Guild wars 2 combat & where is my AI at.

Guild wars 2 combat & where is my AI at.

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

I created this thread because I wanted to discuss the state of the combat in guild wars 2,
it’s actual flaws, primarily in pve, from a player side (meaning that we’ll look at classes, skills and traits instead of the encounter provided in game).
The title imply that I’ll mostly be talking about meta builds (so a lot of melee zerk), but I also intend to base my analysis on a spike environment instead of the present constant dps one.

GW2 combat there we go:
In pve most of the “optimal build” for most classes expose several flaws in the combat system:
-Auto attacks driven gameplay.
-non impactfull skillset.
-access to boons and conditions.
-the condition removal mechanics.
There we have a pretty high level view of the problems highlighted by the actual state of pve and, face one of the biggest problem a lot of builds in gw2 aren’t enjoyable more precisely, they provide the kind of fun you get from finishing a rubik’s cube while knowing the algorithm(this cannot simply be solved by changing the way character are played ,it also involves a really engaging set of rules).

Now let’s get more specific, in the following post I’ll look at the classes’ skillsets and traits(primarly war,guard,ranger and thieves, then engineers and mesmers hope some people will join the game when it’ll be time for the necromancers and elementatilst since, I am not familiar with playing these classes.).

Easiest first, meet: the warriooooooooor (YEAH!!).
The warrior class mechanic is a resource called adrenaline, used to unleash burst skills. It is primarily granted by attacking the enemy and using some skills. A few traits make other use of adrenaline: one granting condition removal on a burst skill hit (used a lot in pvp), and the other (grandmaster traits)ones giving a buff depending on the adrenaline level, extremely popular in pve. There we find the first problem: adrenaline have a lot of way to be build but only a few reasons to be used, worse some traits encourages the player for sitting on adrenaline.

So the first warrior problem: How to make players use adrenaline.
My solution (the “my” imply that it’s subjective): The berserker’s power and heightened focus strait should instead of being permanent effects, would give other(better) ones for a set time on a internal cooldown(not too long) each time max adrenaline (or a adrenaline layer) is reached. Also making the adrenaline decay even in combat would promote the management of the resource.

So there is my first post on the matter, feel free to react and post your own solutions/problems, I’ll soon enough post about warriors’ weapon skill and utilities.

Reflexion on warrior Banners.
The AI problem enounced by Pariah.
Example of AI design.
Stats on signet and power creep.

(edited by Teckos.1305)

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Posted by: Reverence.6915

Reverence.6915

PvE was always designed for the lowest common denominator. You will rarely get challenging PvE content since they’ll be abandoned by the majority of players (TA Aetherblades… it’s so hard to get a party for that even with cross-server LFG). The skillset is just fine for most classes. Just warriors seem to have an extremely faceroll, mash 1, autoattack on and afk type skill set. Other classes have to manage boons, cooldowns and weapon sets to maximise dps (and in the case of engi and ele, your f1-f4 abilities changing your skillset/playstyle).

There’s no real difficult end-game content in PvE because it was intended to be that way. If you want a challenge, go WvW (in a high tier server) or sPvP.

Expac sucks for WvW players. Asura master race
Beastgate | Faerie Law
Currently residing on SBI

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Posted by: Pariah.8506

Pariah.8506

The main problem in IMO the AI.

When your opponent doesn’t provide a challenge you don’t need to further your skills and become proficient.

As it is the AI in GW2 exists in a completely different dimension than the players:

  • It simply doesn’t care about AoE
  • In fact it’s oblivious to any sort of positioning, if a ranged mob gets pulled close to a stacked zerk group it will continue to attack them with its ranged attack from up close where it’ll get whacked by the zerkers full force
  • It doesn’t time its (very very few) skills to interrupt/ spike players properly, spamming them when CD is down instead
  • Its only reason it sustains itself is because of a disproportionally large HP pool
  • The former excuses it from having to sue any heal skills ever, making player CC nigh irrelevant
  • Due to its extremely limited skillset it can’t into teamplay. Unless it’s something hardwired like the Gongplaying Dredge (note that they will proceed to use their gong buffs regardless if they’re in a group or not and that they will neglect attacking in favour of using that skill once it’s off CD, even if the player is near death and could be killed quickly it will still choose to play its gong instead) mobs don’t have anything to compliment each other.

