I'm not sure that I really have any profound insights here, or that it'd make sense to share them if I did, but yeah, I think it is not unlikely that Taunt functions a bit differently on the 4H than elsewhere in the game.

What he said.

Oh yeah BoS doesn't help at all for this fight and totems are great.

I've had always noticed that same behaviour on BWL drakes, where a tank will Taunt off another, who promptly stops attacking, only to have the drake go back to the former tank when the debuff wears off. That trend continued until about a month and a half ago, and everything seems to work as we would expect it to. Actually, same thing applies to Kurinaxx; he used to swap back even after taunts, but don't now.

No real insight on Taunt, aside from saying "Sorry, I thought this was fixed" :(

Taunt was changed in 1.11.2. Taunt holds aggro now when you use it on just about any mob, though it is possible for somebody to exceed the taunting warrior's threat level before it wears off.

Anyway you can test this new taunt with any mob. Have 2 Warriors run out, have one Warrior beat a mob into an inch and stop all actions(make sure the mob isn't bleeding) of it's life and have the other Warrior taunt off he should have aggro even without any hostile actions following his taunt.

Yep, all of the above is in Kenco's R&D post on threat. This change happened in one of the 1.11 minipatches, and I actually wouldn't be surprised if was made specifically because of the Four Horsemen. The fight would not be possible with pre-1.11 taunt.

Do you have a link to this post? I've noticed some strange things going on with taunt, but hadnt been able to put my finger on what exactly had changed.

Kenco's thesis appears to have been dropped from the R&D forum when bliz changed over to the new forums.
If anyone has a copy of it, it would be cool if we could get it linked or quoted here.

I'd like to believe this, but after having a hunter feign, get up, and promptly pull aggro off me, I don't think that's entirely correct for 4H. And he did this around 2 minutes into the fight.

Thanks Ngita, that does indeed look current.


And as to the FD thing - weren't folk reporting bugs with aggro not being reset on battleres, FD, soulstone, vanish type stuff?

Well, that may explain that.

Contrary to the above posters, Taunt does work differently on the 4h encounter. The problem is that they did not code Mocking Blow and Challenging Shout to work in the same way and thus, the problems.

A perfect example is if you Mocking Blow and follow it up with a Taunt, the majority of the time when the Taunt icon wears off it will run after the previous tank, even if he is practically already at the next Horsemen.

Considering the way Taunt currently works, and that the other warrior wasn't even in range of the Horsemen when the Taunt icon was up to pull agro, how can you possibly explain how that Warrior got agro after the Taunt icon wears off if Taunt worked normally on the Four Horsemen encounter?

Another example is agro. Assuming Mocking Blow and Challenging Shout were not used, have you ever seen a Warrior pull agro on a Horsemen after the other tank successfully taunted it?

I do most of the tank swapping encounters for my guild, and I know the success rate on it. Certain tanks just forget to turn off their attack on time and end up agroing during the taunt, and retaining it after the Taunt icon wears off for the other tank. The tank that Taunts misses his attacks, the other tank isn't paying attention lands a sunder and a Revenge and it's unsuccessful.

I've never seen an unsuccessful swap after a successful Taunt by a tank on this encounter. If Taunt worked normally on this encounter, that would be pretty much impossible. The odds of every single warrior always turning off attack on time is practically 0.

Furthermore, take it one step further and TRY to pull agro after a successful Taunt. I've tried to, and I've never been able to whereas on every other boss in game, I can have the mob revert back to me if I want to. An additional X% of agro is not hard to overcome during the Taunt icon if you unload and the other tank has his attacks miss.

I'm pretty sure Blizzard knows that the swap is very important to the encounter and that the odds of so many Warriors successfully swapping that many times is pretty much not going to happen so yeah I think it's very likely they changed the way Taunt works on this one specific encounter.

Basically, I think each Horsemen has a separate list much like Patchwerk does for the Hateful Strike tank. The Horsemen list is simply capped at 1 person, and Taunt gets you on the list. What that means is that when the next tank comes up and Taunts, it knocks the previous Tank off the list which would result in a pretty smooth transition between Tanks. It's also possible the list has some bonus agro associated with it above and beyond what you would normally get from a Taunt.

The problem occurs in the fact that it appears ONLY Taunt gets you on the list (and the druid equivalent). Mocking Blow and Challenging Shout do not put you on that list so the "weird" agro occurs when Mocking Blow and Challenging Shout are used. Furthermore it appears using Mocking Blow or Challenging Shout prior to a Taunt has a good chance of that Taunt not working correctly and not getting you on the list.

If you asked your tanks which form of Taunt they used on a transition that "messed up" you'll likely find your answer. The easy solution is to just not use Mocking Blow or Challenging Shout at all and you'll likely see the abnormalities in the tank transitions vanish.

I think the reason they coded the list to only work from Taunt, and not Mocking Blow or Challenging Shout is because they intended for Taunts not to be resisted on the encounter and that aspect of the encounter is likely bugged.