About TauntingFollow

This was the situation - Agnarr raid, I was SA, instructed to stick with the MT near Agnarr while the rest of the raid played with the rocks.

The MT, equipped with 2 great weapons with LDoN proc augments spent quite a while building up agro on Agnarr then told me to engage also, which I did, from back of mob.

Then he tells me to start taunting to build up agro in case he goes down. So Agnarr turns to me, whack whack, 5000 DD proc, Bluie splat!!

So this is my question about taunting - with the agro the MT had supposedly built up, should I have been able to taunt Agnarr off him so easily? Or is it just that +1 to Hate thing, so Agnarr instantly hated me more as soon as I taunted him?

Very curious about this, and hoping some of the learned minds on this board can help me out

Yikes. Sounds like a combo of bad communication and bad luck. Lots of people use the world "taunt" to mean "gain agro". They shouldn't, but they do anyway. Even then, you could have probably gotten away with using taunt (just until you succeed once) to catch up with him on agro. The idea is that he's hitting the mob fast and for lots of agro, if you'd caught the taunt in between mob swings, the mob would have been back on him before it swung again and you wouldn't have been paste. Getting a proc during that time period was bad luck as well...

What you could have done in that situation was to turn off autoattack, and then time Agnarr's attacks. Use taunt right after it hits the MT. Use it until you get one success. There's no reason to attack because you want to be right behind the MT. Presumably your attacks wont keep up with him anyway, and taunt will catch you all the way up anyway, so it's uneeded. However, having autoattack on could mean that it takes a bit longer for the MT to get that 1 point of hate back (maybe).

That's one way to do it. Another would be to just hit the mob with your best agro inducing weapon(s) without using the taunt button. The idea is that you should be close enough that if the MT goes down, you'll be the next on the agro list. That's probably what the MT meant by "taunting" the target. They should have clarified what they wanted you to do before sending you up to build up agro in the first place, but those kind of miscommunications happen all the time on raids.


I would like to add that the taunt message is so incredibly useful. I hadn't really thought much of it at first (wow. I get to see how often taunt fails), but it's really grown on me. It's immeasurably useful to know with no question that you've got agro before breaking a mez. In the past, I would taunt, stun, stun, taunt again, then attack and hope that I had gained enough agro to keep the mob (and did 99% of the time, so that was a good method). Now, I can taunt, and if it succeeds, I *know* I can break mez with no fear. It gives me a really good idea whether I should chain stun or not, and allows me to be that much more efficient with my mana (obviously, this matters more for knights then warriors).


Um... Another huge trick with taunt is to use a knight to "pre-taunt" a mob. Either knight class works great for this. You want to use your beefy warrior to tank, but you want the agro generation of the knight to start off the battle. Easy to do. SK pulls with his snare/dot/whatever it is they do. Warrior meets SK on pull and follows mob, taunting it. Once he's got a success, he's now got all the agro the SK built up, plus 1. Violla! Huge agro lead, mob can be slowed immediately, life is good.

Paladin works similarly. Paladin chain stuns mob once it's in camp. During this time, slows/debuffs can be landed safely. Warrior taunts. When/if successful, he's got all the pally's agro plus 1. Again, you gain the agro generation of the knight, and the melee toughness of the warrior.

You can actually do this on raid targets using rangers and WS. I'll leave it as an excersize to the reader to come up with how. It's amazingly effective against many raid type mobs, especially in PoP.