"Aggro" system after engagement in melee and Armor

[kartacs]

Hi there!

 

TL:DR: My testing (and game experience) suggests that there is a "sweet spot" at 3 armor difference between the tank and the dps (rouge for example). If it is in favor of the dps then the enemies do not switch target in melee to hit the dps instead of the tank. 2 armor difference also works since in most cases you have enough time to kill most enemies before they would switch to the rouge. If you have other experience or some kind of manual to aggro please share.

 

Long version:

 

So I have spent a good amount of time to search for "how aggro work" in pillars of eternity. I have found everything about "Engagement", and that's all nice and dandy. However actual "aggro" seems to be less discussed. If anybody have a good link or already know please help out a fellow player .

 

I did some testing on a "skuldr whelp", three "forest trolls", two "forest lurkers". So here is two very basic scenario:

Scenario A:

1. Fighter (armored to the teeth, carries an actual "larder door") goes in and engages enemy.

2. After engagement along comes a rouges in light armor and shivs the enemy in the gut.

3. Enemy promptly forgets the fighter ever existed and happily stomps the rouge.

 

Scenario B:

1. Aforementioned Fighter jumps on three enemies. He has an engagement limit of 2.

2. Two enemies got engaged by him and stays next to the fighter.

3. Third enemy goes on to pick somebody from the party. Or not.

 

This means there is an aggro system here. And my testing show it largely dependent on armor. I left the fighter with huge deflection (61) with no damage (unarmed) and my rouge with big damage (30-40 hits with sneak) and next to no deflection (9). Hard mode.

I did the following with a lot of combination of armor variations and combinations of the aforementioned scenarios and enemies. This is the result:

1. Fighter naked, Rouge in 5 armor -> enemy stays on OR switches to fighter even if rouge engaged first. All the time. Every Time. No exceptions (ok there were some cases like 1 in a 100). 

/*Engagement number doesn't seems to matter here. If the fighter goes in butt naked, and everybody else just follows after "inital aggro", and wears something, enemies will not leave the fighter.*/

Lets fine tune it:

2. Fighter in 5 armor, Rouge in 6 or 4 armor, fighter engages -> enemies stays on the fighter for one hit THEN switches to rouge. Sometimes even switches back to the fighter, sometimes not. This is weird as hell, didn't managed to find out what happens here. Either way 1 armor difference is inconclusive. Lets move on.

3.  Fighter in 5 armor, Rouge in 7 armor, fighter engages -> enemies stays on the fighter for 2 or 3 hits THEN switches to rouge. Sometimes they do not switch at all. It might have to do something with the level of the enemy. In this case forest trolls never switch or just after 4-5 hits but forest lurkers switch after 2 hits.

4. Fighter in 4 armor, Rouge in 7 armor, fighter engages -> enemies stays on the fighter and almost* never switch to the rouge. EVEN if the fighter is way over the engagement limit! If I add a butt naked third character to the mix one forest troll will go and engage that sorry bloke. But if its just the two of them (rouge in heavy armor, fighter in light), and fighter got everybody in melee range, they never switch to the rouge.

 

However in the meantime something peculiar happens in the logs: 

The logs says that enemies do engage the rouge (whatever armor combination), BUT they switch back to the fighter before they actually hit (there are not turn animation either if you stand behind them). This is interesting I do not know why it happens.

 

That's all folks. This made many fight quite easier for me (especially with enemies with high resistances). My dps might be a tad slower in armor but you don't "have to" hit with ever cc to stay alive.

 

 

[PrimeJunta]

Interesting research there. Thanks.

 

Have you tried varying the deflection differential between the striker and the tank also? I haven't, but I have a gut feeling that it's a factor too. I've switched Rings of Deflection around and moving one from the defender to the striker appears to make the AI target the striker less.

[Torm51]

So tanks should wear lighter armor and get a high def. Issue is you will get harder but high Def should make up for it. Also melee dps should wear heavy armor. So odd lol

[evilcat]

Monk tanks. New meta.

Edited January 3, 2016 by evilcat

[Torm51]

Monk tanks. New meta.

Ya been doing it for a while.  They are still soft in the early game while wearing plate If you don't give them a high deflection.  If  do it hurts DPS a lot.  Enemy rogues with the Reflex attack that hobbles coupled with sneak attack murders Melee dps tanks with low deflection.  Go through Readrics front door on PotD.  Its fun

Edited January 3, 2016 by Torm51

[Boeroer]

But didn't AndreaColombo report that a priest with no armor and very high deflection doesn't get targeted as often as as priest that has low deflection? I mean that's one major point of his priest support build. I think he wouldn't have posted that if it wasn't true - because he alsways does a lot of reserach and testing you know.

 

Maybe there's kind of a prioritiy chain: DR>Deflection>???. So basically "Attack the guy with the lowest DR in reach - if they are all the same, go for the guy with the lowest deflection". Could that be the case?

 

However - I noticed that your common glasscannons get rushed if they wear no armor at all - but if you put on armor value of 12 or higher this changes. Enemies don't try to rush them any more - or less than before. 

Edited January 3, 2016 by Boeroer

[SimpleEnigma]

I've had enemies target someone with higher armor further away than the character next to them. I wonder if each mob checks the effectiveness of its attack versus all characters and if one is especially vulnerable it will switch targets. Probably weighed against the damage it will likely take disengaging. But this is just me hypothesizing based on what I've seen in game and what I've read; no structured research.

 

I can attest to the monk low deflection early game issue. My poor monk just gets destroyed if a mob with CC attacks him or gets interrupted to death. Durance can only bail him out so much! Is there any early game monk help thread?

