[khanable]

Higher hate values might be right

from a feb 21,2001 patch:

*NPC AI - Hate*

We've made a number of changes to NPC AI, specifically to the section
dealing with target-selection, or what's commonly referred to as "Hate". It
is not so much that NPCs react differently to hate now than before, but that
we've changed the way that hate is awarded.

--- We reduced the amount of hate that can be caused by a proc. Due to the
high proc rates at upper levels, the amount of hate generated from procs,
and the spells that were selected for those procs, made keeping the
attention of the creature much too easy a task for the tank. Simply, it
nearly eliminated the challenge of keeping a foes attention at levels above
50.

--- We've capped the amount of hate that can be awarded to most casters,
specifically for debuff-type spells like the Malo and Tash series. The hate
calculation for these spells takes into account the number of hitpoints of
the NPC and did not "play nice" with the increased HP limit of Velious. It
explains why Enchanters, for instance, would complain that casting a Tash
spell would lead to near-instant death.

--- We've redressed the amount of hate generated by heal spells.
Previously, and *partly* due to a bug, the high level heal spells such as
superior heal or complete heal would generate no more hate than greater
heal. In fact, so little hate was generated by these spells that it made
controlling NPC aggression trivial. Heal spells will now generate an amount
of hate more in line with the number of hitpoints actually healed. Due to
our desire to leave the lower level game more or less untouched, two
separate caps have been placed for targets level 50 or below, and 51 or
above. Heal spells will generate significantly less hate for targets below
level 51 than those at or above that level.

--- We've also re-evaluated ways that players have to reduce their own hate.
While spells in place to allow this are OK, the Evade skill (possessed by
rogues) let them out of their damage too easily. A rogue that successfully
evaded would immediately drop to a level of hate lower than someone who was
in the awareness range, but hadn't done anything to really upset the
creature such as damage it or heal its foe. This problem was exacerbated by
the increase of the size of the hate list implemented with Velious.

Perhaps something interesting to note is this:

We've capped the amount of hate that can be awarded to most casters,
specifically for debuff-type spells like the Malo and Tash series. The hate
calculation for these spells takes into account the number of hitpoints of
the NPC and did not "play nice" with the increased HP limit of Velious. It
explains why Enchanters, for instance, would complain that casting a Tash
spell would lead to near-instant death.

Maybe debuff style spells took into account the mobs HP, which is why warriors felt the epic was shit for group play (lower hp mobs generating lower hate, along with the high delay). Adding a cap to casters, they still had the issue of the warrior epic being overpowered as fuck on high HP mobs, so they nerf it down to a static amount of +hate.

OR the cap affected weapon procs as well (makes more sense tbh), but the cap was considered fairly low and they changed out the warrior epic to have +hate.

Mind you this patch comes out a few days prior to someone posting the spdat.eff data to allakhazam reflecting a +hate on the warrior epic proc.

Thoughts?