The only merit I can give it is that it holds off its attack if you use one of those “Effect on block” skills like Thief’s Spear No.3

The mobs needs to change drastically, lower their HP and give them means to defend and heal themselves instead, make them smarter, make them pose an actual threat that doesn’t blindly rush into a group of zerkers stacked in a corner.
Above all make PvE being about something more than just plain damage. How did it go again Jon?
“DPS: Call it whatever you like—DPS, damage per second—we just call it DAMAGE, and when it comes to making red bars go down, you can never have enough of it. Don’t trivialize it though” well guess what, you just did

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

Snip.

Even if i said I would focus on the player side problem, I have to admit that the artificial intelligence tied to most enemies is a pleague for the state of pve, making it more complex and decreasing the health pools would change the pve meta. But AI isn’t the only thing we can change on the game side: let’s make more enemy cleave in melee range, and reduce the cleave from some weapons: for example the warrior’s axe auto attack (vertical hits) is able to cleave on horizontal enemies, while dealing the greatest AA dps. Give boon steal to enemies, make them apply weakness, with just these few design ideas, a more engaging gameplay will be encouraged.

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

After a few days of reflection I decided to post on Warriors banners, which would be a good way to discuss the support role in gw2.

The banners are placed by the warrior to give a buff to allies on a pretty wide range(up to 900 if traited), they can also be equipped by any player.
In the current state of the game, banners are just placed and that’s all no gameplay tied to them, they proposed skill are unattractive.

There, the banner problem: A equip-able tool is better left in a corner than used in a fight.
My solution:

  1. The bonus: there this trait which is BAD and which could be replaced by another one, making the banner bonus much more potent when equipped by the warrior(or by someone). Now, there is a good reason to equip the banners.
  2. the skills: most of the banner #2 skill is a channeled buff, and the buff is pretty much a lackluster (except for the banner of tactic), first of all if the warrior is using a banner he is probably trying to support: so he will need the ability to give boons, but also the ability to sustain through non damaging conditions, and spikes.
    The boons given duration might be too short compared to other means of acquirement. There is how i would see the skills being tweaked: the auto attack is fine the #2 skill should always be a team wide boon application+ support(boon coherent with the banner type), the #3 and 4 should be a mix of spike and and control, and finally the #5 should stay a stomp(blast finisher) but have more features added to it like for example, making the ground around the banner pulse cripple and damages during a few seconds for banner of defense.

Buffing the banners in this may make them much more powerful because of they use and drop nature. Having a cooldown on equip may be a way to counter it.

Quick note one support: if a pure dps build is able to give as much if not more support to a group(through boons, condition removal, CC …) than a build “focused” on support,
well support simply wont be a part of the game.

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Posted by: cesmode.4257

cesmode.4257

I think that in open world, auto attack is all you need. You will have an army zerg behind you to back you up. Theres no thought process behind any of the fights excep teq.

Karma is as abundant as air, and as useless as the Kardashians.

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Posted by: Guanglai Kangyi.4318

Guanglai Kangyi.4318

The main problem in IMO the AI.

When your opponent doesn’t provide a challenge you don’t need to further your skills and become proficient.

As it is the AI in GW2 exists in a completely different dimension than the players:

  • It simply doesn’t care about AoE
  • In fact it’s oblivious to any sort of positioning, if a ranged mob gets pulled close to a stacked zerk group it will continue to attack them with its ranged attack from up close where it’ll get whacked by the zerkers full force
  • It doesn’t time its (very very few) skills to interrupt/ spike players properly, spamming them when CD is down instead
  • Its only reason it sustains itself is because of a disproportionally large HP pool
  • The former excuses it from having to sue any heal skills ever, making player CC nigh irrelevant
  • Due to its extremely limited skillset it can’t into teamplay. Unless it’s something hardwired like the Gongplaying Dredge (note that they will proceed to use their gong buffs regardless if they’re in a group or not and that they will neglect attacking in favour of using that skill once it’s off CD, even if the player is near death and could be killed quickly it will still choose to play its gong instead) mobs don’t have anything to compliment each other.

The only merit I can give it is that it holds off its attack if you use one of those “Effect on block” skills like Thief’s Spear No.3

The mobs needs to change drastically, lower their HP and give them means to defend and heal themselves instead, make them smarter, make them pose an actual threat that doesn’t blindly rush into a group of zerkers stacked in a corner.
Above all make PvE being about something more than just plain damage. How did it go again Jon?
“DPS: Call it whatever you like—DPS, damage per second—we just call it DAMAGE, and when it comes to making red bars go down, you can never have enough of it. Don’t trivialize it though” well guess what, you just did

They tried making mobs run out of AOE/out of melee range in one of the betas. It ended up being hilarious because anyone with a stationary pulsing AOE on short CD (elementalists, guardians, etc.) could just totally shut down any mob, including bosses, just by spamming AOEs and watching it run around trying to get out instead of attacking.

