END not important to pallys?Follow

I haven't heard anyone say that endurance is a must for paladins. True or false? I wanted to focus more on the tanking part of a pally and use my healing spells to survive, not heal others.

I disagree some what in a group where you are the secondary tank
you can mend between mobs and the cler can take care of the main tank and the other guys. as a main Tank you will be to busy to heal yourself Just trying to maintain Agro will keep you busy it the Clerc job to keep you healed its your job to keep everyone pissed off at you and I use my mana to do that. The only time I think a pally is the right choice for a main tank is in a
holy vers undead situation against everythig else I think its pretty hard to hold agro over a simlar lv ranger, monk, sk or bard for that matter. just my two cp

If you are secondary tank, yes, you will often heal yourself, but that is about the only case that will happen (raids be the other case).


Disagree completely. Paladins make excellent tanks. If they paladin cant hold aggro, either the paladin is not doing their job very well, or the rest of the group is not doing theirs. I tank with those classes all the time and have little problem holding aggro so long as no one in the group gets crazy. The only exception might be before level 7 when paladins lack a stun spell.

Ok i have been found out and maybe shouldn't be giving advise but I have a lv 19 Pal as a tank I stun I taunt I bash I stun I taunt I bash ..... and I still can't pull a group off a lv 18-20 ranger what am I doing wrong. yet I have a lv 17 barb warrior and I tuant I bash i kick I have agro and I pick my teeth and do my nails till the mob is dead o yeah thrown in a taunt every now and then. Is it just that my Barbarean is so ugly with that cute scar over his eye. or what

I have a lvl 70 pally and the only time I lose aggro is when a necro is messing with me and trying to take aggro. Just keep stunning and taunting and you won't run into too many problems. When you get group heal spells later in the game, they work wonderfully for gaining aggro.

Also, I have a friend that set up a macro that stuns, taunts, and BEGS the mobs. Apparently, she is maxed in beg and it really angers all mobs. It's kind of funny, but I think I'll try it. Maybe I'll get some plat from a pissed off discordling.

Lets not be hasty here. I personally think war's are the worst of the three but thats just my opinion. I have found that if my Dru drops a full dot stack on a mob and pull agro from a war, the war rarely gets it back. I have never played a war so I don't know what type of agro generating abilities they have, but I have noticed SK's and Pally's can usually generate agro quicker than a war. Plus the fact that my SK will bring the mob to him as where most war's I've seen usually have to chase after the mob.

I went with the SK for 2 major reasons:

1. An Sk's pet is great for pulling and added DPS. Nothing like the mage or necro pet, more like a long lasting DoT.

2. FD, another great pulling tool.

War's rely very heavily on the gear that they wear so if you don't have the funds to keep them up I would go with a Pally or a SK.

I agree agro control doesn't rest completely on the shoulders of the tank.....the DPS classes should know when to hold off(especially casters)

Actually, I have disarmed a mob, once. He was green, and it was rusty steel, but he got disarmed and the weapon ended up on the ground, lol.

I disarm stuff all the time, cmon (skill is maxxed at 200 though hehe). As a monk I guess thats the only way I can attempt to pull aggro from a caster (even fast landing weapons have a hard time sometimes). But will disarm work as aggro generator if mob has no weapon?

Couple of things to keep in mind (I did not see posted here):

If a mob is rooted, the closest person/pet gets the aggro no matter what. You can taunt/stun/disarm till you are blue and if your ranger is one step closer, he will get and keep aggro.

Part of aggro control falls on the rest of the group. They have to learn what will generate aggro and what to do to lose it. As a druid, I can drop 2 or 3 DoTs, and not get aggro until I sit. Well if I am not outside (and mounted) I NEED to sit. Sometimes I will drop a root, sit and usually tank has aggro back by the time root breaks. I can also use snare to pull adds off tank and root park them. There, getting aggro works to our advantage.

That's interesting. At level 58, I find I like roots more these days as an aggro tool against red cons.

