Hello my fellow DDO-er's...

I love this game.

So here I am happily making a new toon. He will be a human fighter 2 paladin 18, with all the intimidate feats and shield feats. The goal of the build is to tank a big purple named boss and be the center of the healing, keeping aggro on self, using Defender of Siberys III enhancements, allowing the rogues to get sneak damage, etc.

A friendly guy tells me those feats are a waste (he was referring to Skill Focus Intimidate and Bullheaded) ... the marginal extra intimidate skill they give you is not as important to holding aggro as the 200% hate times your damage, and you would be better to apply those feats (and possibly change the build) to more DPS. He did not say Intimidate was a total waste , just that it was not worth investing all the Intim feats in. Intelligent and nice guy (ty to Skale on Thelanis btw).

I have DPS builds ... I want to do something different. But I realized that what this guy was saying might very well be true ... that if hate is 200% of a (relatively-speaking) small number, it won't take aggro away from the barbarians and/or rogues and the build will be a failure (a failure against my goal).

So why am I posting? Because I want to know the truth (here it comes ... "You can't handle the truth!" ... please pretend that I can :-) ). And I would like to know it from an authoritative source. I request a Turbine Developer tell me how aggro is figured with respect to high Intimidate skill relative to ongoing DPS. If these feats (Bullheaded and Skill Focus Intimidate) don't really do what the average joe assumes they do (pull aggro to you) then I want to know that before I invest a lot of time in this build.

I welcome feedback from the player community as well of course. I am familiar with different builds, like the Hurt Locker that kind of ride both sides of the fence (the sides being: intimidate versus ongoing DPS x hate multiplier) ... I am not really looking for someone to suggest a build. I am looking for someone with knowledge to explain to me how aggro works so I can make intelligent decisions on this. Once the aggro model is understood the builds can be constructed around this data / model, and I can freely tradeoff DPS versus Intimidate with the build / items / enhancements / etc.

If there are threads that provide the answer (and I suspect there are) ... please provide me the link(s) and thank you very much :-).

Sideline ... useful information for me also includes:
*how much intimidate will pull mob X's aggro in dungeon or raid Y on difficulty Z.