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Posted by: chemiclord.3978

chemiclord.3978

They tried making mobs run out of AOE/out of melee range in one of the betas. It ended up being hilarious because anyone with a stationary pulsing AOE on short CD (elementalists, guardians, etc.) could just totally shut down any mob, including bosses, just by spamming AOEs and watching it run around trying to get out instead of attacking.

Not to mention the endless complaining about how the AI was “too hard” and “too frustrating” and “not fun” to fight against.

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Posted by: Substance E.4852

Substance E.4852

The main problem in IMO the AI.

When your opponent doesn’t provide a challenge you don’t need to further your skills and become proficient.

As it is the AI in GW2 exists in a completely different dimension than the players:

  • It simply doesn’t care about AoE
  • In fact it’s oblivious to any sort of positioning, if a ranged mob gets pulled close to a stacked zerk group it will continue to attack them with its ranged attack from up close where it’ll get whacked by the zerkers full force
  • It doesn’t time its (very very few) skills to interrupt/ spike players properly, spamming them when CD is down instead
  • Its only reason it sustains itself is because of a disproportionally large HP pool
  • The former excuses it from having to sue any heal skills ever, making player CC nigh irrelevant
  • Due to its extremely limited skillset it can’t into teamplay. Unless it’s something hardwired like the Gongplaying Dredge (note that they will proceed to use their gong buffs regardless if they’re in a group or not and that they will neglect attacking in favour of using that skill once it’s off CD, even if the player is near death and could be killed quickly it will still choose to play its gong instead) mobs don’t have anything to compliment each other.

The only merit I can give it is that it holds off its attack if you use one of those “Effect on block” skills like Thief’s Spear No.3

The mobs needs to change drastically, lower their HP and give them means to defend and heal themselves instead, make them smarter, make them pose an actual threat that doesn’t blindly rush into a group of zerkers stacked in a corner.
Above all make PvE being about something more than just plain damage. How did it go again Jon?
“DPS: Call it whatever you like—DPS, damage per second—we just call it DAMAGE, and when it comes to making red bars go down, you can never have enough of it. Don’t trivialize it though” well guess what, you just did

They tried making mobs run out of AOE/out of melee range in one of the betas. It ended up being hilarious because anyone with a stationary pulsing AOE on short CD (elementalists, guardians, etc.) could just totally shut down any mob, including bosses, just by spamming AOEs and watching it run around trying to get out instead of attacking.

Little wonder a system from GW1 (a resource based combat system) didn’t work in a skill spam one like GW2.

Mobs avoiding AoE made GW1 harder and much less brain dead, faceroll’y and yet had the exact opposite effect here.

Connection error(s) detected. Retrying…

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Posted by: Frenk the Vile.2596

Frenk the Vile.2596

I think many players just play TP and buy on gemstore, so WHY polishing combat? All you can get by fighting in PvE is blue crap, green crap …and shiny-token-collectible-limited-time-crap. Sadly, cool things are obtained with money in this game.

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Posted by: Pariah.8506

Pariah.8506

They tried making mobs run out of AOE/out of melee range in one of the betas. It ended up being hilarious because anyone with a stationary pulsing AOE on short CD (elementalists, guardians, etc.) could just totally shut down any mob, including bosses, just by spamming AOEs and watching it run around trying to get out instead of attacking.

Make mobs able to attack on the move like us, lower their HP from the horrendous sponging it is at currently and makes them have a melee and a ranged attack.

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Posted by: Turtle Dragon.9241

Turtle Dragon.9241

Zerker or Kick
This is the biggest problem in GW2 right now. You either play Zerker or we dont want you in group. Some people even say that Zerker is the only way to play, and those who are investing in Toughness/Vitality are in need of a “crutch” to learn playing. Some even say Toughness/Vitality are completely useless. This limits “useful” builds to Zerker and Zerker only.

1. Improve Zerker DPS. Yes, practically double it. No I am not crazy, keep reading.

2. Implement more mobs with Immobilize and Weakness, but with good visual cues for those attacks. The only reason why Zerker is the very best is because of the Dodge mechanic. You can simply Dodge out of everything with infinite Vigor and faceroll your rotation mindlessly. You dont even need condition removal on your skill bar right now. Immobilize and Weakness changes all of this and will provide much more interesting gameplay.

