Entangling Roots doesn't prevent "return home"

[MrSmite]

Core: f6f102c70b

Bug:

The Nature damage from Entangling Roots doesn't prevent mobs from "returning home"

Details:

A while back I released a patch that allowed you to kite mobs as long as you do damage to them. It seems that the Nature damage from Entangling Roots is not counted as actual damage toward this reset timer.

• Cast Entangling Roots on a mob
• Move far enough away that it is out of range
• Without damaging the mob, let the roots break
• As the mob gets close to you (ie: away from its spawn) cast Entangling Roots again
• Let the roots run out again and then recast
• Keep recasting it, occasionally allowing the mob to get closer to you (not close enough to melee you)

If you keep this up, after about the 4th cast of Entangling Roots, the mob will reset and return home.

Note:

The patch did not address specific damage schools, it should work on both spell and physical damage

[Shauren]

This is not a bug. On retail DoT's don't prevent creatures from evading

[MrSmite]

Retail is not 3.3.5 and many mechanics are different on retail now.

What I'm talking about is the return home when a mob reaches its aggro radius. Any damage done to the mob should keep it following the player unless it is a world boss, at least that's how the code was written. It checks the "last damaged" timer and IsWorldBoss() or something like that. So whatever function handles the DOT from Entagled Roots isn't resetting the timer.

Any damage should count toward kiting aggro. DOTs especially are useful so you can maintain low threat to hand off the mob to the tank when needed.

Warlock Kiting

Heavy Affliction locks can dot and kite using Fear and/or Curse of Exhaustion, the idea being to use Fear effects and CoEx to keep the mob off you while your DoTs tick away its life. If you use CoEx, it helps to have passive and active Speed buffs and effects. Since you can cast DoTs and CoEx while running away from the mob, you're pretty much running all the time in this scenario with the mob following you (hence the term 'kiting') except when you need to stop to cast Fear or turn around to cast Death Coil.

[MrSmite]

I would file this as "low priority" however since Druids have other direct damage spells to kite with.

[Shauren]

The article you linked refers to 'kiting' as running from the mob to avoid being damaged, not to move it very far away from its spawn point and prevent from evading.

Additionally, I changed the code that resets the timer to exclude DoT damage.

[MrSmite]

@Shauren

You misunderstand the point of kiting apparently. When you kite a mob in instances you don't necessarily do it to avoid damage but to give the raid group time to deal with other mobs. That article addresses "kiting" in general but doesn't state that it's specifically only for avoiding damage.

For example, in Razorgore the Hunter would typically kite Razorgore out of the room to where the Beast normally is while the raid picks off the adds. Once that is done the Hunter brings Razorgore back to the tank. Using low damage DOTs to keep Razorgore aggro'd onto the Hunter allows the tank to pick up aggro during the handoff.

Your change to the code is incorrect, especially if you based it on retail which is not the same as it was in WotLK. Mechanics have changed in retail and encounters and abilities have been rebalanced which makes kiting like that largely irrelevant.

Further support that DOT damage counts:

Well you don't have to be doing damage to keep the mobs attention, just doing something to keep it's aggro on you without reseting because of distance. So you can just downrank an instant cast spell like a DoT and keep using that for minimal damage.

[MrSmite]

FYI, this is why I rant about the PR process. Because you devs. don't have any type of peer review you make changes that sbouldn't be made without any input from the community.

The original PR was merged on 2012-09-21and nobody took issue with it including DOT damage. Your commit was almost a year later (2013-08-01) and was based on current retail which is wrong.

I'm sure if I put up a PR to fix what you broke it would simply be ignored but I'm going to try anyway.

[Shauren]

How can you say current retail is wrong when you did not play retail WotLK? Sorry but I'm going to stick to my retail experience over some wowwiki article which most likely dates back to TBC. Another thing is that you linked a forum post by a random player - I've seen many times people assume some class mechanics work in some way when they never even played that class.

[MrSmite]

How can you say current retail is wrong when you did not play retail WotLK?

