A calling for Atysian Myth Busters - English

Gidget

There are many myths and misconceptions about AI behavior, and this reminded me of various misunderstandings I've heard led a few people astray, as well as a few (possibly flawed/erroneous to the point of bordering on "myth") observations;
Fyrosfreddy
3.c I haven't observed any mobs targeting homins by skill level, but I would say once engaged, they have a tendency to "go to damage". If a tank is engaged doing 1150 damage, they do have a tendency to ignore the tank and go to the mage doing 2700 if the tank does not hit frequently enough.
As near as I can tell, mobs will go after whoever is altering the HP balance of a fight to their detriment. Mobs have fairly short attention spans so they tend to go after whoever has swung the balance most recently, with some adjustment for how dramatic those swings were, though not as much as you'd think. (If I can tank plods 2 at a time with a pair of q90 daggers and a CC skill around 120, there has to be more to it than DPS!)

I agree that frequency of hits supersedes damage done, and can confirm that even low level dagger tanks are able to hold much stronger foes. While I succeeded in holding much more opponents using circular when dealing with social herbies, I never managed to hold more than 2 hornchers no matter which weapon used (and even when having taunted all of them) while I well recall to have held at least 3 kinchers, so there may be a species dependency. Torbaks seem to always be trying to turn to the healer and back to the damage dealer (no matter whether melee or nuker) often resulting in ineffective change of target.

Btw., up to 40 hpm is only available for a caster when constantly spamming enchants, otherwise max hpm will be 21.4 (60/2.8) hpm for a single rocket cast, and 20 hpm for a double. But my experience did at least not systematically show that a mob strayed from a tank when it managed to dodge/parry often, rather it seemed to take the hostile intent for the action.

Yet I did not fully understand what you mean with "HP balance". Do you mean the HP left to any party, so that a severely wounded mob would act differently? I cannot confirm that from my observations. If you mean that a healer is perceived like a damage dealer (which perfectly makes sense), I agree.