First time on the forums to ask veterans on how target selection works when battling PvE monsters. I found an AFK just chilling around when it "accidentally" engaged into battle. Nearly dying, I decided to jump in for fun. I was thinking maybe I should stall the battle until the monsters kill him for giggles. But as soon he is one hit away from death, the monsters switch to only target me. Why is that?
I stall the battle as long as I could thinking maybe the monsters will just finish him off first. Eventually my health got too low and then I just kill them all with one spell. I got the full XP while the afk got none.
So how does monster selection work? It targets the biggest threats first?
Typically, enemies will primarily engage the enemy directly across from them, going back to spot #1 if there's no wizard across from them. Enemies joining late because of another wizard being late (such as with mob battles) tend to go after the wizard that also recently joined. I have noticed some discrepancies in this. For example, in Pagoda, the Cow bosses tend to all switch targets to a wizard who's late, while both Old Cob and Medulla pretty much always target the wizard with the lowest health for their 4 Pip Shadow Spells regardless of who they're going after.
As for changing targets, dealing 100 damage to an enemy will generate enough Threat to make it change targets to you, provided nothing else has generated Threat on it. Healing will cause enemies to start targeting you (again, provided no other Threat was generated) if you use and heals that aren't overtime. Dealing around 1000 damage can get multiple enemies to target you, not just the one you hit.
I don't really know what would cause them to change targets to someone with more Health without Threat being generated via damage or healing, but hopefully this helped.
Interesting. So you say it depends on where I am, target selection is different? And it also takes into consideration who dealt damage. I thought the devs programs it to be smart, take down the "low" health threat so that instead of a 4v4 it would be a 3v4.
Makes no sense to keep targeting someone who is trying to take you down while you ignore that one person who is one hit away from death.
I recently came back after a 3-4 year break so I kinda forgot everything about the game. Re-learning it as I level up. Thanks for your reply.
It would be smart of the enemies to do that, but at the same time, the current system allows players to manipulate Threat so that particularly tanky characters can get all the enemies to focus their single-target attacks on them and not the more vulnerable wizards. Well, unless the hammer does an AoE for like 10000 damage and fails to end the battle. It's pretty hard to get them off of the hammer then.
I would probably be interested in a target selection behavior that would allow enemies to single out the more vulnerable wizards without those wizards doing anything for Threat, but can be overrode with enough Threat generation. Might encourage someone to actually tank in some of the harder dungeons instead of three supports + one hammer.
