Introduction
In Lineage 2, combat is a way of life. In PvE combat, PCs fight mobs to gain various rewards. This article attempts to explain the AI behind mob target selection, and tries to illustrate how PCs can take advantage of it.
Please note that this idea is not universal and in fact is theortical, but seems to be collaborated by observations in game. It's probably how it is programmed on the back end, but short of looking into the code, it's not possible to verify the ideas here.
(And in no way do we claim to be savants when it comes to the Hate idea. Other MMORPG probably have something similar, and someone else probably have covered it in details. It's just that I can't find it. :))
The Mob Hate You
In case you hadn't noticed, the mobs don't exactly love you. In fact, they downright hate you. At best they leave you alone; at worst, they come at you with a big cleaver -- or worse. But how do they know who to hit?
If you are soloing, the answer is simple: the mob selects the only idiot PC standing near it swinging a weapon at it or slinging spells at it. That's rather straightfoward.
But when there are 8 PCs in a party, the mob, being of only one brain, sort of have to figure out which one to hit. So how does it pick one?
In real life, a mob will probably just hit a random PC. In Lineage 2, the mobs are smarter than the average bear though, and would actually pick a PC based on a set of criteria. This set of criteria boils down into a single attribute we can call the Hate factor.
The Hate Factor
The mobs hate you. We've established that. But what we are really interested in is how they hate you, and what it means when they hate you really, really, much.
Template:Lineage 2/CalloutThe idea behind the Hate Factor is that it is a set of statistics that mobs have. This set of statistics increases due to some situational factors. Mobs will then use this set of statistic to make targeting decisions, picking the PC with the highest Hate Factor to attack.
This means, if 8 players gang up on one mob, the mob will maintain 8 Hate Factors, one for each PC. Whichever PC have the highest Hate Factors is attacked by the mob.
We start off by assuming that the Hate factor is an open-ended integer value (i.e., it is discrete, and has no upper bound, and with a lower bound value of 0). The first and forthmost rule when dealing with Hate is as follows:
1 point of damage done is equivalent to 1 point of ''Hate''
(Break for lunch. To be continued. :)