Guild Wars 2

While I was levelling an alt in frostgorge earlier today I noticed something odd about how some of the svanir mobs were acting. It seems that, in addition to gaining several new attacks they never had, these mobs are now strafing, back-pedalling, dodge rolling, avoiding aoe rings and not engaging when on low health. I even saw a svanir ranger cancel his barrage channel to reposition.

Could it be that Anet is testing its shiny new AI routines?

Noticed the same at Svanirs in Dredgehaunt Cliffs .. however especially the backwards
walking to me looks more like a bug.
I also noticed some weird walking patterns from them from far away outside of fights.

I for one welcome these changes! I would also love to see environmental creatures exhibiting various behaviors:

• More different predating behaviors. We have these jaguars hunting and killing nearby rabbits, same for ettins, sometimes we even see a jaguar fithing a ram, but I’d like to see another pattern such as flocks of animals invading an area for some time or until a triggered “flock” event has been finished.
• Other fauna-related event would be fight for survival! For some time an area would grow more plants that could be harvested if the player managed to finish the event, but animals would become agressive and gain boons to protect the area, like a way to fight for the food. Obviously only herbivorous animals. If they succeeded before the timer expired, their number would increase. If they failed, a champion king would spawn to protect the area. Killing the beast would reward like 3 patches of different plants to be harvested. Such event would have a 12h cooldown.
• Stampede events! Close to a river we could run into a wave of heavy animals rapidly rushing into different directions with a permanent non-removable stability and causing knockbacks as they run through players, they would also have a periodic protection boon (whenever they reach first point of location before redirecting to somewhere else, and so on). The reason would be revealed if the players managed to stay within small circles (like PvP conquest ones) for some period. Killing any of such animals would fail the event. After standing for 2min. inside each of these circles, the animals would “calm down”, and then there would be a swarm of black jaguars along with elites which have annoying stealth skills. Killing them would give the player a Peaceful buff that increases MF by 30% while they’re in the map.