That's a pretty silly statement. Current retail is MoP and nothing in Trinity should use MoP mechanics, period. Also, I did play a Hunter on retail, even in WotLK (albeit briefly).

Let me try one more example to hopefully pierce your stubbornness: The Hunter's epic bow quest

One of the demons, Artorius the Doombringer in Winterspring has an aura with a 30 yard range that does around 800 shadow damage every three seconds. Hunters must defeat the demons without their pet or assistance from another player.

In the case of Artorius the Hunter has to stay moving which means they rely on Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting to keep him aggro'd and eventually kill him. If you remove the DOT damage from the aggro reset then that leaves the Hunter with Arcane Shot. Since Arcane Shot is on a 6 second cooldown, if you miss a shot then you accumulate a 12 second delay between damage. This will cause him to reset because the timer is 10 seconds.

I really don't understand how after a year of the evade patch being in place you arbitrarily change it to MoP mechanics. As I said earlier, MoP has had a lot of changes in mechanics, spells and encounters (ie: the removal of the Hunter epic bow quest) which do not apply to WotLK.

In closing: There are cases in WotLK where it is necessary to have DOT damage count toward keeping a mob from resetting. I think I've given plenty of concrete examples that should outweigh your MoP retail experience.

PS: Yes, I did that quest. Wether you believe it or not I'm not just paraphrasing some wiki article.

[CDawg]

This is not a bug. On retail DoT's don't prevent creatures from evading

Aside from current retail. Damage over Time did in fact prevent creatures from evading during 335a.
I can't say much about Cata since I didn't play it very much. But, I do more remember kiting creatures through several maps with just very small amounts of damage all the way to Shattrath during TBC.
I also remember grouping up with some hordie friends and kiting Stormwind guards all the way to Badlands.

[Venoltar]

Heyas. I can at least confirm a couple things. I played Wotlk retail, heck I even beta'd for it.

In the cases where entangling roots worked at all on a mob in an instance, which I found annoyingly rare ;) It would never cause them to break off and evade, if they could they'd chase you forever until either you died/left the instance, they died, or someone else managed to gain more aggro than you and managed to not die as a result ;)

There actually was only an aggression timer outside of instances, within they would chase you forever unless they ran into a pathing problem and simply could not get to you, and even then they just became immune to damage until you were reachable again.

So the DoT side of things is not an issue in this specific case.

If however this was a world mob it got more difficult as the aggression timer was most definitely in effect and the mob would most definitely break off eventually. The main strategy I used as a druid on world mobs was to entangle, move to max range then starfire followed immediately by a new entangle before they closed the gap, then repeat. The starfire was what reset the aggression timer. If things went bad (i.e. roots breaking too quickly and repeatedly) and I had to go a while without getting some kind of direct damage in, I'd see the mob evade and reset straight out of the roots. What I can't say for sure is if this was a DoT issue or something specific to roots itself, but it was definitely that way in retail.

[Shauren]

We are talking only about mobs in world (not instances)

[Pitcrawler]

Maybe this can help http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw8Je6qqZ5s ...?
The paladin is kiting using consecration which is some kind of dot effect, I think. Every time he stops he is healing himself. I don't think he does any direct attacks.

[MrSmite]

@Pitcrawler - Yes, Consecration does DoT damage to mobs that stand within the affected area.

I've outlined extensively in my PR how DoT damage is used by classes to kite but it seems this issue is largely ignored by other developers and held hostage by one.

Here's a video where a Druid kites using Insect Swarm. If you watch with annotations on, he clearly says:

You only need two things to kite: 1) A speed increase 2) A DoT

In fact, that video shows how broken Trinity's evade system is. He kites 1 mob but it's linked with 4 others and they keep following him (which I'm not advocating for here). On Trinity those others would turn around.

[Pitcrawler]

Well, that was a much better proof than mine. Very clearly to see and read.

[MrSmite]

See my comment here.

I simply don't have the time or energy to invest here.