Guild Wars 2

This revolves around AoE skills that players are using against mobs. Currently there are two ways that mobs handle this. Most mobs are stupid mobs that stand in them and just eat the full damage. Some mobs (in the newer maps) are the exact opposite and will walk/jump out of your AoEs, making it very frustrating for classes that have lots of AoE skills.

I think that a better way to address this is to give each mob a % chance to walk out of an AoE field. While in combat, this chance could increase steadily but slowly to a set maximum (probably around 80% for open world mobs, and 100% for “bosses” like fractals bosses, or elites/champions) and would increase more rapidly whenever they take damage from an AoE field.

Everytime the mob dodges out of your AoE field, their chance to dodge out of AoE fields drops dramatically, to a set minimum for each mob (probably 1/4 – 1/2 of their max chance, so 20-40% for most open world mobs).

This would make fighting mobs more engaging because their behavior would be more erratic and harder to predict. You may get unlucky and have them walk out of every single AoE you place down, or have them walk out of none of them. The specific mininum/maximum chance to walk out, as well as the rate as which that chance increases/decreases could be tweaked for each mob, giving mobs in harder zones a higher chance overall to walk out of AoEs, and mobs in easier maps (like starting maps) practically zero chance of walking out of AoEs.

Piggybacking off the idea, if enemies are going to have moves/dodges at their disposal, they need to have an appropriate cooldown time. Looking at you, shadowleapers…

It’d be a healthy idea to have enemies that are more active in movement. But, that would require enemies to be well designed at all stages. I’m skeptical that ANet cares much in that regard.

But, let’s imagine monsters redesigned a bit.

I believe there to be a system/engine limitation that causes most mobs to ‘stand and fight’, rather than the fluid combat players get. So being highly (or even mostly) mobile could be something beyond dev control.

If plausible, I really like the idea of giving enemies stamina charges. For an enemy that’s intended to be evasive, give them more than one charge (ie, you can run a shadowleaper out of its ranged dodge as a form of counter play), and most enemies will only use it to avoid AoEs once per 10 seconds or so. Stretch that out longer if they’re under Weakness (again, counter play).

The idea of dodging mobs still has a challenge in determining where they dodge. An enemy that moves too much could reach its tether and force a fight to restart. It’s rare, but I’ve had it happen in GW2 already, and that really sucks when it’s a boss that does it.

That’s another good idea, I’m tired of those kitten frogs leaping out of every single AoE I put down, it does nothing but drag the fight on. Giving them stamina charges that they would have to consume to do something like that would probably be a great deal easier to implement and test than my idea, but it would accomplish more or less the same goal of not letting some mobs dodge all AoEs while others don’t even try

Hmmm, I found something interesting in the reddit thread.

Anet did hire a new ai consultant for hot expansion

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4aby1n/ai_used_in_hot_and_its_potential_future_use/

http://intrinsicalgorithm.com/IAonAI/2016/03/on-everquest-next-and-ai-driven-mmos/

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021848/Building-a-Better-Centaur-AI