3. Improve monster damage. Right now Zerkers dont even die if they get hit, specially Warriors and Guardians. Bosses should be 1-hitting anyone running FULL Zerker(glass cannon). There should be a really high skill cap on actually playing Zerker. If you are “really that good”, then this wont affect you since you never get hit by anything anyway and can still run Zerker. For those “less good”, you will have to consider other options or take the risk of being 1-hitted often.

4. Improve Toughness. Toughness right now is a very underwhelming stat that scales poorly the higher you go. If monster damage gets improved from 3., then Toughness should also be improved to match. Then with both Improved monster damage + Improved Toughness, players will know that difference between being 1-hitted with Zerker and not be. Zerkers clearly have way too much survival right now and even room for mistakes.

I understand that you do not want a “holy trinity” in this game. Every class should be able to run DPS or Control or Support, true. However, I expected teams to be more balanced to let’s say “requiring” 3DPS and 2Support out of 5 party members to be optimal or even 4DPS and 1Support. This would be regardless of class because all classes can do the roles. Right now, all people are doing is just run Imba teams of 5 full zerkers and faceroll everything.

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Posted by: Dalanor.5387

Dalanor.5387

But what about e-sports and pvp balance? :C
On a serious note, stat scaling needs to change. When investing toughness means nothing (yay, you can endure one more hit) and vitality isnt necessary an issue due to the lack of conditions the enemies pums out, the only “good” way to go is full dps.
The sad part that how condition output works by players (its bad) its makes half of the damage types meaningless. Only good for damage modifiers like +10% if enemy has X on them.
Another problem is the low attack rate and predictable fights. Reading the animations is a good think, but when everything is soooo slow that you can avoid every damage by dodge and / or blocks and reflects, its just stupid.
Oh, and reflects. Feedback is uber stupid. Not only prevents you from projectile damage, which is overwhelmingly used by bosses, it scales by your stats and since bosses hit kittening hard, they just kill themselves. Just think about the “Lupi meets the feedback” situation. Personal reflect is nice like what elementalist, ranger or engi gets and the wall fits thematicaly for guardian, to protect their allies, but feedback is … stupid.
Did i say that reflect are available for 2 of the most favourited classes .. ?

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Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Dalanor pretty much sums it up.

Never mind that say necromancers rarely get to show off their boon conversion skills, because mobs are made tanky by stats rather than boons. And that tanky aspect feeds into the whole “DPS or GTFO” PVE meta. Because you can’t out-tank a mob, no way, no how.

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Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

The annoying part is that mobs are made tanky just by their HP. It is rare for mobs to have high toughness, so there is no reason to diversify and add a condi user.

It is something Nemesis originally said, and I agree with him: PVE needs to be more like PVP. Now, when Anet hears this, they decided to put the down state on PVE enemies, which was the stupidest thing they could import. There needs to be several things ported over, and these things need to all center around one thing:

Enemies have to be built to kill you.

Its that simple. So many mobs in the game are currently build around the idea of giving them a gimmick they use once or twice without any real meaning. Mobs need to have much better AI, and more things they do with it:

#1: Primarily ranged mobs should try to kite players. Nothing to elaborate, but as players approach them, the ranged mobs should walk backward, or walk sideways away from players. In game, we currently have many pulls, leaps, cripples, chills, immobilize, and stealths, and yet we don’t have much of a reason to use them. Why? Enemies just run up to your face and fight you at point blank. There’s no one to chase and no one to run from.

#2: Mobs that grant boons should not spam boons. One of the biggest issues with fighting the dredge is that, if you remove or corrupt the boon they have, they immediately reapply it to everyone in range. This is true for most mobs that use boons on themselves: there is no reason to ever remove the boon because it just comes right back. Mobs, if having boons, should always have long duration + long cooldown, so removing them matters.

#3: Unshakeable and defiant need to be reworked. First, unshakeable needs to no longer reduce vulnerability and weakness, since champions are really the only place those conditions can be effective. Second, stacks of defiant need to dissolve on their own. Maybe one stack every 2 seconds or so. That way, you can have meaningful CC, even when only one player has CC skills.

#4: Melee mobs need to be more effective at chasing players, because currently players can just kite and shoot mobs without any additional help. Enemies need to do stuff like use swiftness, use more cripples/chills, have leaps, and also use stability. Not all at once, of course, but it would be helpful.

#5: Stability needs to mean something. This is for players, mostly. Currently stability has limited access, really short durations, and long cooldowns, which makes stability nigh useless. Stability needs longer durations, since the amount of CC in the game is already disproportionate to the amount defense there is against it.

