How to Fight Mobs – WOW

The Basics of Combat in WOW

The enemies are known as mobile object/s or mob/s for short. Proximity is what defines when a mob that is unfriendly will attack you and is defined in the game as the ‘aggro pull’.

So What Is Aggro?
Aggro short for aggression is the common term used to describe why a mob will attack you rather than someone else.
Within the game there are two types of attackable mobs, neutral and hostile. Neutral are depicted with a yellow circle whilst hostile have a red circle when you target them.
To understand the combat situation you need to know what aggro radius is. This is the radius around the mob that if you enter will result in the mob attacking you either until you kill it, it kills you or you run away (cluck, cluck).

What is Aggro Radius?

Aggro radius represents the invisible distance around a mob that changes based on the mob’s level and the player character’s level. On an equal basis level for level the aggro radius is about 20 yards. The radius changes per level at approximately 1 yard per level up to a maximum of 45 yards and as low as 5 yards. Lets look at some examples: A player character who is level 30 and a mob is level 20. As the player is higher in level you would deduct the level difference from the base aggro radius. This gives a 10 yard aggro radius for that mob versus a level 30 player character. If the mob was level 40 then the level difference is added to the base. This gives a 30 yard aggro radius for that mob versus the player character.

There are however exceptions in the game where some mob’s have a higher than normal aggro radius. Creatures with the word ‘starving’ in their name have a higher aggro radius. For example Starving Dire Wolves have a higher aggro radius than Rabid Dire Wolves.

When you begin to attack a mob you generate threat and this decides how long that mob will continue to attack you.

What is Threat?

Threat is per mob and increases through various actions against that target or helpful actions on you, for example: The more you hit something doing damage per second (DPS) will raise your threat on that mob. If you heal yourself during combat through any means this also increases your threat on that mob.

So in short threat is a non-player character’s (NPC) agression towards a player. Every NPC has a threat table you don’t see unless you have an addon that can display it such as Omen or KLH threat meter. The NPC will usually attack the player character with the highest threat however this is not without exception as some NPC’s have special attacks that can be randomly targeted at any player character.

The most basic form of threat generation is damage and is approximately calculated at 1 damage point equates to 1 point of threat.
Beneficial abilities such as healing spells generate global threat however this is divided amongst all the NPC’s attacking.
Healing generates threat at approximately 1 point of healing to 0.5 points of threat.

Lets look at an example considering no threat reduction talents or abilities:

A warrior hits a group of four NPC’s for 1000 points of damage thus creates 1000 points of threat against each NPC.
A healer then heals that warrior for 2000 health points thus creates a 1000 points of threat divided amongst the attackers giving 250 points of threat on each NPC.

Buffs, power gains and any ability that affects the global combat is considered global threat. For example a cleave attack on two targets will have it’s threat divided up.

Some things to remember:

• A player character being attacked is neither losing or gaining threat
• If a player is healed at full health this will not generate threat
• Normal health and power regeneration will not generate threat