Expedition of the Guild: how to keep aggro on the tank comes down to two rules the game hands you — enemies pick their target in the order Tank, then Melee, then Ranged, and frontline tanks hold aggro more reliably than anyone else. Put your Tank on the front line, give it Threat Transfer, and the boss stays on it while your healers keep working.
Expedition of the Guild: how to keep aggro on the tank and the targeting order
The targeting rule is the important part, because it means you are not fighting for the boss's attention — you are being disqualified from it. Enemies look for a Tank first, then a melee hero, then a ranged one. If your Tank dies, the boss does not wander off to a random damage dealer; it moves down the list to the next melee hero and your healer is still the last thing it wants.
So the aggro rules in practice are short:
- Keep the Tank at the front, in the position the game treats as the front line.
- Keep it alive. A Tank that dies takes the party down the targeting list with it.
- Do not rely on damage to hold a target. Threat is a separate stat, and it is tracked separately on the Equipment tab.
Enemy targeting priority: Tank, then Melee, then Ranged
The priority order is fixed, which means the shape of your party decides how the fight unfolds. A party built with a Tank, ranged damage and a healer behind them keeps the boss on the front line for the whole fight. A party without a Tank gives the boss a melee hero to chew on instead, and that hero was one of your damage dealers.
This is also the reason role coverage beats raw numbers when you put a raid together. The classes and roles guide covers which heroes fill Tank, DPS and Healer, and the party composition guide covers how many of each role a 20-hero raid should carry.
One thing the game does not have yet is a way to assign separate main and off-tank targets. Players have asked for it, because without it several bosses chasing different heroes turns the screen into chaos. Until that ships, one Tank holds the line and the rest of the front line is decided by where you stand them.
Threat Transfer and the rest of the tank sheet
Threat is a stat you build for, not a side effect of dealing damage. Every hero's stat sheet carries a Threat Transfer value next to Block, Dodge and Accuracy, and the Equipment tab shows it for the whole party, so you can see at a glance which of your heroes is contributing aggro and which is only contributing hits.
The same sheet tells you whether the Tank can hold that aggro through a mechanic:
- Health and Stamina decide how long the Tank survives the mechanic.
- Block and Dodge decide how much of the incoming damage it avoids.
- Accuracy decides whether its own attacks land, which matters because a Tank that never hits builds no threat in a fight that rewards damage.
- Phy. DEF, Mag. DEF, Phy. Res. and Mag. Res. decide how much of the boss's damage type gets through.
Every one of those numbers is listed and explained in the gear stats guide, and the four slots they come from are covered in the loot distribution guide once drops start arriving.
What you do when the boss ignores your Tank
If the boss is beating on a damage dealer instead of your Tank, the usual causes are in this order:
- The Tank is dead, so the boss moved down the targeting list.
- The Tank is not at the front, so it is not treated as a frontline aggro holder.
- The Tank's own attacks are missing, so it is not building threat while the others are.
The first is why keeping the Tank alive comes before everything else. The second is a positioning fix, and the third is an Accuracy problem that shows up in the same stat sheet.
None of these are solved by adding damage dealers, which is the practical answer to why a damage-heavy party is a levelling shortcut rather than a way to clear a boss.