Introduction to Agro Mechanics

As our guild members push steadily towards raid content, it's important that we all understand the core mechanics that impact our success. Since we are committed to helping everyone who wishes to experience end-game raid content achieve that goal, I will be writing introductory guides that will educate even the most inexperienced on the basics.

A brief disclaimer before I start:.

Reading guides and mastering your rotation (if you have one) on the target dummy is no substitute for actually getting into a dungeon and learning the hard way. Some people have developed a fear of running random dungeons with strangers, and that's understandable, but you shouldn't wait for an all-guild run to develop your skills. Be brave, be bold, and get out there with the jerks and idiots! Your guild mates will appreciate your sacrifice the next time you all party together because you will make a better contribution to your friends' experience.

Run randoms; do it for your friends!

I've chosen to start with Agro Mechanics because there are a lot of players who only play solo up to the level cap and it's one of those mechanics that soloing players will not encounter or have many opportunities to think about.

What are Agro Mechanics?

Agro mechanics could be describe as the game rules that determine when and who monsters will attack.

Why should I care about Agro Management?

Some people act as though only the tank needs to worry about agro management. The truth is that good agro management is best accomplished when every party member knows how to contribute to the effort. While an excellent tank can act to recover from a multitude of agro management blunders, every healer and damage dealer needs to ask himself, “Do I want to be the player who causes problems for the tank to fix?”

The answer, of course, is “No.”

Some common terms

Note: Thanks to MMOTerms.com for help putting concise language to some terms.

Mob: An AI-controlled (NPC) monster.

Agro: As a verb, it means to draw a mob's attention and aggression (e.g. “The tank will agro the boss). As a noun, it refers to the mob's attention and aggression (e.g. “I got the boss's agro!”).

Agro Radius: The minimum distance from which a monster will “notice” and attack a player. Generally, the lower your level, the higher a monster's agro radius will be towards you.

Threat: A measure of how likely a mob is to attack you. The person with the most threat is the person the mob considers the greatest threat---and also the person to which the mob will focus its attacks.

Performing actions that hurt a mob, or that aid a player whom the mob has already agroed will generate more threat and increase the chance that the mob will attack the player that performed the action. It is every party member's responsibility to help ensure that the tank has more threat than every other party member.

Pulling/Drawing Agro: When you make a mob attack you. Hopefully, the tank is the only person who draws agro, and hopefully the tank can hold it during combat.

These terms should be sufficient for our agro management discussions in the near future. In my next article on the subject, I will continue with what I call Rule the First: Let the Tank Handle the Pull.

Cheers for now.

Why Rift?

Trion Worlds' Rift got a fair amount of press at the end of 2010 just prior to its launch, but since then it seems to have dropped off a lot of radars. Certainly, the competition for press has been intense lately, what with much-anticipated releases like Diablo III, SWTOR, and Skyrim battling for the rights to devour our precious reserves of attention-span.

But every once in a while, Rift makes an appearance in the conversation, and there always seems to be someone ready to denounce it as a flop for no reason I can fathom other than its failure to match Blizzard's titanic success.

Now, I'm sure other players have their reasons for not liking Rift, and I would never say that it perfectly matches every player's wishes for a game—-that would be absurd.

But since there are people out there who don't know much about the game, or in the even less likely scenario that there are others who are interested, I've put together this list of why I like Rift.

#1---It's pretty.

This goes at the top of the list because it's least important to me. I could almost care less how a game looks as long as the play itself is fun.

That said, Rift's visuals are really, really nice. Don't get me wrong; I love WoW's style and I know Blizzard's developers continue to ride that little engine of theirs as far as it could . . . err . . . can go, pumping out graphics improvements with every major content patch, it seems.

But I really love the environments in Rift. I'm not an artist or animator So I probably lack a sophisticated language to describe what I see and why it appeals to me, but a lot of people claim that it's “better” than WoW's, whatever that means. And for my part, when I compare the vistas in Rift to those in other MMOs like Guild Wars, WoW and even SWTOR, they have a fidelity and richness that is hard to match.

If you don't know what I'm talking about yet, go chcek it out. Your mileage may vary, but this is my opinion piece, so there!

#2---Dynamic world events.

Yes, Rift has real, un-instanced, un-phased zone-wide invasions that include hordes of cannon fodder for you to gorge your e-peen on, and and raid bosses that will flatten you like you deserve for mercilessly pwning so many noobs.

When I first heard about Rift,their dynamic content features were major talking points for their marketing campaign. Like man MMO fans, I was desperately hopeful, but that hope was tarnished with scepticism. Others had made similar promises and failed to deliver, so what reason was there to believe in Trion, who, as a company, were new to the MMO sphere.

I'm happy to report that Rift's dynamic world content works as promised. Real in-game events of varying challenge levels and scopes and it's really easy to get in on the action with public raids that you can join with one button press (no need to endlessly spam in General chat to try and get the raid leader's attention).

Again, if you haven't given this feature a chance in Rift, I highly recommend it.

#3---Rapid development cycles.

Trion insisted that their engine was so powerful that they could pump out new content at a rate that gamers wanted and other developers couldn't match.

Well, I don't know if those two claims turned out to be true (can you ever keep up with the gluttonous appetites of online gamers, when the faster you deliver it, the faster they consume it?), but Trion is already churning out new raids and world zones that aren't just delivering more quests, but new game mechanics as well.

A year since release, Rift already boasts the following:

• Three 10-man raid dungeons
• Three 20-man dungeons
• A dozen party-sized dungeons of various difficulty levels, including expert versions of all dungeons designed for level-capped players.
• Numerous world events, including soloable, party- and raid-sized rifts and zone invasions.
• 4 PvP warfronts.

#4---Really big classes!

No joke, the classes in Rift are BIG. Well, they aren't called classes, but I'll explain that. Rift has four “callings” you can chose from. These match standard fantasy RPG archetypes with the Warrior, Cleric, Mage and Rogue.

Not so big? Read on.

Each calling has 9 sub-classes, or “souls,” (including one PvP soul in each calling). Each character can assign talent points among any three of these souls to determine up her character's abilities. A soul's core, or “root” abilities are unlocked as you assign more points to its talents, but diversifying can be as rewarding as specializing, if you do it “right.”

You might say that a system that allows so much freedom must be a balancing nightmare, and you'd probably be right. If you aren't a player who enjoys frequent changes to your favourite class, then Rift may cause anxiety or depression as Trion's designers work to exalt valleys and make low the mountains among the souls.

No way to say for certain how it will all turn out, but I am one of those players who is thrilled by new and modified mechanics for my class and loves finding new ways to pump more out of my class after a change, whether buff or nerf. It's another layer of dynamism in my game that makes the whole experience feel more alive somehow.

Conclusion

Rift is big
Rift is fun
Rift is where my
Guild loves to run

Okay, bad poem is bad, but I think you've got my point by now. I'm know there's more to appreciate about Rift than what I've listed here, but hopefully this is enough to pique some curiosity out there. As they say, the more the merrier.

First post!

This RiftBreakers blog is a fan-blog for Rift, Trion Worlds' MMORPG. Content here will include class and content guides, links to guides, editorial commentary on Rift content, news and updates. This blog will also serve the RiftBreakers guild updates and news.

Methane

Guild Leader

RiftBreakers, Shadefallen Defiant