[kartacs]

Did some more testing in the same setup as before with deflection, interrupt (value and actual hit), health, and damage dealt. And the result is inconclusive at best. But clearly skewed towards damage! It would take a truck load of time to document it (and I would like to play the game now :D), but also would be meaningless since you don't want to "cut" the damage out of a damage dealer. The only sure factor is still armor. If the tank has 2-3 point of advantage in armor he "repels" enemies, otherwise they stick to him.

Other then that I presume there is some kind of aggro system in the background which takes multiple stuff into account. My best guess is for now: Damage dealt > Health > Interrupt  > Deflection.

In same armor value (leather armor value of 6):

1. Low hp (dps 39 tank 91) + big dps + low def pulls the mob off the tank in 1-2 hits. If the first hit is an interrupt it pulls immediately. Sometimes even mobs from the other side of the tank will come to hit the dps (but only if it does not break engagement). No surprise here.

2. Same as before (low hp, low def, high interrupt) but dps has no weapon and hits unarmed. Enemies never switch to the dps even if interrupts them every second hit. Makes sense however unusable since the point of the dps is to deal damage.

3. Low hp, high def (dps 45, tank 39), low interrupt, high damage. Also pulls the enemies off the tank right away. Which means deflection plays no interesting part here either. Even if it would you cannot have a good dps with much higher def than the tank. 

 

This means if you deal tons of damage you better have a higher armor than your tank. Or to rephrase this: your tank should have lower armor than your melee dps. Otherwise CC fest.

[Elerond]

They have added with patches system in game that enemies switch target if they can't harm or if they are really ineffective against character they are engaging, which means that if they can't really harm your tank they try to attack some other members of your party. There maybe some suicide prevention algorithm that checks how much disengagement they will take and if that is too high they will not change target or some other reason why they sometimes still continue to fight against characters that they can't even hit.

 

Enemies also seem to have some priorities when they switch their targets

 

For example they seem to more likely go after ranged/magic using characters than melee

They seem to go after those characters who they can harm most

If they are engaged with high damage dealing melee character they seem to be less keen to switch their target  

Also characters with high DPS may be higher on target priority list than support/cc oriented characters.

 

These are just my observations without any scientific proof.

[AndreaColombo]

But didn't AndreaColombo report that a priest with no armor and very high deflection doesn't get targeted as often as as priest that has low deflection? I mean that's one major point of his priest support build. I think he wouldn't have posted that if it wasn't true - because he alsways does a lot of reserach and testing you know.

 

To be fair, I didn't do a lot of research on this particular subject. I based my statement on my last play through, during which enemies never targeted my Priest who happened to be the only dude carrying a shield. I had high-DR, high-DPS fellows around and one low-health, low-DR Priest with high Deflection and enemies never rushed past my front line to maim him.

 

Though based on kartacs's research, it is perfectly reasonable that my high-DPS characters took priority over the Priest by virtue of their higher DPS rather than their lower Deflection.

 

To quote Irenicus, "It is time for more ... experiments."

 

(I was really tempted to spell it "moar" but I have too much respect for David Warner's performance to do that on any Irenicus quote.)

Edited January 4, 2016 by AndreaColombo

[Doppelschwert]

Stupid question, but isn't it possible to read these kind of things out of the game files?

 

I mean, where is the border between files being accessible and therefore moddable (all the stuff in the IE Mod) and stuff which is not accessible?

 

I'd guess if there was access to the targeting files it shouldn't be too hard to read what the AI is deciding on.

[AndreaColombo]

^ I believe the main issue with that is that in order to read what the A.I. is doing from within the game's files, you'd need to be very proficient with the programming language the game was written in. I guess it would be within one of the IE Mod maintainers' capabilities, for example, to research this information in the game's code and relate; but I also imagine it would be a rather tedious, time-consuming task.

[PrimeJunta]

This is very weird but I'm not seeing exactly this kind of thing with my Bonebreakers. My paladin officer wears Fine Breastplate (DR 10), everybody else wears plate armour (DR 12). For some reason, the AI really wants to target one of my uglies, he's the one standing next to the paladin. Quite often his health is in the red when everybody else's is in the green, including the pally's who has less to start with. If I move him to the back row he's a bit safer of course. 

 

So of course I gave him Shod In Faith. Fires every time. He's our unofficial healer.

 

I honestly don't know why the AI hates his ugly mug so much, but it does. He has the same stats as the other three fighters, with only minor differences in equipment.

[Boeroer]

Now that's really weird. I saw your other posts about this party and I can't imagine why the AI wants to do this. You also have Kana Rua and the paladin officer - if I were the AI I would try to attack one of those first.

 

Or does he perhaps have an item with Spell Binding? That would make him a caster - for the AI I mean. Then it would at least make some sense. 

[PrimeJunta]

No items with spell binding, and I only gave him Shod-In-Faith after I noticed this happening.

 

That said, now the AI has switched to his neighbor. Poor guy, whoever's standing next to the Captain will get clobbered first.

 

Fights against multiple casters really are somewhat tougher than if I had some CC capability. Did Blood Legacy (Kana and Captain at level 7, fighters at level 6) and it got a bit delicate there from time to time. If I tried to stand my ground in the chamber, I got knocked down by those Pillars of Faith and then killed by other means.

 

Then I had some pie and ran away for a bit, then killed them one by one by rush and retreat. That worked.

 

Clearing wilderness maps OTOH is easy-peasy, except Searing Falls and Pearlwood Bluffs which are packed so full of the critters there's no room to fall back and regroup when mobbed. Same thing with dungeon-crawling; quite easy with this setup. The set-pieces in close quarters are troublesome.