#6: Enemies need to attack more frequently, but do less damage with each individual attack. Currently, you can just loldodge nearly everything in the game because enemies have big slow attacks. If enemies had rapid but weaker attacks, then passive defenses would be more important, as well as regen and protection. Not every enemy has to be reworked, but having diversity in enemy attack patterns would be a boon.

#7: Enemies need to cleave and pierce more often. One of the reasons why stacking is so effective is because when an enemy attacks, it only hits one player in that group, which means players effectively have 5x the durability while in a stack. If enemies cleaved more often, then to stack you would still have to actively block and dodge.

#8: Enemies need to have their attack rate effected by chill.

#9: Enemies need less health, and they need to heal themselves. Nearly any enemy that is veteran rank or higher needs to have less health, but also have a self heal that is on a long cooldown. This will make timed CC more important, as well as make the healing reduction from poison important in PVE.

#10: Enemies need diversified defenses. Currently, they just have high HP and nothing else. There needs to be mobs who have high toughness, mobs who use strong protection and strong regen, making condition users more important for the team, as well as boon stripping.

After all this is put in, then PVE will be interesting. Nearly every class has something they can use to deal with all of these problems, and having players deal with these challenges will make for better players and more entertaining gameplay.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

Hey guys pretty cool to see all you Ideas about AI, I decided to take a break from my skill analysis to give an AI suggestion.

I will divide the AI in 3 templates(starting structures): brute force, ruse and support. Every type of AI will be defined by the movement and skills used. There are 2 tricks here:
1.the AI assigned to a monster change dynamically.
2.movement is about getting away from the target, the action have 2 components: the range traveled and the interval between travels, so every time I will talk about movement I will mention a couple [range,timer].

The templates:

  1. The brute force: [low,medium] movement, the skills used are primarily strong offensive abilities.
  2. Ruse: [low-medium,low] movement, the abilities used are the ones with soft cc(cripples etc), condition application, with a lower priority ton high damages.
  3. Support:[medium, medium] movement, use of hard cc, application of boons.

Now comes the fun part the group AI. with the system implemented all we need is a higher level manager which will set, target(zone or player) to each mob and also change the AI type used.

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Posted by: nexxe.7081

nexxe.7081

Good post and i agree with some of it, but the real problem with GW2, is the hybrid combat system. It tries to combine Action-Combat with tradtional MMO combat, which doesn’t mesh well.

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Posted by: Pyrasia.9281

Pyrasia.9281

The annoying part is that mobs are made tanky just by their HP. It is rare for mobs to have high toughness, so there is no reason to diversify and add a condi user.

It is something Nemesis originally said, and I agree with him: PVE needs to be more like PVP. Now, when Anet hears this, they decided to put the down state on PVE enemies, which was the stupidest thing they could import. There needs to be several things ported over, and these things need to all center around one thing:

Enemies have to be built to kill you.

Its that simple. So many mobs in the game are currently build around the idea of giving them a gimmick they use once or twice without any real meaning. Mobs need to have much better AI, and more things they do with it:

#1: Primarily ranged mobs should try to kite players. Nothing to elaborate, but as players approach them, the ranged mobs should walk backward, or walk sideways away from players. In game, we currently have many pulls, leaps, cripples, chills, immobilize, and stealths, and yet we don’t have much of a reason to use them. Why? Enemies just run up to your face and fight you at point blank. There’s no one to chase and no one to run from.

#2: Mobs that grant boons should not spam boons. One of the biggest issues with fighting the dredge is that, if you remove or corrupt the boon they have, they immediately reapply it to everyone in range. This is true for most mobs that use boons on themselves: there is no reason to ever remove the boon because it just comes right back. Mobs, if having boons, should always have long duration + long cooldown, so removing them matters.

#3: Unshakeable and defiant need to be reworked. First, unshakeable needs to no longer reduce vulnerability and weakness, since champions are really the only place those conditions can be effective. Second, stacks of defiant need to dissolve on their own. Maybe one stack every 2 seconds or so. That way, you can have meaningful CC, even when only one player has CC skills.

#4: Melee mobs need to be more effective at chasing players, because currently players can just kite and shoot mobs without any additional help. Enemies need to do stuff like use swiftness, use more cripples/chills, have leaps, and also use stability. Not all at once, of course, but it would be helpful.

#5: Stability needs to mean something. This is for players, mostly. Currently stability has limited access, really short durations, and long cooldowns, which makes stability nigh useless. Stability needs longer durations, since the amount of CC in the game is already disproportionate to the amount defense there is against it.

