Guild Wars 2

I was just playing through the “Retribution” instance of the personal story, and one thing that struck me as particularly immersion breaking was how bad the NPC AI in this game is. During the big battle inside the courtyard. You’re supposed to be in the middle of an epic war, fighting for your lives and everything you hold dear right? …

But what I saw was NPCs just standing around doing jack-all most of the time. I noticed that once whatever enemy a particular NPC happens to be fighting dies, they don’t seek new targets and continue to just stand still in the same spot. It’s rather jarring, to say the least.

Those guys who followed me around to cap the points were just as bad, cause half the time they just stood there doing absolutely nothing while i was wailing on the zombies by myself; only occasionally did they attack half heartedly.

It was even worse during the fight with the plaguebringer dragon, most of order npcs just either lay on the ground dead, or stood around doing virtually nothing. One npc stood next to me, ran up and fired and few shots, then ran back to me and just stood there for the rest of the fight. It was so silly. And of course, the dragon itself just stood there.. doing little short of soaking up my rifle shots.. he hardly did any damage to bother kiting. If anet was trying to make something epic they pretty much failed here… even the Nightfall finale was better, even Abaddon put up a better fight than the weak GW2 bosses that do paltry damage… I got promptly disconnected in the middle of that fight, so I dont know what happens after that. but anyway… it was generally all very disappointing.

TLDR: NPCs dont seek targets, they hardly attack, they just stand around once theres nothing within their aggro range. they are dumbkitten bots with AI worse than master togo…

NPCs do have really bad AI..Multiple times in my story quest, they started to revive me then ran off to go to the next phase, no priority what so ever

this game is realy bad once you get past lvl 40 imo.

I just played this mission again and noticed the exact same thing. During the final battle most of the npcs just stood on the field not attacking. Are those guys bugged or something?

They are obviously paralyzed with fear.

Erm, no, they need to get that fixed.

I just recently did that quest and yes, sadly I found it very lackluster.

Suggestions to improve the overall quality and epicness of quests like that:

- Make friendly NPCs actually hit for something and have a bigger aggro radius. Make their fight and how you help them actually matter. To compensate, increase the number of monsters and respawns (not the respawn rate tho)

- Dragons, so far this was my first dragon fight, but I found it surprisingly familiar to the swamp meta event monster from Queensdale. Both monsters have almost the same mechanic: they don’t move and they have a phase of random AoEs. Make them move, make them stomp people, make the dragon fly around, attack from different positions… And make those somewhat random, so people will need to react fast to unkown situations.

I will try to make a more thoughtful post about this matter later.

Yeah, I always wanted to see someone get stomped on by a dragon or batted to death by its tail. All of the dragons I’ve seen have been the same, none of them move from their spawn area and are pretty much just massive slow-moving meatshields. I’ve had better fights from some of the DE champions, esp the ones with 400% faster run speed and 1 hit KOs. Now taking those down actually feel like an accomplishment cause you have to kite like hell.