ok
aggro - there is no way to tell how high your aggro actually is, you just know you're doing ok when the mob is only beating on you =P
As far as weapons skills go, try and practice them all, even if you are being PLed. There are a lot of good weapons and if you don't have all of your skills up, you won't be able to take advantage of them.
here a few decent weapons to raise skills with
1hs - i'm sure you're doing ok here, but razor edged shan'tok is a great ratio 1hs for dirt cheap (at least on my server) and lamentation or defiance are good as well

1hb - cane of the tranquil, centi warhammer, goranga spiked club (no drop, but you can usually find one rottng in Maiden's Eye)

2hs - blackened alloy ******* sword, war marshall's bladed staff (this is recommended level 56, so stats and ratio won't be that great, but it's pretty cheap nowadays on my server)

2hb - sarnak battlehammer

piercing - crystalline spider fang, shimmering partisan

a few weapons that are awesome and it would be terrible to miss out on =D ... Greatstaff of Thunder, Copper Hammer of Striking (GREAT aggro weapons), Gomdurig ... just to name a few mid level good ones, these aren't even the uber ones
check out the post above titled "Making a barbarian warrior" for some more warrior info

In the early game from lvl 1-30 you run around and work up all your weapon skills. Getting agro is the name of the game. In short the only advantage a warrior has is to take damage better then the other classes. Everything a warrior does is about taking damage. Hitpoints, AC and resists are your friends. Any cleric knows that if you have to heal a ranger, shadow knight, paladin all will be harder to heal. Do not focus on anything other then hitpoints and damage resists.

Too many warriors are thinking about how hard they hit. Agro is about hitting often. The damage does not matter, the fact that you hit often means dexterity is important. Fast weapon with haste. But if you can not take damage, know one wants you. My brother is a time enabled wizard and he dishes out over 60% of the total damage in any LDON group. Parse the data and wizards are amazing. Your job is to grab agro.

Here is how to get and fix agro. First you want to make sure the puller does not hit the target first. You want to hit it first because it give you agro. Then you want to make sure you are at full hit points when you pull because the cleric will get agro if they heal you in the first couple of seconds of the battle. Setup a hot key that uses the /assist command to assist the puller. In that hotkey also state in group mode that you are assisting the puller against the target. Use the %T to automatically target the monster. When you hit the assist hot key you setup this is what it should look like.

Yukondave cheers at a fiend
Yukondave is assisting Drakoner against a fiend.

This is what you put into the Hot key

Line 1 - /assist nameofplayer
Line 2 - /cheer
Line 3 - Yukondave is assisting nameofplayter against %t

You do the hotkey because you will be blamed for messing up pulls or switching targets during a bad pull. This tells the group when they want to blame you that you did your job. Stay on target and make sure it you have a record. If you assist, you never get confused. Averyone should use the assist button.

Stats of importance, AC, AC and AC. Then stamina, Hitpoints second its dexterity and third is agi and forth is strength, mostly to carry all the plate armour. Agi is one that is hard to figure, but I can tell you it helps with the number of hits taken.

Use your taunt key non-stop and use your disciplines for getting more agro. The more agro you have the more damage the other members of your party can kill it faster. That means you get exp faster and no one else dies.

If a warrior is doing their job right, at the end of a fight, no one else should have taken a hit and you should have been the only one with damage.

First a few words on Taunt

Taunt will add to your agro. It really doesn't matter if it is putting you a few ponts above the higher agro or adding agro points the effect is the same.
You can improve your ability to hold agro by pressing the taunt key every time it pops. However this could result in you not being able to taunt when a caster draws agro. If you like or need the added agro of mashing the taunt key, consider wating until the mob is slowed before mashing it. Also if you are about to be healed hold off taunting until after the heal lands.

The belife that agro is dependent on number of touches or number of swings is wrong. This belife came out of a statment in one of the EQ books that said it was a factor (it never said it was a major factor) and misunderstanding of the primary hand damage bonus effect.

