Welcome to Project: Gorgon!


Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.

The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.



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  1. #1
    Senior Member kazeandi's Avatar
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    Animal Handling unplayable (because...)

    Hello,

    I sent in a bug report, but I'm not sure if I expressed myself in an easy to understand manner, so I'll repeat my report here and give you a screenshot to show you directly what I mean.



    As you can see on this picture, I did 0 damage myself, 100% of the damage that lead to the death of the mob in question came from my pet.
    I aggro'd by proximity, doing a "body pull" without performing any action during the pull or the fight.
    I didn't use any skills at all to not generate any aggro, so my pet would start out against as low a ceiling as possible.

    If ~500 damage from my pet lead to 1/3 my aggro value, I must have hovered at ~1500 damage just by being spotted. This can't be right.

    The mob didn't even turn around to my pet once. Had I done any damage on top of my initial aggro, getting the mob off me would have been even more of a problem - which is a moot point in this case, because my pet reduced the mob from 100% to 0% without even overtaking me in the aggro list.

    Now, this was a lowbie mob, as you can see. Only a sand dog in Sun Vale against a lvl 57 polar bear. "In longer fights, the pet will overtake you", you might think. Wrong:

    I was in the wolf cave earlier today and was facing a challenge way worse than this: How to pull only a single mob as an Animal Handler?

    - You can't send your pet in and let it aggro, then turn tail to pull the mob out of shout range. As soon as your pet is under attack, it performs retribution without moving, in all modes: Assist, Guard Me, Follow and Stay.

    - When I body pulled a mob, my pet would run in to retaliate, in all modes but Stay

    - When I set my pet to Stay, performed a body pull, ran back, then used Sic Em and Get It Off Me, the wolf would kill me without my bear ever taking aggro off me.
    --> There was no way for me to play solo in this situation, because my pet would not survive the onslaught of everything that would come running after a shout by the mobs. Pulling myself would lead to my own death.

    My bear has 180% "taunt", but aggro generation at least of pets, if not in general, seems to be completely broken and needs attention.
    I am actively leveling and every pull with adds at challenging mobs near my level is a struggle. Animal Handling is not viable as a combat skill.

    Couple this with the extremely low damage output of my pet (I have damage boni and "bypass armor" where possible and as high as I could get it) and you can see where the math goes wrong.


    Then there's various bugs like the Sic Em problem: Pet shows the animation but stays still or runs halfway, then returns to me. Other skills (trick) don't do anything and the pet taunt is... well, as I described and illustrated with my screenshot above.

    I don't know how pets were before I played - I heard AH/Necro were way overpowered.
    The nerf came, according to guild mates, 9 or 10 months ago and nobody I ever played/spoke with ever saw an Animal Handler in any form of endgame content. If you have telemetry to see how many active templates in which level range use the skill, you'll see that most players give up right at the start or in the 20s, when the Great Cat they tame dies to a mob 5 levels below it's own.

    I've been running all kinds of pet-optimized mods, with damage, taunt effect and pet-hp/armor, to no avail.

    I would suggest the following measures to fix the problem:

    - Reduce initial aggro to 1 (or the lowest value), so that any action of the pet would take aggro off me, as long as I didn't generate any threat myself.

    - Give pets more base damage. Start with 10% and see how it goes. Adjust accordingly.

    - Make mods on Animal Handling gear stronger. +16dmg in the 50s, when other skills get boosts in the 100s is not sufficient

    - Fix Sic Em, so the pet performs proper pathing and doesn't get stuck and gives up immediately

    - Make Get Em Off Me a guaranteed taunt for X seconds

    - Give pets AOE on every skill. Even low damage is better than what they have now and AOE skills by me "break" the pet if it's on Assist, because it can't assist me on several targets simultaneously.

    - Give bears an innate aggro bonus on damage (2x), reduce aggro for cats (50%), to give Animal Handlers actual tools for solo and group content.

