Replace aggro hardcap with diminishing returns

As the title says. Currently, the enemy AI is hardwired that, if there are seventeen enemies attacking you, the rest will ignore you completely. Now, let's face it, seventeen enemies is a handful at best in a game that cheerfully throws dozens of enemies at you at once and completely inadequate for players who seek out huge battles intentionally. It's also felt hardest by archetypes {tankers {and brutes?}} for whom aggro management is part and parcel of their team role, as it's essentially saying that this is the most you can do, no matter your playstyle, build or personal skill.

Thus, what I propose is replacing the hard limit of NPC aggro with a gradual curve of diminishing aggro returns, where past a certain limit, every enemy aggroed incurs a penalty toward the aggro of the next.

For example, {and I'm pulling these numbers out of my rear}, there are ten enemies attacking you. You attack another one, but since ten is the limit where diminishing returns start to kick in, a few points are subtracted from the aggro toward you that attack created, making it easier for that enemy to break away and attack someone else. You attack another enemy, and a few points more are subtracted from that attack, and so on, and so on, making it inherently more difficult to keep the attention of an entire group of enemies the more enemies pile on you.

That way, in theory at least, the number of enemies a player can keep aggro on is placed more squarely in their hands, rather than a seemingly arbitrary number.

Did I miss anything?

An open letter to NCsoft

Depends on where the diminishing returns kick in.

An open letter to NCsoft

Can't they just remove the agro cap? Or make it something like capped at 30?

Diminishing returns would be computationally intensive compared to the current system.

That alone could make the system unfeasible.

you also can agro as much as you like. you just have to kill some within time to keep the agro from the ones that didn't follow.

Yyy-eah, farming isn't exactly what I had in mind here.

An open letter to NCsoft

If I remember correctly, the reason we have a hardcap in the first place WAS because of farming. I think there's some build that's perfect for farming and they would aggro the entire map and then wipe them out with one hugely powerful AoE. The hardcap was so only a mob or two could possibly be pulled at a time and therefore said AoE couldn't kill an entire map in one go.

And hopefully that proposition would be considered on its own merits and accepted or rejected on them. Let's not jump on the slippery slope semantical bobsled.

An open letter to NCsoft

how about just.. I dunno... raising the aggro cap?

It would take a lot less code

It wouldn't piss players off trying to make sense of diminishing returns.

It'd make the developers lives easier too.

This makes no sense. Think of it this way: if you are the enemy and you see seventeen other guys attacking a person, don't you think it would make more sense to attack the people that aren't being attacked by seventeen guys? The aggro cap makes sense in an in-character, game world sort of way - there are so many guys piled up on that one person that it would just be easier and more efficient to go after another guy.

Of course, nobody cares about common sense because IT'S A GAME LOLOLOL GAMES DON'T HAVE TO MAKE SENSE. Whatever.

based on what ive seen in game from actual experience using most of the powers mentioned (rain of arrows, blizzard, freezing rain, ect with the exception of rain of fire), ive used them on mobs way larger than 16 enemies and taken out a single mob of 25 with blizzard, the only thing left alive in the mob was the bosses because they have enough hp to survive the massive DoT from bizzard, same can be said for rain of arrows, ive taken out whole mobs with it before (assuming i had enough dmg buff), even without dmg buffs i still hit everything in the mob regardless how big it was.