Guild Wars 2

I was doing some events in Sparkfly Fen, and I realized a problem that a lot of events can have. Some enemies require intelligence and NPCs are stupid.

Specifically, I was defending Hylek villages from Risen, and they were sending in Plague Carriers. Plague Carriers are good enemies to fight humans, because if they hit you, they’ll flatten you, but if you’re paying attention, you can avoid them completely. They are terrible enemies to send against NPC assistants though, since NPCs never bother to escape their blast radius. What ends up happening is that even if you’re doing well, the NPCs tend to get flattened on a fairly consistent basis, because they just can’t take he kamikaze burst effect (this same problem occurs with Range pets and Necro minions, btw).

Assuming it would be too difficult to program NPC assistants to dodgeroll when targeted with an AoE, my recommendation is that you could give massive damage “run away or this will kill you” type attacks a unique tag, a “run away” tag in the properties of the move. This tag would be meaningless and invisible to human players, but what it would mean is that NPC characters, AI controlled help, would be mostly immune to these types of attacks, dealing only standard attack damage, rather than the 50%+ damage that they normally deal.

This way, if a Carrier runs up to you and a pack of Hylek, and starts his suicide timer, the human player would have to avoid it or take a ton of damage, like normal, but the NPC support characters would only take a reasonable amount of damage, consistent with other attacks being thrown around.

As someone who came here and didn’t want to post, I can tell you that the lack of replies are mostly because… what are we meant to say? You want to improve AI, and mentioned a method how. OK.. I guess we’ll see what ANet does.

I would just like to see the NPC’s with armor, health, and actually have some skills. They are absolutely worthless at best right now.
While the enemies have skills, and better AI, the NPC’s just run up and start swinging even if they are a non-combat type ‘citizen’ or whatever and that is just ridiculous.

If they are a lionguard or other faction defender they should have armor, health, weapons, skills, etc. while at the same time they should be able to attack at a trained defender type of speed instead of the NPC 2.5-3 second rate.

Event NPC’s have skills (may never use them though) but still get flattened VERY quickly for no reason. But a town with lionguard defending it can be taken over by a couple of enemies with aoe on 30 second CD and that makes me feel that the Humans should not exist in the game because of their complete ineptitude in combat.

I play in Wayfarer Foothills alot – Norn starting zone and there’s a town there that gets ‘invaded’ on a regular basis. Technically it is heavily defended and fortified but it will fall to the very first wave every single time if there isn’t 1(ONE) single player there.
Enemies scale to player density but NPC’s don’t and that isn’t right. This town should be able to defend itself unless there are more players there but since the NPC’s don’t have skills AT ALL they will fall to the first pair of elementals that enter the town (one at each entrance). A single wandering elemental will take out the two defenders at each entrance on a regular basis with or without the event going. 2 on 1 and they can’t win? The lionguard need better training clearly.

Anyway, I agree. NPC’s need better AI, comparable stats to the enemies in the area, and skills. I as many others would agree, sometimes like to watch NPC’s fight it out – whether it is two animal types attacking each other or npc’s and enemies fighting.

This reminded me of the zone were Son’s of Svanir are constantly attacking this area and NPC’s are fighting very well against them. This should be duplicated all over the place. – Snowhawk Landing – down below the waypoint the lionguard are constantly fighting there. Attack speed for all parties is quite slow and pathetic but it’s entertaining.

I would just like to see the NPC’s with armor, health, and actually have some skills. They are absolutely worthless at best right now.

Sometimes yeah, sometimes not though. Most have really weak attacks, like they can wail on an enemy for five minutes and not get anywhere, but most have relatively decent defense against standard attacks, so they make excellent meat shields if you let them acquire some agro before taking on the fight. If I’m taking on an event with NPCs around, I’d much rather have them alive than dead, especially on my squishier characters. The problem is that with these "one-hit-KO type mobs, they tend to get annihilated way too quickly, while against ordinary mobs you can keep them alive if you can draw agro off of them and/or use area heals.

But yeah I agree with you that NPC towns should typically not fall to the enemy when players aren’t around, but I think they do that on purpose because when players are around most places never fall completely, so times when players are absent are the only times you’d ever get to see the “retake the town” event. Besides, most places are much easier to retake than they are to hold, requiring you to only kill a dozen or so scattered mobs, instead of several waves of a dozen mobs at a time. The only location I’d ever had trouble retaking from the enemy is the Zinti temple area in Sparkfly, which requires that you take over about a half-dozen different locations in the town, dozens upon dozens of mobs in total, taking a decent sized group about ten to fifteen minutes minimum, and yet the reward is no more than any of the standard events in the area. Totally not worth it on a personal level (but of course having the area open makes it much more useful to the players).