    - Make pets ignore damage, aggro, completely everything in Follow mode, so it comes to the Animal Handler and doesn't get stuck in combat at the very spot.

    - Make pets in Guard Me react to aggro on me the moment it occurs - not when I actually take damage. Pet should intercept the attacker.

    - Give pets a "leash", so it can't be further away from the Handler than x meters. This would make it possible to save the pet by running away.

    - Improve pet accuracy and avoidance against ranged

    - Give us an ability to break crowd control effects (for the pet, not the Handler)

    - Introduce pets with crowd control, like spiders with a short root

    tl;dr

    With 1500 initial aggro (or is initial aggro = mobHP*3?), a pet has to do 1500 damage to the mob and I have to be able to take damage from a mob with that amount of hitpoints to survive - calculate yourself. Add any aggro I'd generate by healing myself, armor patching, chugging a potion.
    It is currently impossible to play a support char with Animal Handling, coupled with the pet's damage output, a damage dealing build is more effective, but then, why have the pet at all?


    Thanks.
    Last edited by kazeandi; 07-18-2017 at 08:52 AM.

  2. #2
    Senior Member Crissa's Avatar
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    Oh, that's actually quite interesting.

    I wonder if there's any other variables about aggro from the type of pet or mob we don't know about? Or time?

    How long did that encounter take? Do you have any regeneration?
    Last edited by Crissa; 07-18-2017 at 10:05 AM.

  3. #3
    Senior Member cr00cy's Avatar
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    I noticed it too when i wa sleveling my ah. Pets cant get, hold, or take aggro off me most of the time. There was few instances when mob briefly took aggro, but then agin tehyare not nearly tanky enough to surrive holding it.

    On another hand when i recently started levleing bc and druid i noticed that my golem gets aggro off me basicly every time -and i DO use damaging skills.

  4. #4
    Senior Member Tagamogi's Avatar
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    Yeah, I noticed the same thing with the bc golem. I got one notable autopsy report that showed it having one thousand percent aggro (well, 1127% or something like ), so I think there is a bug involved. Out of curiosity, which abilities is your golem using? Mine was just doing healing and power regen - I'm not sure if it's the abilities causing the problem or just the golem's presence. Ironically, the bc golem seems much tankier than the ah pets to me, too, although I've never tried a bear pet yet.

    When I played a spider, the baby spiders seemed to get aggro a lot as well and it seemed to follow the bc pattern of the mob attacking the spider pet for no particular reason. They were too squishy for me to test much, though.

    @kazeandi - I would be curious if you have an answer to Crissa questions. I wonder if the game might be overcounting healing/regen effects for aggro, although it seems more likely it's just bugs in the pet coding.

  5. #5
    Senior Member cr00cy's Avatar
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    My golem was set to use healing and power restoration, with occasional dmg skill. But sonsiderign his poision bomb had liek 70 dmg and my attacks were hitting for 400+ i cant imagine he overtakign my aggro. Even with healing it shouldnt be posisbel since i had it set up to trigger when im belove 70% hp so hewwasnt even using it.

    Another interstign thing - when i body pulled mobs they usualy stayed aggro on me - only when i started attackign they would switch targets.

    Imnot sure how revelant this si but i usualy started fight with armor-destroyign skills (acid bomb/rotskin). Mayeb this skills have some werird de-aggro build in.

  6. #6
    Senior Member kazeandi's Avatar
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    No regen involved, I just stood there 100% inactive while watching my pet killing the mob.

    When I normally hunt, I spam Sic Em for the pet's dmg bonus and Get It Off Me to.. erm, get it off me but normally, both skills don't help. Something that aggro'd me aggros me till the bitter end.

    (I did have lvl 5 gourmand food tho)

    PS: Sorry for the late reply
    Last edited by kazeandi; 07-20-2017 at 08:17 AM.

