I believe the argument on kiting is a bit of a red herring here, unintentional of course.
From the OP’s description he built relatively close but not close enough (I assume here, giving benefit of the doubt) to agro the creature onto his base. People do this all the time, its a sort of live and let live situation… or they have a close enough boss to farm at their leisure. Nothing exactly out of the ordinary.
But what likely happened is another player dragged the boss nearby and then broke agro. Probably unintentional, just riding by. Again nothing out of the ordinary, but bad luck for the OP. NPCs have a tendency to target really random targets when their primary gets out of range.
In my experience they like to target things like horses, bearers, and dancers before fighters. Or at least it seems like it. Could be murphy’s law here where they target everything BUT the stuff you want them too.
Rotbranch is not a great world boss to deal with when crap hits the fan. Its not a giant spider, its not a giant scorpion, or even a tiger, elephant, or rhino. Its a very very dangerous foe when you are surprised. Usually the best advice is to run away in said situation.
How the hell do you run away when its up in your base wrecking everything? Well you don’t. Panic mode sets in. Rightfully so. Either you deal with the crap sandwich and bite down, or you lose all your weakling thralls. Now here’s where I have to get into the OP’s mindset. I spent all that work, I can’t lose them. Gotta do something, anything.
So he tries to get the boss away from his base. This is where he believes a bug happens:
The base is close enough to the spawn point where if you tried to kite the boss back to its spawn, it cannot reset agro until EVERYTHING (52 thralls even) are OFF his agro list. Otherwise when the player pops off of it, he reagros the next targets and runs back.
This is not a bug, this is intentional behavior. There are only two solutions to get this boss off the stuff it has agro on. Move all the thralls quickly to a new location further away (not really feasible). Or kill the boss.
I’m going to reiterate what I just said for the OP to understand exactly what happened here.
When a NPC is agro’d it puts the person who agro’d them at the top of the list.
When the NPC is chasing that person, anything in range such as mounts, thralls, pets, and players can get added to that list.
In addition if you did not setup the behavior of the thrall and their engagement properties, they will attack a NPC that gets close to them. So even if the boss ran by, they likely ran out to hit it.
When thralls and pets attack a NPC, they get on the agro list. Sometimes they go to the top if the first person hasn’t done anything (Aka running away).
Then the NPC goes through that list one by one.
If you get on the top of the list and can kite it away, the thralls and pets will NOT drop off the list.
They stay on the list until the person at the top drops off and then it checks to see if the next one is far enough away, running towards them.
If it runs towards them and doesn’t get close enough, it goes to the next target and does the same.
If it is in range it continues the attack.
What this means is once you kited the boss away, it checked 52 times running back a bit each time. It likely didn’t make it to the bottom of the list until it got to your base and resumed its attack, causing the existing thralls to reagro themselves and add themselves back to the list.
Again this is intentional behavior. Not a bug.
Here’s some steps to prevent this in the future:
- Build further away from a boss spawn.
- Build structures to prevent NPCs from getting at weaker thralls.
- If a boss still gets into your base, rely on killing it instead of kiting it away.
- Turn non-combat ready thralls passive in Behavior-Engagement so they don’t get themselves killed.
well time train new ones. Only takes one day