Guild Wars 2

I absolutely love the PvP in this game, and the PvE world is crafted beautifully. Unfortunately the gameplay doesn’t stand up nearly as much because of the AI. In GW1, the AI would be programmed to stand there and use its skills normally. This was fine in GW1 because the gameplay was more like a traditional MMO where you simply go up to an enemy and then stand and cast until they die, then move to the next enemy and stand and cast until they die etc etc.

GW2 is completely different though. Positioning is everything. The biggest indicator of that is the use of dodging. The biggest difference between a good player and a bad player is their use of dodging. This is what makes PvP so great, when I throw out a large attack I can never predict whether or not my foe will dodge. This is what leads to all the problem with PvE. It’s stale because enemies aren’t just worse versions of real players, they have none of the same behaviors, even in endgame zones like Orr. It’s stale because if enemies don’t move around and dodge, CC is negated and DPS is the only way to go. Why bother CCing if the enemy is just going to stand there while you can DPS the hell out of him? I think if the AI had a good dodging behavior, PvE would instantly become better. Dungeons would have more of a challenge, the open world would be more exciting, builds would become much more varied. Let me know what you think about this.

Disagree on the skill requirement in PvP. Agree totally that the AI should be able to dodge. Each enemy should also have ranged/melee combat options, and swap intelligently.

Get ready for unpopular opinion:

Dodge is a bad mechanic.
How would you like all your enemies to constantly and without warning become invulnerable? Sounds like great fun. Dodge is a cancer in this game’s pvp. It infects the game with spam and nothing, no amount of game balance, will change this fundamental problem. Well, unless there was some trade-off for not dodging on recharge, such as skills that use endurance, but it’s not going to ever happen.

Yep – unpopular opinion, for sure. I love the “dodge” mechanic. It’s the only part of the game that requires skill. That’s my biggest beef with the PvP in this game – it’s rock, paper, scissors, with only dodge as the equalizer.

My ideal guild wars 2 would have been guild wars 1 with the current graphics and combat mechanics. (that is, mobile combat with dodge and full z axis). What we got was a hack n’ slash, with almost no variety in builds. (pve? go zerker. WvW? zerg in PVT or roam as condition bunker. PvP? Bunker up!)

For those that didn’t play GW1 – the baddies had the same skills as the players, and (especially in the expansions) groups of baddies behaved like groups of players. The PvE in GW2 would be greatly improved by giving all the enemies player skills, with ranged/melee options and access to dodge/endurance. Scaling should be a matter of group size, not a matter of making enemies HP sponges. 1 shot kills are a cheap mechanic as well.

Some mobs do dodge, notably the bandits. Others have other things they do to avoid/block attacks, like the improbably blocking archers in CM.

It would be fun for the AI to be a little less predictable, sure, but sometimes you want the feeling of control from knowing in advance what the enemy will do. Or I do; my reflexes aren’t so hot but I can learn over time and feel like an accomplished fighter against mobs. Since my character is supposed to be good at combat, it’s nice that I can make them look good.

That’s an RP viewpoint. I know I cringe when I flub JPs on my super-athletic perfect-balance acrobat thief. So I’ve spent time learning them better so he can look good

Anyway, having the AI always able to hurt you badly if you’re not on the top of your game is good in short bursts but I for one don’t want to feel constantly smashed by the world. That was one thing that killed DaoC for me, if I went 10 feet outside a city the world ate my caster alive. It’s nice in GW2 that I can look at the scenery rather than spooking at the color of mob names as I run for my life.

Veterans would be good candidates for more unpredictability. Veterans do have experience on their side…

I’d also like to see more enemies using boons to some degree.

Veterans could learn use same combos as players.

Reading this thread makes me want to go back to GW1. One of my favorite parts of GW1 was creating builds. There are so few builds in GW2 that the invention aspect is basically absent. They had to patch GW1 a lot to try to balance it, but even before it was balanced there were enough skills that you could usually invent a build to counter whatever was giving you trouble. I loved that enemies basically had the same abilities as players. I felt I could learn from what the enemies did, and that figuring out how to deal with enemies would help me in PvP (even though I never really got out of the random arena in PvP.)

This game won’t really feel like GW to me until there are enough skills and ways to combine them that average players can invent builds which are reasonably viable and aren’t obviously built-in to the game. The enemies should use that same set of skills (including dodge.)

I love that the combat is more active and positional, but the lack of skills and enemy AI really kills it. Not sure they can actually fix the AI though since this is a real MMO and they must have more server constraints. (Which could be the reason they add super spongey enemies rather than more enemies.)

AIs using dodge would lower the effectiveness of DPS unless there’s someone who can CC in the group. CCing is much more fun than DPS but currently it’s useless. Its great in PvP, you can completely shut someone down with CC while you massacre them. In PvE, larger creatures are unaffected and smaller ones are weak enough were its much faster to just dole out large damage.

Fighting bandits is always fun.

If there was no dodge I probably wouldn’t be playing. I don’t like traditional mmo combat mechanics – the main attraction of gw2 is the more action tps style combat, although with an archaic targeting system.

Having said that, pvp combat is fun whereas I find pve combat a boring waste of time – no satisfaction, the only fun comes in the loot gained from a pve mob. So yes, giving pve mobs an ability to dodge would be fun for me.

Guild Wars 2 mob AI needs to be much better.

There are better AI that reside in the game. They are located in the “heart of the Mists”. The class specific trainers there. They use the abilities of each class and are a much better fight/are extremely more fun and you don’t know what move they are going to do next. I’m pretty sure they don’t dodge though but the fact is that they aren’t doing the same moves in a rotation and are tougher to fight against. I also wish more mobs besides the few in the toxic events had a downed state as it is a lot more satisfying to finish your foe off and it also makes you vulnerable to other mobs around you to make the fight more active and using cc would make a lot more sense so that you could finish the downed foe much like it works in PvP.

Karkas dodge, but its kinda hard to see so you end up blasting attacks into the wind.

Random dodges wouldn’t really add anything. If you were able to predict it then you could use skills correctly and even interrupt it. Punishing blocks would also be nice forcing you to pay attention.

And then perhaps some devastating AoE effects forcing you to more around. For example blind every second.

I was just thinking we need to see “Yellow Circles” from mobs that are them pushing conditions rather than direct hits. Blind fields or even poison. Just a different cue from “this-will-hurt-red”.

dodging for mobs is too hard for ANET to code if they cant even make the mobs get out of red circles…

Lalangamena.3694:

dodging for mobs is too hard for ANET to code if they cant even make the mobs get out of red circles…

They implemented it during the beta and it was very punishing to classes that are forced to rely on AoEs, such as a staff elementalist. It was also easy to exploit because the mob would always run out, so red circles basically acted as a knockback.

If they wanted to, they could easily make a mob dodge roll out of AoE and towards the player, or dodge out and then use ranged attacks instead. Adding this functionality to everyday mobs however would only make the game tiring to play, with no real value added.