#6: Enemies need to attack more frequently, but do less damage with each individual attack. Currently, you can just loldodge nearly everything in the game because enemies have big slow attacks. If enemies had rapid but weaker attacks, then passive defenses would be more important, as well as regen and protection. Not every enemy has to be reworked, but having diversity in enemy attack patterns would be a boon.

#7: Enemies need to cleave and pierce more often. One of the reasons why stacking is so effective is because when an enemy attacks, it only hits one player in that group, which means players effectively have 5x the durability while in a stack. If enemies cleaved more often, then to stack you would still have to actively block and dodge.

#8: Enemies need to have their attack rate effected by chill.

#9: Enemies need less health, and they need to heal themselves. Nearly any enemy that is veteran rank or higher needs to have less health, but also have a self heal that is on a long cooldown. This will make timed CC more important, as well as make the healing reduction from poison important in PVE.

#10: Enemies need diversified defenses. Currently, they just have high HP and nothing else. There needs to be mobs who have high toughness, mobs who use strong protection and strong regen, making condition users more important for the team, as well as boon stripping.

After all this is put in, then PVE will be interesting. Nearly every class has something they can use to deal with all of these problems, and having players deal with these challenges will make for better players and more entertaining gameplay.

I love this post. I have seen similar problem in many other games, some RPGs, and some RTS. Many mobs are not meant to kill the players. They are just there to be killed. They are, like… I’m a big angry cave troll, I will growl at them every 9 seconds (not inflicting fears, keep taking damage during that time), then I will swing claws at every 6 seconds and then randomly change a target…

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Posted by: Bagel.4598

Bagel.4598

It’s funny how so many things were done right in Guild Wars 1 and they threw it out the window in attempts to create a better game and system.
From the majority of threads and player posts all over these forums, it appears Anet have essential ruined the game system that was ALREADY different from other MMO’s and that long term and new players alike really enjoyed.
If they were wise, they wouldn’t have “fixed” something that wasn’t broken.
Guild Wars 2 has some good things, but nothing that outweighs Guild Wars 1 except perhaps the graphics.
Silly devs.

(edited by Bagel.4598)

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Posted by: Pariah.8506

Pariah.8506

Silly devs.

GW1 devs are long gone

And great Post Blood Red Arachnid, nailed the issue

Attachments:

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Posted by: Substance E.4852

Substance E.4852

Silly devs.

GW1 devs are long gone

And great Post Blood Red Arachnid, nailed the issue

A few are still around but I feel like a lot of them hightailed it or were forced to when Anet decided to dumb down virtually everything they did previously.

About the only thing in this game that feels more complex than GW1 is the stat and trait system which would be a good thing if most traits weren’t pointless and pve wasn’t “go zerk or go home”.

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Posted by: Tru Reptile.6058

Tru Reptile.6058

It’s kinda sad that developers feel the need to create games with the worst possible players in mind. I’d love to play a MMO where mobs challenged me because of their A.I. and not buffed stats.

I remember how thrilled I was when they added AoE scatter in GW1, and amazed at the amount of QQing because mobs didn’t just stand there are drop their loot.

(edited by Tru Reptile.6058)

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Posted by: Bagel.4598

Bagel.4598

It’s kinda sad that developers feel the need to create games with the worst possible players in mind. I’d love to play a MMO where mobs challenged me because of their A.I. and not buffed stats.

I remember how thrilled I was when they added AoE scatter in GW1, and amazed at the amount of QQing because mobs didn’t just stand there are drop their loot.

This.
I find it amusing and somewhat conflicting that they chose the weapon linked skill system because some players in GW1 were running around with the same starter skills and not branching out, but then they chose to buff AI’s damage to make content more challenging instead of implementing intelligent mobs.
But hey! Which path is cheaper, right Anet?

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Posted by: Rieselle.5079

Rieselle.5079

It’s a mistake to thing about enemy AI as “intelligent” or “challenging.”

Games like Megaman (or a more modern example, Dark Souls) manage to be fun, engaging and challenging even with simple, non-“AI” enemies.

Having good combat mechanics, enemies with a variety of carefully designed set behaviours, and good encounter design with set pieces / gimmicks. These are much more important than “AI”.

For example, rather than worrying about making monsters run out of AOE circles (which can be easily exploited), why not have monsters that perform hit and run tactics with leaping attacks and then evading retreats? Their constant movement will already cause them to leave AOE circles as part of their natural behaviour.

