Curing Tabula Rasa's aggro problems

Over the weekend, we took up developer Kagasumi's call to try out Tabula Rasa's new patch 1.7, and the enhanced, killer AI that came along with it. You can read our impressions of the change here, but the short version is that the wider aggro sharing on test takes away all the strategy and decision-making of combat and replaces it with an unsurvivable zergfest.

While we assumed the only choices were between a smaller or wider aggro sharing radius, Planet TR poster Line has written up a pretty thorough post exploring another possibility. It doesn't make sense, Line says, for enemies to be able to locate a player the instant he gains aggro of one enemy within a certain radius. Enemies should at least have to use an ability (which could be stopped by the player) to draw the attention of nearby allies, and that attention should be drawn to the threat's point of origin, not the player. What Line is describing, in essence, is the sort of AI routine more commonly seen in the shooter genre.

Is it feasible to see this sort of code-heavy change this far into release? Maybe, maybe not. We do know it'd make the game considerably more engaging. And it'd be better than being zerged.