Guild Wars 2

Just a simple suggestion really, which I imagine would be very difficult in practice

Anyway, I am almost certain that NPCs and mobs have signed a universal ‘turn based combat treaty’, where essentially, each person exchanges hits in the politest manner possible. This happens until one person (usually an allied NPC) dies. Occasionally the monster will throw out a ‘death cloud of doom’ (either poison, fire, weird darkness thing). That tends to be the most exciting that NPC combat gets.

More interesting NPC skill sets
I just wish that named/important NPCs were a bit more dynamic in combat? This becomes apparent in the personal story, where your allies are basically a bunch of little kids punching, scratching and using pea shooters on mobs. I don’t expect unnamed/generic characters to have extensive skill sets, but it’d be nice to see people like Magister Sieran going beyond vapour blade, mixing it up with dodge rolls etc. Self heals would be good! I would love to see an allied NPC heal themself with a proper healing skill- I think the Lionguard do? Or even give them unique skills! I think this just makes combat seem more interesting.

Ability to avoid DoT AoE
Also, it would be really nice to see a similar thing to GW1 where mobs/NPCs were capable of moving out of dot aoe spells. It would be very nice to see allied NPCs that could actually free themselves from impending doom, by sidestepping an inch. Event failure, often tends to be scaled up mobs casting their death clouds of doom in a focused spot, normally where allied NPCs are standing. This results in their death. It results in really contrived gameplay, where people actually have to stand on spawn spots to make sure death cloud mobs are killed before they do anything. It would just be really nice if these allied NPCs were more than deadweight (literally).

Improved ability to resurrect
At the same time, could you potentially give all guards/generic NPCs an ability to rez characters within a certain range? Sometimes I’ve died next to a guard and they’ve pretty much just stood on my corpse. Other times, I have been really impressed that an NPC managed to rez me from death. Moments like this really make the game quite immersive.

Summary
-Give important NPCs a useful skillset and an ability to use them
-Allow allied NPCs to recognise they are standing in something which will kill them, and have them move accordingly.
-Improve NPC ability to resurrect people.
-I didn’t mention this above but maybe give resurrected NPCs a health boost in personal stories or something. Normally, all important allied NPCs are dead, but there’s no point in bringing them back up because they’d just get one shotted by a cliff bat or something.

Otherwise, I do enjoy the game
Thank you very much for your awesomeness.

I completely agree in regards to allied npcs, especially ones like the destinies edge characters and faction based allies, for a Warmaster, Forgal Kernsson doesn’t fight too impressively. The utterly impressive Gw1 Ai is sorely missed, and to be forgotten eventually.

But it goes hand in hand with enemy Ai/combat, you can’t improve allies without improving enemies.

Enemy combat in general is quite lacking as it doesn’t put much pressure on the player, with the slow rate of attack. If enemies attacked at the same rate as players, at least with auto attack not their other skills, combat would be a lot more engaging, though I think it is a bit late for this all to be implemented into the game, it would be like remaking the game. It could be used in newer content though, the gauntlet showed they are willing to trade big health enemies for strategic, pressure filled fights that are down to the wire, loved it.

I agree with the enemy combat. Perhaps it could be ‘improved’ in higher level areas, where mobs attack slightly faster and have more interesting skills, but without stupidly overpowered attacks. Ideally everything would be universally improved, but yes, I think it’s a bit late for that now.

However, I think mob density is high enough to balance out any improvements made to allied NPCs anyway. Ideally I would have liked both to have been more interesting… but yeah