All causes of agro are converted to a number and added up. The person who has the highest number is the one the mob will attack. One of the major ways a Warrior generates more agro is doing more damage in the same amount of time. This is done by having haste cast on you, using weapons that proc, or by using weapons with a better dps.

If you dispute this please explain why a two handed weapons that have a better dps than two one hand weapons will out agro the one hand weapons. The Only advantage the two handed weapon has it dps.

The contence of my statment was building agro during a fight, not regaining agro. If you are buidlding agro there is no differance. If you are trying to gain argo then there is a differance.

wow ... ok
if you are the tank, you should have aggro
but you know that mob is going to be slowed and you know you're going to be healed ... Bik was saying that both these actions generate aggro and that by holding off on taunt untill after said spell is cast, you can try and avoid them gaining aggro should yours not be high enough at that point in the battle
the whole POINT of taunt is to regain aggro when you lose it ... and in those situations, there is a possibilty of losing aggro, hence holding taunt till after
seems like good advice ... it's what i do and it works rather well for me

If you are trying to build agro, taunt will do nothing for you. It will simply move you to the top of the hate list. It does not add to the amount of hate you already have in the same way that proc's, incite etc do and, as such, does not contribute to the building of agro.

This being the case, it really is only useful for gaining agro either initally or once you lose it.

Actually, after doing some research, taunt does provide "hate equal to highest plus a little," what is usually refered to by most players as taunt+1. This is STRAIGHT from the developers. There are exceptions for overcoming pull hate (pulling gives a hate bonus that can cause difficulties for the taunter, hence why FD'rs and faders are preferred pullers) and the like. Here is a good post from a long thread on the subject of taunt.

http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum/showthread.php?postid=32130#post32130


Edited, Thu Oct 14 16:32:35 2004 by dfrnchman

I think the most important messages are (straight from the dev):





Make your own inferences from this, but the dev is basically spelling out when you should effectively use Taunt.

Personaly I don't think that developer ever played a tank. Anyone who has played a tank knows that a Sucessful Taunt dose not always result in the mob attacking you. A common example is when breaking mez and the chanter is sitting. Even with the sucessful taunt the mob will attacking the sitting chanter first.

Furthermore I and others have noted that mashing taunt will give you agro lock when with out mashing taunt you get ping pong agro. For me in game observations trump theroy.

I would suggest you go to the Steel warrior and read up a bit on hate and agro etc. You'll find that there has been substantial testing of theories and there are a number of plausible explanations given for this behaviour which does not negate what the dev has said.

ie. there is the hate list and then there are seperate circumstances which affect agro outside of the hate list (low-health agro, sitting, initial agro etc)

Lag (or potential lag) will always mean that in-game observations are inherently more flawed than extensively parsed logs, such as has been used on TSW.

Were you replying to me? If so: no I don't agree with that statement. A successful taunt will always put you on top of the mob's hate list. The Dev was correct. However, there are other "factors" involved in who the mob beats on; not just who is on top of the hate list. cf rampage as an example.

Did/do you log your tests? What weapons do you/did you use? Do you have any levels of Weapon Affinity? Or are you just going by what you see on the screen?

Going simply by your own experience(s) severely limits the accuracy/validity of your conclusions.

From your statment I assume you have never hunted in Veksar. Any camp in Veksar is very easy to break, and once broken can be pulled by anyone. Thus I was pulling to take advantage of that aggro bonus.

According to your own statments there must be two parts of taunt. One that moves you to the top of the hate list, and one that increasses your agro. So every time you hit the taunt key the following things happen. 1 You are moved to the top of the hate list. 2 You recive an agro bonus. There is no reason to believe that you only recive the agro bonus in Veksar or that reciving the agro bonus is an exception to the rule. Thus every time you hit the taunt key you recive an agro bonus.

The only question remaining is how much dose this agro bonus aid you in holding agro. As I believe I stated earlier the agro bonus doesn't help you as much as the incite ability. I've never had to mash the taunt key since the incite line of abilities was added.
However if you are having problems holding agro vs other melee classes, then mashing the taunt key might put you over the top.