This is my knowledge from back in the day and I can't really say how applicable all of it is here, but I know most of it is still true:
- Melee aggro is determined by the raw damage stat on your weapon so that when you swing, you generate an amount of aggro determined by the damage of your weapon, not the damage you end up dealing. You generate the same amount whether you hit or miss, and extra damage from strength doesn't make a difference.
- Faster weapons do not inherently generate more aggro, but many of the best weapons happen to be in the faster end. It's also easier to lose aggro between swings if you swing every three seconds compared to twice a second, even if you generate the same amount of "threat per second." This led to the illusion that faster weapons were better when in reality they just produce a more even level of aggro instead of spiky aggro. Over the course of a fight, it's the same if the weapons have comparable ratios.
- Assuming an appropriately geared warrior and not someone with shit weapons or absolute endgame gear, melee DPS accounts for roughly 60-70% of your aggro if you have appropriate proc weapons. The procs are what put you ahead of actual DPS classes (hopefully). You can't really tank consistently with weapons that don't proc, but some people remember fairy-tales of how they held aggro with lammies or jade maces when the fact is that they were simply grouped with DPS that had worse weapons and thus allowed the warrior to hold aggro by simply doing better DPS.
- You don't want just any proc. It has to have some high-aggro component, usually a stun and sometimes a simple '+x aggro' gain (think Enraging Blow). A straight damage or DoT proc won't generate very much aggro unless it deals so much damage that the amount of damage itself is significant aggro, but that's rarely the case for warrior weapons. Bloodpoints aren't good tank weapons, for instance, because they just proc a 45pt lifetap which generates the same amount of threat as any other nuke for 45 damage, i.e not much.
Aggro/taunt works like this:
Whoever is the first to enter a mob's aggro list will be the initial target of that mob. To overtake whoever currently has aggro, you need to then have some amount of aggro above that player before the mob will switch targets. This is why being the first to aggro a mob is a good thing if you want to tank it and a bad thing if you don't. I don't know how much more aggro you actually need to overtake the current tank, but I would estimate that it's something like 20% more.
Let's say Bob the Warrior pulls a mob and hits it a few times. He now has 100 aggro.
Joe the Rogue commences stabbing the mob and does more DPS than the warrior, putting him at 110 aggro.
The mob is still on Bob because it would take 120 aggro for it to change targets. Once it does so, however, that player is in trouble because Bob then has to generate a great deal of extra aggro to get the mob back. If Jill the Wizard drops a big nuke and ends up at 150 aggro, Bob would have to get up to 180 before the mob would turn back on him. If Joe doesn't stop DPSing in the meantime, he'll arrive there before and the mob will hit him instead. This is why, when the tank loses aggro, the mob will typically go through several targets who were above the warrior on the aggro list before he can get it back. The guy who takes aggro doesn't just get himself killed, he might get the entire cleric line mowed down as well.
Fortunately, Bob can taunt the mob. If he succeeds, he is placed 1 point of aggro above whoever is at the top of the list, and the mob forcibly changes target to Bob. It circumvents the mechanic that would normally require him to get 20% more aggro than the current holder and simply makes the mob target him no matter what, but he still has only 1 point more than Jill so she better not keep nuking or history will repeat itself.
So, over the course of a long fight, the warrior's proc weapons will generally ensure that he maintains a level of aggro that's high enough to prevent the DPS from taking aggro, but it's difficult in the beginning of the fight because it takes so little to turn the mob. Once the aggro numbers are in the tens of thousands, nobody can take aggro with a big nuke or something because there's a very large buffer, they'd have to keep building aggro ahead of the warrior for a while before they'd surpass 120%.
|