  7. #7
    Senior Member Tagamogi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by cr00cy View Post
    Imnot sure how revelant this si but i usualy started fight with armor-destroyign skills (acid bomb/rotskin). Mayeb this skills have some werird de-aggro build in.
    I can rule out rotskin since I was using knife/bc, but I would have used acid bomb as well. I haven't tried body pulling mobs without attacking them. I did notice that if I had multiple mobs on me, they'd usually all make a beeline for my golem at the same time, including the mob I'd just dps'd down to 10% of its health. The mobs I wasn't actively attacking would still have taken bomb damage and have a fire dot from me on them, though.

    My leading theory is that the power regen from the golem might be causing the aggro, but I can't tell when he's casting it, so it's pretty unprovable. And if I want to blame regen, then maybe the regen from kazeandi's food might have out-aggro'd his pet. If it's power regen though then mentalism should get aggro from their power wave too, and I haven't seen any reports of that.

  8. #8
    Senior Member kazeandi's Avatar
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    With me having 300ish armor/HP at the test sand dog in my screenshot, I probably never went below 90% anyways. Fight also didn't take too long, so there wasn't a lot of regen.

    My pet was on Guard in this fight.

    Now, there's an observation I made: if I don't do anything at all, the mob is sure to stick to me. Sometimes, a nuke (shrill command or one of the druid spells) leads to the mob turning around to my pet - which is counterintuitive and surely not how aggro usually works. It's also unreliable - if this was a 100% workaround, I wouldn't care so much.

    As is, every fight is a race - will the mob die faster than me?

    I made my bear pretty tanky. It has almost 700 hp/armor (at 58) and I have absorb on my chest. 1:1 against similar level mobs, there's no danger of it going down, unless the mob has armor penetration (bear still can't solo it, I have to help).
    I think bears should have this baseline, going even higher with mods, but damage intake is not the biggest problem right now (however, for other pets, like cats, it is). The main problems are aggro and damage.

    Of course, pet control is bad, but I guess the new UI will help with that. I won't sweat that. But I work twice as hard at least as every other class to level and gear up. Tried Staff today, just for fun - that was like 3 leagues above my AH level play. I've basically been playing this game in hard mode, but whenever I give up frustrated and play something else for a while, I miss my pet gameplay and end up switching back.

    I beg of you, devs, please fix Animal Handling :/
    Last edited by kazeandi; 07-20-2017 at 05:16 PM.

  9. #9
    Senior Member Tagamogi's Avatar
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    I tried a similar test: No food, no regen gear, I body-aggro'd a boar in Sun Vale and just stood there. I hit a stop-watch when my pet (level 50 Fangsworth, on Assist) started attacking the mob and 17.5 seconds later I died because the mob was still beating on me.

    So, power regen should decidedly not be the aggro culprit. Oh well, it was a nice theory.

    Edit: I should possibly add that I was wearing unarmed/rabbit gear, no ah gear of any kind, so the problem is not ah item mods either.
    Last edited by Tagamogi; 07-20-2017 at 05:15 PM.

  10. #10
    Senior Member kazeandi's Avatar
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    The question is, is it a pet aggro problem, or is aggro broken in general? The combat summary seems to indicate that the game does discriminate between you and the pet, but the inner logic of thresholds of aggro looks messed up.

    Bandaids would be a forced aggro switch with GIOM - that shouldn't be too hard to implement.

    Btw, do the devs read the class forum? I'd hate to waste my time experimenting and posting if it went by unnoticed.

    Another observation:

    The initial aggro supremacy only goes one way. If I send my pet in, then cast an AOE, only the mob my pet beats on stays with it, while the rest goes after me. While pets can't save you, you can certainly pull aggro off your pet. This was with AOE tho, didn't try focused "bad dd behavior" yet. An Assist pet usually switches target in such cases - I'll find out after work today, with 50 Druid vs 58 Animal Handling. Cosmic Strike should generate enough threat explosively.
    Last edited by kazeandi; 07-20-2017 at 05:46 PM.



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