Or similarly, rather than having many of the same type of enemy (or solo enemies), why not design most encounters to be groups of enemies with group behaviours? Like melee enemies that pull and CC, covering ranged enemies with good DPS and push skills, supported by healing enemies. That sounds a bit trinity-ish, but you could equally have ranged casters casting Frozen Earth on clumped players, with Whirlwind Axe warriors doing PBAOE damage etc.

Similarly, with bosses. It’s not important to have intelligent bosses.
But the set behaviours and animations of the bosses have to be dynamic, threatening, reactable.
There needs to be a progression of boss behaviours over time, so you can’t stick with a single tactic.
The boss needs to have combat mechanics that encourage players to use a variety of builds and skills, not just DPS. And I mean /combat/ mechanics, not silly environmental gimmicks like the various fractal bosses.
Ideally, bosses should only be damageable in bursts – they are near-invulnerable most of the time, requiring players to struggle to survive. Then they become vulnerable periodically, and/or when something happens (eg. enough damage is done, or a key skill is interrupted, all stacks of defiant are stripped, etc.)

Anyways, action games like God of War, Devil May Cry, Demon’s / Dark Souls have some examples of good boss battles to learn from. (and some terrible ones too.)

I find many western game devs are pretty lazy and rely on smart general algorithms. “Let’s make an adaptive tweakable AI and apply it to all the enemies!”

Whereas Japanese game devs tend to be terrible at algorithms/technology but create better games in the end through detailed craftsmanship and gameplay design.

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Posted by: Amiron.1067

Amiron.1067

To be honest, I think warriors are in a pretty good state, and I hardly find them boring at all. The only weapons that aren’t too exciting is sword and mace. Greatsword, Longbow, Axe, Hammer, and Rifle are all fun to play and require you to use multiple skills.

The classes that I have an issue with is Guardian and Ranger. Sword is boring; you only ever use #3 for dps, and #2 for gap closing. Otherwise, it’s all about the auto attack. Hammer is the same way; spam auto and use #2 whenever it’s up, the other skills are al purely situational.

Rangers are worse. Axe is a terrible weapon, and Sword is literally an auto-attack spam. Using any other skill translates into a dps loss. It’s terribly boring.

I want weapons that require me to follow a rotation to deal damage.

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Posted by: Pariah.8506

Pariah.8506

//

While I agree with a lot of the things you said I must say I still find that a good AI can do wonders for a game by creating a world that is truly alive.
Here, take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQsojJCv6ac

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

About the AI/mob design, I recently got something while trying some builds in heart of the mist, maybe Anet don’t want the game to be challenging or the pve mob designer aren’t that good because the profession specific monster players can fight in HOTM are much more challenging that any other monster in the game: they spike, dodge and even CC.
Take the warrior, engineer and thief put them in a circle arena with pillars, make them 33% bigger, have them deal 40% more damages , give them 150% more HP and get ready for the QQ threads on the forum (their tears are delicious).

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

Time for another post. This time I will talk about the signets, especially about the passive bonuses .
Most classes in gw2 have these signets giving +X to a stat(kitten to be you engineers), and these are really popular in pve. But I feel like the design of these signets is pushing players toward power creep thus being a bad implantation of passive effect. This kind of passive effects adds nothing to the gameplay in fact the player decides to lose an active skill for stats.

The problem: Stat boost as a passive does not improve the gameplay, it does the total opposite.

My solution: I can’t give an universal solution but, I will give some principles and a few examples to accompany them.

  • Make the bonus require some change in the gameplay: for example the guardian signet of judgement instead of reducing all incoming damages by 10%, reduce them by 15% but only if the guardian is facing the source of damages.
  • Add/Improve a management system: Here an example is the thief’s infiltrator’s signet and the best instance of this in the game is the mesmer’s signet of ether. While the thief seems kind of weak, the mesmer’s passive adds a more depth to the gameplay, seriously this skill is well designed from the heals base to counterplay created by the 3 sec delay between each pulse (soooo much).
  • A compromise between the passive and the active effect: the bad application but in a way which might not be expected: is the warriors signet of rage the management of adrenaline of the warrior has become such an anecdote that it is better to always have this skill of cooldown. The good example is again the signet of ether the active adds a good compromise: loosing the regenerative factor, and being able to create a huge burst through the phantasms.

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Posted by: Kalarchis.8635

Kalarchis.8635

Enemy AI in GW1 went through all the same problems. I still remember when enemies started moving out of AoE fields and the absolute kittenstorm some players threw. You’dve thought the game was ending.

