Quote:
Originally Posted by kilmoll
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Sneak pulling only works if you are absolutely in a straight line to the rear of the mob...otherwise it will agro on the pull.
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Incorrect.
To get a clean sneak pull, two things need to happen.
- You must be successfully sneaking in the rear 180 degree arc (mob must con indiff to you while sneaking).
- You must aggro a mob without breaking sneak.
The first part isn't that difficult, even if the arc is not quite as large as it should be. The second part is more complicated.
On live, there were a few things that broke sneak. Here's what I can remember off the top of my head:
- Getting hit for damage: successfully defending an attack, a missed attack, or getting hit while runed did not break sneak (or invis/hide for that matter)
- Getting a spell landed on you: regardless of resists, getting successfully targeted by any spell or AE spell effect broke sneak (if I'm wrong about any of these it might be this one)
- Casting a spell/clicking a spell effect from an item
- Zoning
Nothing/not much else broke sneak. You could loot, vendor, trade, bank, and attack without breaking sneak. On P1999 it works correctly for the most part with one important exception.
On live, both attacking AND dealing damage did not break sneak. On P1999, attacking does not break sneak but dealing damage DOES. This is not as it should be.
This makes sneak pulling on P1999 a gamble. Whenever you pull and end up dealing damage on the pull (i.e. not missing with your javelin, throwing dagger, or arrow), sneak breaks which normally results in a failed sneak pull. If you're a monk it's not the end of the world because you can FD and either split using sneak+FD memblur or just try again. If you're a rogue, you're pretty much screwed, which is why rogues do not end up pulling much/at all on this server (also why I ended up rolling a monk even though I played a rogue main on live).
There are a few things that end up offsetting this on P1999.
1. The mob is immune to the damage you're going to inflict. If you're using a non-magical throwing weapon/bow and the mob requires a magic weapon to be hit, you can't do damage and so are guaranteed that sneak will not break*.
2. The mob manages to path away from any possible adds before social aggro is checked. Because you were sneaking for the initial aggressive act, you won't get any immediate adds. However, nearby mobs will aggro if social aggro gets checked quickly enough. On P1999, social aggro seems to be checked at either a somewhat delayed rate compared to mob/PC position or it's only checked at some sort of tick intervals. This means you can occasionally get away with a bad pull as a single pull. (It's also why you can sometimes run past mobs without getting aggro, FD flop dance through zones without ever aggroing a single mob, etc.)
*The only thing that has changed with sneak pulling mechanics in the last 6 months or so is when they changed how rune type spells work. Before the change (which I believe was to make damage shields hit through runes) runed mobs functioned like immune mobs with regard to breaking sneak - sneak never broke against a runed mob even when you ended up damaging the rune. Since the change, sneak breaks if any damage is dealt to a rune even if the runed mob is immune to the type of damage that you're dealing.
This (sneak breaking on damage being dealt) was brought up in the thread about sneak and sneak pulling a long time ago that preceded the original fix to sneak and sneak pulling. I've been working on finding in-era evidence that sneak did not break on damage being dealt but still haven't found much aside from my memory of writing a sneak and sneak/hide pulling guide for my guild's private forums which are now defunct. It doesn't help that there was so much bad information floating around about sneak and sneak pulling due to it being regarded as some sort of magic trick that only really skilled monks and rogues could pull off. The various guides to sneak pulling on sites like The Safehouse are full of bad info and FUD.
Don't even get me started on sneak/hide pulling. That won't work with the current mechanics either but it also won't work because there's no delay between initiating a ranged attack and the projectile hitting a mob - on live ranged attacks worked like instant cast bolt-type spells with extremely fast projectiles. On P1999 there's no delay and they end up working like melee attacks, so there's no time to initiate hide between the hide-breaking attack and the non-hide breaking aggro event.
EDIT:
And more on topic, my memory of doing testing on live is that sneak worked in the same cone that backstab did - which was everything but the front 120-140* arc. This seems like something that would be easy to test on EQ Mac. I haven't messed around on there yet but maybe someone who has can chime in.