I’m going to open with a statement of pure fact. It’s harsh, but I think adequately reflects the current state of a particular game system:
Your teammate/pet AI is utterly terrible.
I’m not trying to be derogatory, I’m sure that programming good AI companion is far more difficult than I could ever possibly conceive of – if it’s even possible at all before the singularity hits and we have AIs smarter than we are. Instead of looking at this as a bash on the game devs, I’d rather look at it as a simple limitation of game mechanics: Your AI sucks and is going to suck. Just accept it and balance the game without the assumption that you will get help from the AI.
Far and away, the best example I can submit of why the AI sucks is the Risen Abomination. This mob class is immune to CC and has a charge attack that stacks Frenzy whenever it lands on something. Watching a Risen Abomination – especially the champion variety – stack Frenzy on a pack of your AI teammates and/or your pet while you stare, helpless to do anything and knowing full well he’s coming after you once he’s gotten some obscene damage and attack speed multiplier, is frustrating as absolute hell.
Face it, Guild Wars is a game that tries to combine action-y elements into an MMO format. Combat movement, damage avoidance, dodge rolling at opportune times – all of these are not just optional mechanics, they’re flat out required to play GW2 well and, depressingly, AI teammates do none of these things.
The solution, in my mind, is rather simple to put down in words, albeit far more complicated in detail. Stop balancing the game around the assumption that the AI helps out. Stop spawning hordes of mobs on us and our AI buddies assuming the AI is going to pick up some of the slack. Stop pinging mob mechanics like Frenzy stacks off AI characters. Stop punishing me for your inability to program a good AI teammate, no matter how reasonable your failure to do so is.
I don’t mind having the squadmates there. They add to the flavor, to the immersion. Unfortunately, that flavor and immersion is ruined when your success is balanced around their aptitude and they seem incapable of getting their pants off their heads from dressing themselves in the morning. Even though I’m sure sphincter clenching and teeth gnashing over the idiocy of your squadmates adds a certain level of realism to the combat of Guild Wars, I think that’s one bit of realism that I can do without.
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A related topic is Ranger pets. As a ranger, I feel as if I should enjoy having my faithful pet at my side. And yet, most of the time I feel more like stringing it up and having a barbeque would be a more effective use of it.
My pet also doesn’t respond to mechanics (the F3 recall is far too unresponsive to avoid a lot of mob mechanics in a game where I have a half second or less to dodge-roll them if I want to avoid them myself). Further, if I leave it on Guard it often decides to run off God knows where, pulling who knows how many mobs in the process, and thus I am forced to keep it perpetually on Avoid Combat and send it in with F1 every time I target switch.
I’d love to use a devourer pet (they’re ranged and have awesome durability), but I cannot. Why? Because if anything looks at it wrong, it goes scuttling underground 20 yards back regardless of where it’s standing or what’s behind it and I have absolutely 0 control over when and where it uses this ability other than to tank every mob myself (unfeasible, given pets’ innate threat generation).
And best of all, it utterly baffles me when this happens, but occasionally my pets will decide that they feel like standing about 30 yards in front of my current position. Why? Apparently I didn’t shower in the morning or something – I have no clue. But they’ll sure stand out there. They’ll continue standing out there even when I switch my pets back and forth (now on a complimentary 20 second cooldown even out of combat – thank you so much for that, by the way). They’ll stand out there until I at least enter combat again, which is definitely going to happen given that I now have a aggro beacon preceding my every motion by 30 yards.
I don’t want to feel like my pet is a ball and chain that I begrudgingly have to deal with to play my class. If I wanted to feel responsible for dragging a drooling moron through game content against his will, I’d go pug a dungeon or play some WvW. Please don’t make me hate my own pets’ existences. Just give them some AE resistance (or make F3 a dodge button rather than a recall or something), make it stand right beside me when not in combat, give me control over abilities that are obviously going to function terribly if left up to their AI (devourer retreat thing) and maybe add in a pet AI scheme that just consists of attacking my current target and doing pretty much nothing else.