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

A little bump on this thread i will start posting again (probably on warrios or ranger).
And as a little present a video presenting how a good AI can change gameplay (in skyrim/not my video ).

(edited by Teckos.1305)

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Posted by: Teckos.1305

Teckos.1305

On pets and especially rangers.

If you have some free time you should make a quick stop in the ranger subforum, quick enough you will identify the two main complaints of the rangers.

  • The sword auto-attack.
  • The pets.

There is a huge risk factor when toying with the pets, the AI. If they have a weak AI, they become easily exploitable, they hit the air and use their skills in a disorganized way, but if the AI is too strong the player will tend to use the pets in a fire and forget way, with a minimal interaction and as a consequence a poor gameplay.

There is also another problem, the pet F2 skills. Most of them have a really bizarre cooldown*cast time to utility ratio and utilities in general: rangers have a lot of pet and each of them should bring something unique.

Finally some of their passives, especially movement speed and basic attack range(for melee pets) cripples them and it is even more obvious in pvp.

Now my propositions:

For the first problem I am thinking about a training system.
Pretty much a limited scripting: for each skills the pet have the ranger can customize a limited set of rules for it use. An example of a rule: River drake —→ Tail swipe(blast finisher) —> at 300 range from a fire field go in and use.

The second problem comes from a design issue: the 2 second daze from the pink moa will in most case be used as an interrupt it must be as responsive as possible so having a 1 second cast time is quite counter productive a lot of these examples can be found and i don’t feel like enumeration. There is also a lack of diversity with the ranger’s pets we have some CCs, some boon application, some heals, some conditions and some really interesting skills like the stalker stealth and the hyena pack, ranger need more of these some projectile block / reflect and area denial.

For the passives I think each race should bring other thing than their stats, and we start with movement speed. Birds should be fast they should have a pursuit potential, while a drake should be slower but have a lot of cleave and the ability to stand their ground. Lastly a small increase of the range value of most of the melee pets basic attack could make them hit much more reliably especially in pvp.

Well that’s all feel free to give your feedback, and if a mod comes by i think the thread should be moved into the profession balance subforum.

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Posted by: tigirius.9014

tigirius.9014

PvE was always designed for the lowest common denominator. You will rarely get challenging PvE content since they’ll be abandoned by the majority of players (TA Aetherblades… it’s so hard to get a party for that even with cross-server LFG). The skillset is just fine for most classes. Just warriors seem to have an extremely faceroll, mash 1, autoattack on and afk type skill set. Other classes have to manage boons, cooldowns and weapon sets to maximise dps (and in the case of engi and ele, your f1-f4 abilities changing your skillset/playstyle).

There’s no real difficult end-game content in PvE because it was intended to be that way. If you want a challenge, go WvW (in a high tier server) or sPvP.

I beg to differ, there are always a slow start in every game yes and there will always be certain things that most devs leave out however, I haven’t played a game in a very very long time that did absolutely so little to actually balance their own PVE system.

Pets are weak, roles are missing entirely (even their own which is sad), trait choices are highly biased just as downed state skills. It’s amazing that people haven’t complained more honestly.

I don’t understand what the problem is, anyone who’s played these classes for 5 minutes and traited anything can see that there are missing elements in many of the classes that should be universal as far as options are concerned, no wonder diversity doesn’t exist it’s like bricks are missing from the foundation and then people wonder why the wall fell.

We’ve given them years of suggestions now it’s time for change. I know I’ve been patient enough. It’s absolutely true that there is an AI problem but for pets and summons they need immunity to AOE damage it’s been a problem in every mmo since the first digital dawn.

Roles need to be a thing, there needs to be CC, actual Healers, and Condition damage needs to have crits that matter and be given longer up times across the board, all condition applier spells need only apply conditions when the player has grandemaster level traits in condition damage lines, and Zerker needs to have conditions removed entirely from every spell until they spec for conditions. That way the stacking problem won’t be so bad in large groups. I’d also like for conditions to turn into other types when they reach a certain level, like 10 bleeds into a deep wounds. Nothing should be immune to CC. And healing should actually scale properly so that the #1 skills heal properly.

Pet AIs need to think about where they are standing so they too can move from an AOE field in time to not be hit.

And finally, we need a system that doesn’t put mechanics into the game and then make the bosses immune to them. Seriously, we just got reflects on turrets and what happens next? Wurm gets immune to reflects. Seriously? Why is that happening and why is that a policy that’s continued? We have these skills for these very reasons we should be able to make use of them otherwise it will become just another ignored trait for the pile.

Balance Team: Please Fix Mine Toolbelt Positioning!