Guild Wars 2

This suggestion is simple, yet it would radically change the game experience.

Basically, it’s standard of all games (even GW2) that all mobs of the same type have the same skills and behaviors.
For instance, this is an example of mob:
Name: Wolf
Behavior: Aggressive
Skills: Howl, Flurry
This is an obsolete mechanic tho, like fetch quests and other things you’ve done away with.

My idea is to give all mobs a random chance to have different skills and behaviors.
Example:
Name: Wolf
Behavior: 60% chance Aggressive, 20% chance Kiter, 20% chance Dodger.
Skills: Howl, Flurry
Extra skills: 20% chance bleeding, 20% chance daze, 20% chance camoflage, 20% chance berserk, 20% chance regeneration.

Coding-wise it’s very simple, as for animations you can use the ones the mob already has (wolf can use howl to regen/zerk, normal attack for daze/bleed).

This way every time we fight a mob, even the same mob, it’s a different battle.

GW2 is so revolutionary in many aspects, why not being revolutionary even in normal mob fights?

if you think they got rid of fetch quests you have a veil over your eyes. all they did was dress the old questing method in a slightly more acceptable manner. Also that wouldn’t be easy to code, at least in a way that didnt tax the system too heavily. having the servers compute the behavior of every mob as they spawn as thousands of mobs are dying/respawning at any given moment would strain the servers tremendously

While adding an RNG element to enemy stats can be easily done in Fire Emblem on a Nintendo Gameboy Advance, in a large scale MMO, it’s not exactly the same. SciChronic has the point down exactly: While possible, it would be incredibly heavy on the servers. It’s just not a good idea to sacrifice performance that much across the entire game.

Very good suggestion.

+1

Sci/Nels: I have decent coding knowledge and I can tell you for a fact this would not sacrifice performance in the least.
The loot calc on a bunch of mob from a group DE is probably taking more performance than a random calc on all mobs in the game.

Thank you solanu for the support

Red Falcon Punch!

I would like to see smarter PvE enemies. I agree that making all enemies smarter would be demanding from a server resource point of view, but bosses/champions/veterans would benefit from this mechanic. After all, they became bosses/champions/veterans for a reason, didn’t they?

It would also help people learn how to prepare for PvP having some enemies that fought a little more like players.

At a minimum, PvE enemies should stun break and move out of the area of AEs (at least sometimes) if they are humanoid (ie: intelligent). Animal enemies should start the fight with a ferocity buff and have a chance to flee when they detect things aren’t going their way.

I dont know if anything in a game like these is easy to code. I cant even imagine how complex some of there stuff probably is.

It might be “easy to code”, but it would be time-consuming to code. They have a team on AI, I am sure, and they worked just as hard as the other teams, I’m sure. you would be asking them to basically make several separate AI for each foe, then put a random generator to pick between them. But realize that most foes in the game are scripted as it is. An army spawns in waves as an event demands.

I would also then argue that even this proposal isn’t realistic. While there are some differences from individual to individual, there is a reason why hunters use the same tactics successfully for every animal: they play off of Fixed-Action-Responses (or instincts) of animals. Believe it or not, sentient life reacts surprisingly similiar. So, any changes in AI thread you would make would have to be minute and subject to override. That would make it even more complicated and difficult.

Overall, it wouldn’t necessarily be impossible to pull off if they wanted to do this from Day 1 of game development, but you are asking them to revamp the foundation of a game they are polishing. It is just asking too much for too little.

Thanks for the replies.
I really hope to see this at some point, waiting on Anet’s opinion on this

Good idea, but I worry that mob behaviour distribution might break the difficulty of some quests. Personal quests have their problems as it is, mobs in heart quests venturing too far off or ganking en mass to make certain area unquestable.

I’m somewhat of a programmer and while I’ve never done anything MMO related, I can’t imagine this being unrealistic and too hard to code. Realistically, they already have different AI behaviours in the game and if you look at the GW1 Beyond stuff, there already is random behaviors or the equivalent (different bars for the same mobs) implemented there. All it would really be is modularising the behaviour and assigning each foe one of them when they are created. Who knows, maybe their behavior is already modularised. It’s a rediculously tiny calculation compared to things like path finding. I know I may be trivialising a few things but it really isn’t outside the realms of a reasonable possibility.
In any case, I really don’t think it’s an unreasonable idea, whether or not ArenaNet implement it, however, is entirely up to them and it’s their game, I’ll like the game with or without this feature.

Thanks Silver for your explanations.

Red Falcon.8257:

This suggestion is simple, yet it would radically change the game experience.

Basically, it’s standard of all games (even GW2) that all mobs of the same type have the same skills and behaviors.
For instance, this is an example of mob:
Name: Wolf
Behavior: Aggressive
Skills: Howl, Flurry
This is an obsolete mechanic tho, like fetch quests and other things you’ve done away with.

My idea is to give all mobs a random chance to have different skills and behaviors.
Example:
Name: Wolf
Behavior: 60% chance Aggressive, 20% chance Kiter, 20% chance Dodger.
Skills: Howl, Flurry
Extra skills: 20% chance bleeding, 20% chance daze, 20% chance camoflage, 20% chance berserk, 20% chance regeneration.

Coding-wise it’s very simple, as for animations you can use the ones the mob already has (wolf can use howl to regen/zerk, normal attack for daze/bleed).

This way every time we fight a mob, even the same mob, it’s a different battle.

GW2 is so revolutionary in many aspects, why not being revolutionary even in normal mob fights?

I support this for one reason:

I’m sick of being pulled 20 meters toward a mob that I have no interest in fighting when I’m just trying to get to an ore node, only to stand up and get pulled again.

Running through southern Cursed Shore = LOL BIND, LOL PULL, LOL BIND, LOL KNOCKDOWN, LOL PULL, LOL BIND

MFW: -.-’