My warrior has a hard time landing taunts on the red cons in PoV, and with the level 50's slower spamming slow on the mob until one lands, I find it difficult to keep the mob off the slower. Even when I time taunt right, Murphy's law makes just enough lag happen so that even though I appear to be right on the mob when I hit taunt, the mob has in reality moved out of range so taunt gives me the out of range message and I have to wait 10 more seconds. So, I've been asking my groups to root the mob as soon as it arrives.

Even if a nuke eventually breaks root, if slow has landed I probably have accumulated enough aggro by then that I can control the mob.

Until this thread I was not sure how taunt worked. That being said I am sure that by pressing taunt everytime you can raises you taunt skill level faster than if you are picky about it. So at lower levels I would still over use taunt just to get my skill lv up ( I even use it when soloing for that reason.)At higher lv I like what was said earlier about not having it when you need so I suspect I will be a little pickier when in groups and leave the taunt spaming for when I solo. That is unless some EQ God smacks me in this thread and sends me running for the hills with my tail tucked :P

You gotta finesse it...

Getting and keeping an agro is an art... well... an art that becomes so repetative we sometimes forget it.

Agro is generated in 3 main ways. Doing damage to the mob, doing malicious effects/debuffs to the mob, or healing someone who has agro from the mob. This agro is a numbers game, pure and simple.

Now this agro is factored into who the mob attacks in a pretty simple way. The mob finds who is in attack range, then finds who is on the agro list out of attack range. It then calculates whether or not it considers it 'worth it' to chase down someone with higher agro out of range or to stay put and fight.

There are also some exceptions to the rules in this number game.
1) Root, as stated, will make the mob attack the closest PC it can find, followed by the closest enemy NPC it will find that has agro (such as a pet).
2) Charm (when it breaks) will automatically put the charmer at the top of its list by a certain percent. The total hate on the mob can effect how many hate points that % is, so this is why pulling agro off charm can vary.
3) 'Taunt' works as a % modifier, not a hate point addition. When you do not have agro on the mob, a sucessful high-skilled taunt WILL put the taunter automatically at the top of the list. A person can be engaged building agro for hours, have a Paladin come in and taunt 1 time, he now has agro (by a very small amount, possibly only 1 point.)
4) Event agro (started in Velious expac and found throughout the game since) does not follow these rules. This agro generally works in clusters, and mobs will agro due to general location and build their own agro on these targets which is hard to break. (Examples - Ring War in Great Divide, High Priest of Ssra adds, Butterflies in Terris Thule Event in PoNB) I wont talk about this now its too different and I still don't understand it sometimes.

Using what I've said we can pin down your problems.

-Your problem with this ranger is plain and simple: First this ranger at this level is undoubtably outdamaging you. Using taunt will get you a tiny bit of agro over HIM for a tiny bit of time, until you let him hit again and start doing more damage. To add to this big problem is the fact that this ranger is most likely using Snare. Snare falls into the second way to get agro, and boy this is a doosy. He may also be using lowbie DOTs which don't add much agro through the DPS, but the debuff factors in separatly and can also be nasty to break. Finally since the ranger remains in melee range, the mob chooses him as the obvious target.

-- To fix this problem you need to get a flow down. Always keep in mind anyone who is using debuffs and curses (including DOTs) on your enemies. In the case of this ranger, he is most likely starting off with his debuffs/snare early. This is good for you, since you can secure agro right after this and maintain it the duration of the fight. Heres how...


You will need to get out your Cease and Desist spells onto your spell bar. They are each almost as much agro as the ranger's snare and will be your greatest ally in the fight for agro.

If your not pulling, as soon as you can get the mob targeted start casting your cease. Remember not to do it immediately if theres a chance it will somehow ***** up the pull, and if your group is annoyed at the stun portion practice timing it to land as the mob arrives at the battlefloor (you wont have to worry about this end game when Cease/Desist stop working).

Now you might already have agro, but if hes pulling with snare or a DOT you probobly wont. Also he may not be done yet, so dont use your taunt randomly.

