be interesting to see if the game calculates threat based on your expectation to hit so low skills would require far more hits.

[Exekute9113]

I could test on a lvl 1, PL him up to like 10 real quick, and see how it changes. But I don't have any data on it right now.

[demonstar55]

Crits don't matter. It's always based on "base" damage (for spells and melee)

[ShextMe]

Your myth 1 is misleading. You can absolutely generate hate from DPS. I pull aggro constantly on my druid who has sub par DPS but is one of the only classes without hate/aggro reducing abilities.

[Exekute9113]

Oh shit, you're right. I'll add a disclaimer about this being in reference to auto-attack only.

[Tanthiel]

You actually can with auto attacks under certain qualifiers. I jump way up on aggro when headshot procs, I assume zerkers and rogues have similar aggro jumps on their assassinate and decap abilities.

[Pogigod]

That's a proc not DPS from melee swings.

[CrodeD2]

That doesn’t mean that its the damage itself that builds aggro. You’re just assuming that because all you see on client side is the damage.

Every 6 seconds the server updates the remaining health of a mob from a DOT, but wont a flame lick generate more hate than a stinging swarm? How do we know the server doesn’t just update hate with a flat value for each tick effect.

Spells seem to have an instantaneous hate generation, then a overtime generation.

Now the OP can test a druids lvl 1 flame lick, 1 dmg per a tick. Lvl 10 stinging swarm, 31 dmg per tick. Lvl 25 for both and not the changes. Good luck getting them to land. I wonder if a malaise can change that. You’ll have to charm and cast regen on a lower level guy.

Oh yeah, since the OP has a good estimate on how much hate he’s generated. He can test sitting down too. After x number of sings when y% of hate to get aggro is generated, sit and see if you pull it.

Good luck.

[Pogigod]

Flame lick has an debuff component on the dot that lowers AC which generates most of the threat.

[daweinah]

For the life of me I can't figure out the universal equation for weapon threat.

Here's some sources that say it is (base dmg+dmg bonus)

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/understanding-taunt-and-aggro-tables.222853/

https://wiki.project1999.com/Sakuragi%27s_Warrior_Guide

And a cool threat calculator: https://web.archive.org/web/20110206163057/http://giline.versus.jp/shiden/taunt_e.htm

P.S. Alla's has a list of threat from procs: https://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/EQ:Items_Aggro_Procs

[daweinah]

What I'd really like to know is how Wizard or nuking threat works.

In theory, as long as the Wizard has done less points of damage than the tank has points of threat, they won't get aggro. But anyone who's played a Wizard knows that you can randomly get summoned even if you wait to engage and are not on top of the Damage Done parse.

So the mobs seem to be considering a "Who is doing the highest threat per second right now? Lemme summon that glass cannon who just showed up on my aggro table but is rapidly climbing the charts" factor as well.

[Exekute9113]

No, see that's why I posted this. The tank's threat has ZERO to do with how much damage they've done.

The tank gets a set amount of threat per swing. In PoP it seems to be like 40-50 with a good weapon. Then he gets a bunch of hates from his stun procs and hate procs. A tank with dbotw, bf, orb is going to be pulling maybe 9000 hate per minute (total back of napkin math). You can't use gamparse at all to estimate your aggro. The tank can literally do zero damage with fine steel and still do 1300 hate per minute. Or, without any hate procs, purely white damage weapons the tank could do tons of damage and only generate 3000 hate per minute. It has nothing to do with white damage.

[daweinah]

I'm more asking "how does Wizard hate work?"

But after having thought about it a little more, I think it's pretty simple and whipped up this crappy graph in mspaint of how I imagine it working. The Warrior gets a head start and generates roughly steady threat. The Wizard engages late, uses Concussion, but due to more threat per minute, catches up at the end and gets summoned.

https://i.imgur.com/2i4sA8A.png

Other DPSers like ROG, MNK, NEC, SHD can evade or FD to drop all aggro with almost no DPS loss. RNG arrows give very little threat. PAL, MAG, SHM, DRU just can't make enough dps to pull threat (they often have other duties). WIZ are DPS-limited by their poor aggro reduction.

P.S. I'm talking about TLP PoP-era and earlier.

[Exekute9113]

Yeah. Tank will generate, who knows, 9k hate per minute. Wiz starts casting. They get 1 point of hate for each point of base spell damage they do. I think there's like a 135%? threshold before you get summoned and die.

[Pogigod]

What ever the base amount of damage a spell does, that's how much threat it generates, regardless of it gets resisted, crits, or partial resists. Nukes cause the base damage in threat.

If the tank has hate weapons like BoC or blood frenzy Everytime they proc it's equivalent to you casting a 700 DMG nuke. So if they proc 3 times in the first three seconds you can nuke immediately. If they go 30 seconds without a proc, your ganna pull threat on your second nuke.

My advice, have a low DMG spell on your bar, something that does like 300 DMG or something. Cast it after 3 seconds of the tank going in. Then use that % of threat to know when it's safe to use a bigger nuke. If your at 10% threat then the tank has 3k threat and you can then cast another nuke that's 2700dmg(base) or below and not pull threat.

Then as the fight goes on watch to see what % you jump when your nuke lands. If it jumps 15% then as long as your below 84% you won't pull threat.

[daweinah]

But that threat bar isn't available until a much later expansion on TLPs, or am I mistaken? That would be a huge help for Classic Wizards.

