Why do minions randomly swap agro?

ClatoVerataNicto·Jul 17, 2015·3 votes·1,177 views

Seriously, it keeps me up at night. I'm not talking about when they are valiantly defending a champion because you attack them. I'm talking about the times a melee minion will be attacking one minion, then randomly decides, "HEY! I'm gonna go attack that other minion over there!" We've all seen it.

I've always wondered and never found any reason for it. Could some Rioter please put this to rest even if it's, "It's random!" or "We will never truly understand the mind of the minion."

4 Comments

CrazedPorcupineJul 17, 20151 votes

Taken from my own thread about minion AI: found HERE

Taken from the League of Legends Wiki (the only source I could find that had info on the minion AI)

An enemy champion designated by a call for help from an allied champion. (Enemy champion attacking an Allied champion)

An enemy minion designated by a call for help from an allied champion. (Enemy minion attacking an Allied champion)

An enemy minion designated by a call for help from an allied minion. (Enemy minion attacking an Allied minion)

An enemy turret designated by a call for help from an allied minion. (Enemy turret attacking an Allied minion)

An enemy champion designated by a call for help from an allied minion. (Enemy champion attacking an Allied minion)

The closest enemy minion.

The closest enemy champion.

ClatoVerataNictoJul 17, 20151 votes

Actually it all makes sense now. They have to respond to calls for help from other minions or they'd keep attacking you when you draw agro.

I guess the fix for this would be to make them ignore minion calls when they already have a minion target.

StratJul 17, 20151 votes

AFAIK there's a few things that decide minion aggro.

Distance to minion
Amount of health an enemy minion has lost
How many minions are attacking the same minion (too many attacking the same minion can make it too hard for players to last hit, so I feel like Riot added a bit of code to help mitigate it a bit)
Slight random pathing
Calls for help as outlined by CrazedPorcupine

They all have unknown weightings, could be constant or variable or based on each other.

1&2 are self explanatory 4 is so that when minon waves first meet they spread evenly (rather than have all minions bunch up and attack the "leading" minion in the wave, they'll path slightly randomly slow that the closest minion is another minion in the wave).

So basically once a minion has taken enough damage for that factor to outweigh the distance factor, aggro will switch

ClatoVerataNictoJul 17, 20151 votes

All those make sense. I have an issue with 2 & 3. I find it very irritating to last hit when the rate of damage the minions are taking suddenly changes because they switch targets.

The amount of times I've missed a cs because I was expecting the siege minion to fire another shot, then it changes and I blackbar it, is infuriating.