Talk:Threat

The Rules
I copied this from a post on the Bioware Social network.

Do you mean you have Taunt up or Threaten up? From my experience Threaten is a near useless ability, and Taunt is more or less an instant aggro. From my cursory look at threat in the toolset - and I am not a programmer by any means - here's the basics:

For warriors and mages 1 damage = 1 threat. For rogues 1 damage = 0.8 threat. Threaten doubles threat from damage, I think Frightening Appearance triples it, not sure. Taunt generates an immediate 300 threat on everything in range, increased to 400 with Frightening Appearance.

I haven't had any problems holding aggro with Taunt only on my Nightmare playthrough. I'm ignoring Threaten altogether so far.

When an enemy first perceives (each of your) characters they assign a random value of threat between 0 and 10. If you are not playing on Nightmare, they then assign an additional 5 threat to anyone wearing light armor and 10 threat for medium and higher (this is based on the item in your chest slot). Note that massive does not grant a bigger bonus than medium or heavy. I guess cloth by omission gets 0. They then add an additional 5 threat to anyone equipped with melee weapons. As you can see these are piddly amounts and unless I'm missing something only serve to make enemies initially focus on your tanks/warriors - a light breeze will pull aggro at this point. And as you can see, on Nightmare you only get random aggros.

As far as I can tell the "wear massive armor" thing doesn't actually do anything? But you'll be wearing it (or heavy with a dex build) anyway so whatever.

Enemies attacking a character with 20% health or lower have a 50% chance of sticking to that character even if you would otherwise pull aggro. Enemies attacking a character with 10% health or lower have a 90% chance of sticking to that character even if you would otherwise pull aggro.

There is a sort of limit to the number of times an enemy will switch targets. Every time they change targets, they'll stick to it for 5 seconds, increasing by 5 seconds for each switch (until it resets after it reaches 25 seconds). I think this is what explains my experience with Revenants, who chase people around even though they're not doing damage any more (running for their life) while everyone else is still piling on dps. The other time this is most noticeable is right after a mage aoes and pulls a bunch of aggro and you have a hard time getting them off. All this applies less to enemies using ranged weapons (don't know if this includes staves/mages or not) who are free to change targets faster.

Using abilities generates threat on top of the damage it deals. This varies depending on the ability. 100 extra threat on Arrow of Slaying, 100 on Taunt (? seems weird but I guess it's there, making it a total of 400 threat, 500 with Frightening Appearance), 50 on Walking Bomb, etc. And on hard or nightmare, Walking Bomb generates double threat on use, so 100. From my experiences, finding this out does not surprise me... Although the wiki says the extra threat from abilities might be obsolete, so I can't say if that's how it actually works.

Also, besides the threat mechanics, enemies also have behaviours. Depending on the enemy they might try to avoid melee, avoid nearby enemies, prefer to use melee or ranged weapons, give chase or not, etc. P.S. I have no idea how Dog and Shale work with Threat.