Dungeon Alert

How The System Works
As you or your group members enter combat with (or "aggro") enemies, you gradually increase the “alertness” of the region or dungeon you are in with the number of monsters you enter combat with increases. Your enemies become harder to escape from, and bosses grow challenging having had the time to be alerted to your presence. The Dungeon Alert system is forgiving initially, but gets progressively harder as your party reaches certain thresholds of alert. Dungeon Alert is best bypassed by sneaking past monsters, and by keeping the number of monsters in combat under the alert threshold, which will vary depending on the dungeon. It was intended to reduce occurrences of players dragging large numbers of monsters around without dealing with the encounter in some form.

Alert Levels
With each alert level, an icon will appear to warn you that your enemies are becoming more and more aware of your presence:

At the Green Skull alert level, you will note the inhabitants of dungeons becoming more aggressive in their pursuit of you. Bosses of the regions will also fight more fiercely, having had advanced notice of your coming. At the Yellow Skull alert level, monsters will cause you to be Harried on contact (even if their attack roll fails).

Should you be unfortunate enough to reach the Red Skull alert, pray to your gods, for the enemies in that region are out for your blood and the mere sight of you will work them into a frothing rabble determined to eliminate you at all costs!

Boss Alert
Boss monsters in particular gain huge buff from this Dungeon Alert system. You can see "Boss Alert I" and so on description by examining them. Most noticeable effect of Boss Alert is buff to their AC. Melee players will have huge trouble hitting them with Orange and Red Alert. Carrying Destruction and Improved Destruction and other AC debuff for such case is recommended.

How to Prevent or Remove Alert
To help prevent a player from getting in a situation where they've inadvertently made their dungeon too tough, certain actions can reduce and mitigate the alert level. These actions can happen on the fly, and help a player to effectively manage how much awareness their foes have at any point during their adventure. Such beneficial actions include:
 * Destroying enemies: by killing, banishing, or otherwise slaying foes, you reduce their ability to alert their friends to fight you!
 * Charming enemies: You're one of their fold now! Charmed enemies don't try to give away your presence.
 * sneaking by enemies: It's hard to make a fuss about that which isn't seen. If you successfully slip by enemies using your stealth and are not caught, you're in the clear, having not alerted every mob and his brother to your existence. An additional benefit to our stealthy types is monsters will no longer have ESP, forever searching for you. If you're careful not to be discovered, your enemies will eventually give up looking for you! After all, it must have just been a mouse.
 * The passage of time: Time heals all wounds. Monsters in a dungeon will eventually calm down after a while even if you agitated their entire hive. If you've not been seen or heard from for a while, the bad guys gradually presume you were dispatched and their angst decreases.

Players can use any combination of these techniques to manage how aware their enemies are to their presence. It is even possible to take some monsters in tow in the heat of the moment? but if you start to amass a small army's worth of trouble, the danger also amasses!

Lag Speculation
There was speculation as to the instances of players dragging around large numbers of enemies, causing the servers to process pathing and combat information for each of these mobs, causing inherent dungeon and server lag, so this solution was introduced to inhibit a player from playing the game in such a way.

Alert Level and Tumble
Even though you may get slowed by the Harried effect you may still get out of a sticky situation by tumbling if it is high enough.

Green Skull - does not effect Tumble.

Yellow Skull - When Harried you get a -20 modifier to your Tumble Skill.

Orange Skull - When Harried you get a -40 modifier to your Tumble Skill.

Red Skull- When Harried you get a -50 modifier to your Tumble Skill, and they can stack up to two times making a total -100 Mod.