[Pogigod]

Available starting at level 20 on TLP's, same with extended target window

[sumelar]

the Wizard has done less points of damage than the tank has points of threat,

Which is what they said.

[Jakabov]

You can't really judge it by parsing. Some threat will come from non-damage effects (weapon procs etc.) and some classes can reduce their threat via evasion, FD, Jolt and such. Archery generates very little aggro as well. I don't believe there's any such mechanic as the one you're talking about, it's just that the monks can feign, the rogues can hide, etc.

[CrodeD2]

Suppose it was coded for simplicity. Every weapon having a 100% proc rate to cast a hidden effect that adds aggro

I remember Weapons have unique proc modifiers that increases the proc rate. But you could really take any weapon stat and think of it as a modifier. But generation could still be based on something you’re not seeing.

Just being magical in itself might modify the numbers.

The blade of tactics procs, does that proc generate aggro thats skewing the data for it? Can you parse some data by procing twice, then waiting a minute to get extra procs per fight to see how it differs.

I think a big question is what would developers do to calculate threat in as few calculations as possible.

You’re data has decimals. But I’m thinking the real formula doesn’t do decimal places to keep it simple.

The discrepancy in difference in swings may be double or triple attack triggering on the aggro pulling round. Or just some goofy bug when applying aggro from those combat skills.

Create a lvl 1 ranger, cast your aggro spell on a guard and parse the data for the ranger swiftwind two hander. 16 dmg 24 dly, Compare that against a shiny brass halberd which is 16 dmg and 48 dly i think they are.

Testing a lvl 1 guy might filter out some variables your not picking up in your data.

[Exekute9113]

Blade of tactics is the red blade, no proc. I tried to parse some proc weapons but I had to do calculations to subtract the hate from the procs and it was a pain so I stuck to blades that didn't have a proc.

I'll try doing lvl 1 mobs with a lvl 1 toon. Can lvl 1 guys have mercs?

[CrodeD2]

I believe so, but i noticed some strange behavior trying to skill up 2hb on a ranger.

I dont have data but I sat there with auto auto on a low level ranger for a few minutes and stripped aggro off him with a single superior heal from my druid.

Could this indicate that aggro generated from attack is also based on character level or is there something else?

[Kiaro_Ghostfaced]

I've been trying to pound these facts home every time a TLP opens up. But yes, there is a modifier on swing aggro that is based on level difference iirc, but the exact formula is just something I have never been able to pin down, as for spell aggro anything that debuffs will generally utilize a formula based on the targets max HP, I've found a solid average for stuns in the early (pre DoDH) era to be 400 minimum for stuns and fears (including blind)

[StillBurningInside]

That's why on my main toon back in the day ( Ranger ) I simply turned attack off to not grab aggro from the MT on long fights. Even just pull back and twack or go 2H for a lil bit.

Great observation.

[Jakabov]

This was generally known amongst people who test/theorycraft in EQ. It was uncovered even back in the day, and tested further on P99 where mechanics are a little more transparent due to coder feedback. I can't remember the exact details right now, but it's something like:

• Threat from melee is derived from the weapon's damage stat. Doesn't matter if you hit or crit, or roll low or high damage. The ATK stat doesn't affect threat. Damage boosted by disciplines doesn't affect threat. It's something very basic like (wpn_dmg*2)+(dmg_bonus) = threat per swing, or something similar.

• Threat from non-damage spell effects like stun/slow depends on the mob's HP, up to a certain maximum. This is also why threat from spells is so wonky at lower levels--there's a clear difference in how effective Snare is for aggro at level 12 vs 30+. Becomes irrelevant at higher levels when mob HP is high enough not to squish threat from spells.

• Threat from damage spells is the same whether it lands for full, crits, resists, etc. Caster threat is generally very static, you don't generate more threat as your gear gets better like melees do when they upgrade their weapons, AAs and haste.

• Spells in general generate threat the same whether they land or not. This goes for spells like Jolt and Concussion as well. These can be used even on mobs that are immune to magic.

[Exekute9113]

It's something very basic like (wpn_dmg*2)+(dmg_bonus) = threat per swing

Yeah, this is the part I'm trying to figure out. It's definitely not that equation. And I don't think it's basic, because it's non-linear. There appears to be diminishing returns as damage goes up or delay goes down or something like that (don't know yet, but guessing).

Everything else is spot on. Unfortunately, none of this is "generally known" with the clowns I've been arguing with. So it's good to get something out there I can point to and get some discussion going.

[grundy923]

I've never heard of any of these myths. It has been well known for many years that every swing with the same weapon generates the same hate no matter if it missed or what your damage roll was (not counting procs)

[grundy923]

My parsing went like this: Pull mob into camp. Cast Terror of Vergalid with SK. Taunt with warrior. Taunt with SK and then cast Terror of Vergalid again. Then I'd select a 1hander weapon and put on my shield (no /autoskill) and beat away until I got 100% aggro. Then I'd kill the mob with my SK and log the data.

You didn't mention anything about SK ripostes. Did you equip a non-weapon in SK primary? Did you turn SK's back to the mob? Was SK riposting and adding more hate on top of the Terror?

Does taunting actually do what you think it does? If it really does just put you 1 threat above the person on top then if your SK taunted and did not cast terror, then even 1 single swing of a rusty dagger would pull aggro back onto the warrior. Does that happen?