Spear Hunting for Dummies

[Jackwolf]

They literally cannot "flee forever", they bleed and die. If an animal is fleeing from you because it's low HP, you've already won, you just need to follow it.

Ah, yes, fleeing and bleeding for 0 damage. It definitely will die eventually. Even after finishing Hunter I've seen Badgers run and take 0 HP bleed ticks, leaving blood trails and it's not...

If it's not bleeding to death it's likely because you're triggering it's anti exploit mechanics. The repeated fleeing the moose is doing in the video is not the same as when they are low HP.

This, because when they flee because of this they very obviously don't leave blood trails or take tick damage. Whereas the above mentioned, they do.

Use MC then. It's honestly much easier and it lets you bypass the whole "tracking the animal down" minigame.

Except, again, when something in fleeing and isn't something loves to fight like Boars, Bears, Lynxes (sometimes) they will *continue fleeing even after you reaggro them*.

Also understand that it might take more than two weeks into a world before you can consider bears and moose loot pinatas.

You say this under the assumption that I haven't already been killing bears, apparently. I'm not gonna mess with Moose because while I like fighting things in this game, I'm not suicidal. The only typical creatures I haven't killed this world so far have been Moose and Walrus. That doesn't mean creatures don't still suffer from a flee mechanic that could be better. Please don't assume.

[springyb]

They literally cannot "flee forever", they bleed and die. If an animal is fleeing from you because it's low HP, you've already won, you just need to follow it.

If it's not bleeding to death it's likely because you're triggering it's anti exploit mechanics. The repeated fleeing the moose is doing in the video is not the same as when they are low HP.

That's true but I don't think it is certain that they will bleed to death, if I recall correctly the wording used was that it may happen. It's also not a guarantee that you will see the blood trails as that is based on your perception and exploration, I think.

What are the anti-exploit mechanics, precisely? It is my understanding that the reason for doing smaller chip damage rather than going straight for something like a cleave is due to the fact that when you hit an animal with the stronger attacks you are more likely to trigger whatever arbitrary damage threshold they have that causes them to run away. Not necessarily because they are at low health, though that is also one of the reasons. It seems counter-intuitive to me that the play is to build up opening and use weaker attacks rather than going for the deadly blows.

I don't know precisely what it is, but it's clear there are mechanics that raise the threshold for when an animals flees when it's taking damage from something it cannot path to.

My -guess- is there is some value that determines the likely hood of an animal fleeing that rises as it takes damage and lowers when it deals damage, when exiting combat, and passively lowers while out of combat. I think this is why the reaggro trick works the way it does. Under normal circumstances this value stays low enough to where an animal will fight until it's low hp/to the death, but when it cannot fight back this value gets inflated to a point where the animal flees whenever it takes damage.

As for chip damage vs heavy hitters, who's to say. End game hunting for me has always boiled down to spamming quick barrage into a cleave one shot.