Guild Wars 2

As the topic said, Minions’ AI suffers issues again.

I noticed different situations:

• 1)They sometime get bugged when the “search and attack task” starts: when the Necromancer starts attacking a target and his minions are out of range, they suddenly stuck refusing to do whatever action. This keeps going on even if the target gets close enough to them, they keep standing whithout doing anything.
  The only way to make them activate again is to stop autoattacking, wait for them to restart the action and move near the master, then they can start attaking if the target is near enough. Note that if the Necromancer restart attacking with minions out of the target range, they will stuck again.
  This happened often in PVP and with Forest of Niflhel portals.
  I couldn’t replicate this situation, but I noticed this scheme every time it happened.

• 2)They are more or less reactive on the base of their distance from the master and the distance from the master’s target. They seem to have an “area of action”, if the target is in that area they are more influenced on attacking that target instead of another out of that area. They give more precedence to attack orders if the target is in their “area of action”.
  This means that if the target A kites away bringing them far from the Necro, the bug will occur if the Necromancer orders to attack another target B out of their “area of action”. Check point 3.

• 3)It seems to be influenced by the “combat” factor. In the situation described in the last point they won’t react to new orders from the master until their target is dead or out of combat.

PS: It does seem to react differently between NPCs, Dummy Golems in Heart of the Mists, real players and structure objects.
Maybe the tracking of a NPC is easier than a player and this kittens-away the AI?

I normally don’t use minions unless I go to a low level area. I did end up using them once in the latest patch though… The minions ran around in circles and did nothing. Also, I always have those annoying Jagged Horrors popping up.

Additionally, my jagged horrors get hit by AoE’s and will run off to attack whatever hit them – without me giving any sort of command for them to do so and without me getting hit by anything myself. I am tired of being put into battle by stupid minion AI from jagged horrors running off to kill things that I didn’t even aggro.

I was thinking it was just me but whenever I have minions out lately it seems that stand there and wait for longer periods of time again before doing anything.

sighs.

UP, this problem is kittening boring.
50% fights my minions stand and look at the fight without doing anything at all.

How much time is this thing going on? 1 month since Minion’s AI become more kitteny than usual and nobody does a thing?

Are you controlling the meta leaving things bugged to prevent people from playing it?

18 months and your programmers didn’t develope a decent AI script nor a solution for this problem?

I would say that this is just par for the course, except it wasn’t that long ago that minion AI was pretty reliable. Yeah, it would get stuck in strange elevation change situations like Skyhammer or with people on rocks, but that’s kind of expected. Everywhere else, it was running pretty smoothly.

Now it isn’t running as smoothly. I haven’t been running minions except for the occasional flesh golem or bone minions (suicide runs on the assault knights), but they’ve become kind of unresponsive even when I summon them in melee range of my target.

Perhaps they broke it while trying to address ranger pet problems. Have to admit that AI has been messed up since the game began. Unlike some, I don’t want to do some special series of moves to get my minions to attack. I feel that if I target a player and hit any button for any aggressive type of attack skill, minions should attack my target. I have no why this is so freaking hard for the devs. If I attack a target with a skill in pve the target becomes aggressive and attacks me. Why are minions any diff but in reverse. These devs are lazy

While Mesmer’s AI works nicely. It goes berserk, charges and follows you into hell.

I told it, in the attack script process something got damaged.
I may be wrong, but as far as I know it’s a process of checking logic conditions and variabiles.

If Minions get stuck when you order the attack and they stand still until you don’t get out of combat to let them reach the correct range… there’s something wrong.
Not just this, i observed different situations in which even if they were in range they wouldn’t attack (Niflhel base doors).
Probably in that sequence of actions, there are different reactions based on the pathing or the type of target, and certain conditions lead to that reaction (standing still).

They probably don’t want to fix it because checking a so much long script would be time expensive.

We’re not asking for the moon and the stars here. Just copy the behavior of the mesmer clones and be done with it.

Will.4298:

We’re not asking for the moon and the stars here. Just copy the behavior of the mesmer clones and be done with it.

So, you want minions to die whenever you kill their target?

Mesmer illusions cannot have the same AI as other entities due to the fact they are locked on to a single target. If that target dies, they die.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Will.4298:

We’re not asking for the moon and the stars here. Just copy the behavior of the mesmer clones and be done with it.

So, you want minions to die whenever you kill their target?

Mesmer illusions cannot have the same AI as other entities due to the fact they are locked on to a single target. If that target dies, they die.

This.

In that respect, the fact that player-controlled pets share AI coding with PvE mobs is a little disconcerting. If only because it’s ridiculously easy to manipulate that very same AI to favor the one attacking the pets.

I’ll admit I understand how that decision came about—give the player general control over a PvE mob. Easy, right? It’s still a bad decision and needs to be completely overhauled.

However, until the Devs learn how to admit their mistakes and change their initial designs, I doubt we’ll see much of a difference.

This is a pretty big problem in PvP, and is especially noticeable in any situation there. Most players will kite minions away, and this immediately will lead to them bugging out until the fight is basically over. This bug will persist through:
1.using a minion “command” ability on an enemy player (IE: if the flesh golem charges a warrior, it won’t attack him after the charge)
2. re-targeting a player
3. using ground targeted aoes

I’ve actually stopped using my minion master and swapped to turret engineer until this gets patched.

The issue is they lose aggro if you move around too much. If you sit on one point all game, they’re perfect, if you go from home point to far point, all of a sudden they’ve take great interest in flower picking.

If you get auto target of the Minion Master, I want a 25% speed increase of all my Minions and me while out of combat and an automatical port of Minions when I jump down/up somewhere to my place.
I also want my Minions to get an AI that target’s my target, however far it may be away and run to that target and attack it as soon as it is withing 1500 range. If the target runs away and my minions are further away than 1500 range from me, they should run back to me at top speed.
And while we are at it, how about returning my Minions after Moa has ended? And how about resetting cd of my Minions if I got stomped, but they were still alife when I respawn. Or does your Elite get’s set on CD when you die without using it?

Surely there is more stuff.
AoE immunity and no event scaling in PvE etc.

19 months and Minions’ AI is still “meh”. They cannot find a permamanent solution.
19 Months and they cannot manage to refine and fix the design of classes.
They put out a game with 8 classes and they can’t afford to stay after it.
It was better, let’s say having 3 classes with more focus.

Unfortunately AI is tied up to some other system (it isn’kittens own set of code, it is inherited from a separate set, meaning any AI changes can screw up a lot), so they screw it up a lot. As it is now the AI is “okay”, but has issues due to, surprise (not), pathing. They lose aggro very easily when they have to travel a lot.