To get the max effectiveness from your taunt and the rest of your spells, your best bet is to attempt to get the % jump up using taunt first, following it immediately by another stun (preferably cease again). What this does is jump your agro up the scale first (sometimes to the top by just a tiny bit, once you have higher skill it will always do this), then the stun will boost your agro numerically giving you a buffer in hate points.

Example - {P = Pally, R = Ranger} - Guestimations in Hate
Wrong way...
R pulls with Snare, 560 Hate
R runs back and begins casting DOT, 340 Hate, 120 Hate/tick
P stuns, 480 Hate
P disarms, 200 Hate
P taunts, rolls for 75%, 165 Hate
... Ranger still has agro by 55, and his DOT + DPS ends up continueing to outagro the Paladin.

Right way...
R pulls with Snare, 560 Hate
R runs back and begins casting DOT, 340 Hate, 120 Hate/tick
P taunts, rolls for 75%, 675 Hate
P stuns, 480 Hate
P disarms, 200 Hate
... Paladin ends up on top by 455 Hate. Not a whole lot, but definatly enough to keep agro. Now if the Paladin continues to use disarm and stuns, as well as throwing in taunts for extra boosts I assure you no one can break your agro for more than a second (by using your own tricks against you, such as taunt.)

If taunt fails you will encounter some problems. But just keep throwing on those baby stuns. Once you get enough agro on these guys you shouldn't need to keep chaining anyways, and you can give your mana a small break which may be required at that level.

High end there is no class** that can reliably outagro a Paladin without using their own purposefully attention grabbing tricks (Wizzy Snare + Debuff, Charms, atones, roots, and intentinally agressive DOTs). Even then, the Paladin can usually regain agro through the Taunt + Stun technique. People have argued this with me on multiple occasions but I have yet to find people who could keep agro off me for more than a tick because of stuns, taunt, and a few other tricks up the Paladin's sleeve.
**The only problem I have ever encountered in a true agro battle is with a pet-less SK or Necromancer. Since they can do a DOT + Snare in 1 which can be chained and piled with more DOT dps which can be used to outagro your attempts to gain agro after a taunt. This isn't a problem unless they are trying to do this, however, and so necromancers and SKs are hardly ever a problem.**

As I said, there are certain agros in the game that have different agro calculators, and I'm still not sure how they all work but in most grinding situations this wont effect you.

Not technically true at all. It depends on what level you are, what level the mobs are, and what kind of mobs they are. Alot of what gives paladins their rep as great agro grabbers is the fact that a successful stun stops the mob for X seconds. So even if that stun didn't give me enough agro right away, the mob still stops where it is and lets me beat on it. And I can chain a second and perhaps a third stun before the mob gets to try moving again.

The perceieved effect of this is that the mob is pulled to the group. Pally drops stun and engages. Mob stops. Mob stays stopped. It really doesn't matter who else casts what, it stays there. This makes it *seem* like the pally out agroed, but its entirely possible that somewhere in that first 8-10 seconds, he didn't actually have firm agro, but no one noticed because the mob was stunned.

It's a somewhat achedemic point since it does allow the group to do what it needs "snap agro" for (fast and early debuffs on the mobs without the casters getting pasted). Since pally stuns have a very high rate of success, it works more consistently then pretty much any other class. However, I can tell you from direct experience that when my first stun does fail, or I misstime it and get hit and stunned by the mob (it's amazing how often that first hit will stun you!), the casters most definately feel it. And I can also say that while that first flurry of stuns is generally sufficient to get me enough agro lead to last the fight (perhaps with an occasional low level stun tossed in on long fights), if someone tries to take agro they most certainly can. Easily.

If I *have* to chain stun to keep agro, someone in my group is doing something wrong, and I'll tell them that. Pally stuns aren't the most mana efficient spells in the game. I can't stun continually. I don't get to sit on a horse and med while the combat's going on either. So even for paladins, agro management is still a group effort.