Hey Torch, well I have a few facts about how this works.
You may have noticed that xp mobs always turn when they attack a player in an xp party. They have one method of attack, their main one, and that is all.
HNMs such as Behemoth, Nidhogg, and the Wyrms have more then one way they can attack. If you are behind Behemoth and pull aggro, you will see an animation where he sorta kicks out his rear leg to hit you. Behemoth won't turn around. For the dragons/wyrms, their head is their main form of attack and it moves around to attack people in front. If you are behind the dragon and pull aggro, he will do an animation involving his/her tail and attack that way. The dragon itself won't move to attack people about 45 degrees to the left and right of the front, it will just move its head. Same goes for the tail for the back.
As you already know HNMs have weapon skill moves just like every other mob, what you might not know is some of these weaponskills are bound to a particular attack mode. If you are behind a dragon, you cannot be hit with absolute terror or the dragons breath attack, those are bound to the frontal attack mode. Tail Flail is one of these weaponskills and is bound to the tail attack mode of dragon type HNMs. If you are behind the dragon while the dragon has TP and decides to do a weaponskill and have hate, you will cause a flail. King Behemoth is supposed to have a tail flail like ability called "Kick Out" but I have never seen it personally. "Spike Flail" is a terrible ability. Does roughly 2000 damage to everyone anywhere near the mob. The only way to survive is to have 3 ninja blinks up at the time of the flail or evade it. The way you prevent a flail is to have no one behind the mob.
We risk Sneak Attacks's in Tiamat fights only due to the amount of hate our tank party holds and despite that, we have had people attacked with the tail and on a few times caused a flail. It is a risk we chose to take. We've reduced this risk recently by having our drks do their spinning slash at the start of skillchains or from the front. The sams don't do quite enough damage to cause hate to shift usually.
When you hear us all screaming "Off the Tail! OFF THE TAIL!", we are trying to get everyone who *might* have hate or pull hate soon to get away. A common scenario is: A blm or whm pulls hate. The dragon turns towards the whm or blm and walks over to him. The tanks provoke the dragon and it turns back towards the tanks, the mage casts "cure III" for the hit they just took but are now behind the dragon. *FLAIL*
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Keleios
"Drinkin' his Hate-Juice™ since 2003, Black Mage represent!"
75blm(@1,154,000)/75rdm/47nin/37whm/31smn/25war/15thf/12brd/8mnk/7drk
