It’s just…really, really awkward how easy PvE is, and how massive mob HP pools get – what if the mobs were a little smarter? Would that make the game a little more challenging, and allow some tuning-down of mob HP?
What I mean by ‘smarter:’ I can use a pulsing-damage AoE on a ranged enemy, and said enemy will simply stand there. Enemies happily trot into AoE circles, as well, because they just don’t seem to know that there’s a reason to care.
I don’t like this. I think it’s silly. I think Ranger Pet AI and Mob AI have been said to be too linked to give Ranger Pets the ability to avoid AoE…and I think that’s lame, both because it holds Rangers back and because it keeps mobs from being able to do exactly what Rangers want their pets to - avoid AoEs if there’s nothing keeping them from doing so.
If mobs did gain the ability to avoid them, what would be the pros and cons? I think they’d actually give people some practice at setting up their high-damage effects with control effects. I can’t think of any cons, although the HP pools would probably need retuned afterward.
There is a concern that people would just spam AoEs on themselves to keep mobs at bay, but that could be handled by having the mobs perform some sort of risk assessment – HP vs Aggro tables, maybe, with Armor Classes and Professions coming up as well.
There would be massive qq because people wouldn’t be able to do dungeons without screaming stack every 5 seconds. Which results in mobs all piling up on each other waiting to be steam rolled. In gw1 mobs actually moved out of aoe and didn’t clump on top of each other.
no it wouldn’t be bad. gw2 is a game where you should have to learn how to adapt. the new queen’s pavilion is a step in that direction. i would love for champs to have counters to player damage, IE champs in wvw having a sort of block mechanic and an interrupt.
As quick as the Valkyries ride,
As true as Odin’s spear flies,
There is nowhere to hide.
The mobs used to move out off AoEs in the betas. The problem was it worked too well, as classes with tons of AoEs would end up chasing the mobs around with thier ground targetted AoEs and the mobs would be too busy evading to mount a counter offensive.
They need a middle ground. Maybe have it so powerful attacks have a chance to trigger the mob’s evade routine. Like say Hundred Blades now has a 66% chance to make Mobs evade.
no it wouldn’t be bad. gw2 is a game where you should have to learn how to adapt. the new queen’s pavilion is a step in that direction. i would love for champs to have counters to player damage, IE champs in wvw having a sort of block mechanic and an interrupt.
The queens pavilion champs don’t show much intelligence. They have some tricky abilities, but they don’t react to players at all.
no it wouldn’t be bad. gw2 is a game where you should have to learn how to adapt. the new queen’s pavilion is a step in that direction. i would love for champs to have counters to player damage, IE champs in wvw having a sort of block mechanic and an interrupt.
The queens pavilion champs don’t show much intelligence. They have some tricky abilities, but they don’t react to players at all.
my point was is that you can’t just zerg them. you’ll never complete the event.
As quick as the Valkyries ride,
As true as Odin’s spear flies,
There is nowhere to hide.
no it wouldn’t be bad. gw2 is a game where you should have to learn how to adapt. the new queen’s pavilion is a step in that direction. i would love for champs to have counters to player damage, IE champs in wvw having a sort of block mechanic and an interrupt.
The queens pavilion champs don’t show much intelligence. They have some tricky abilities, but they don’t react to players at all.
my point was is that you can’t just zerg them. you’ll never complete the event.
It is still a zerg except now people have to split up. The queens pavilion champs aren’t much smarter.
The mobs used to move out off AoEs in the betas. The problem was it worked too well, as classes with tons of AoEs would end up chasing the mobs around with thier ground targetted AoEs and the mobs would be too busy evading to mount a counter offensive.
They need a middle ground. Maybe have it so powerful attacks have a chance to trigger the mob’s evade routine. Like say Hundred Blades now has a 66% chance to make Mobs evade.
This is pretty much why I was thinking of establishing some sort of risk/reward evaluation system for the mobs.
I think it’d be effective if the mob was aware of: Its own HP, the HP of the player it’s trying to target, the armor class of the target (heavy/medium/light), current/upcoming AoEs, and aggro values/Hate, as well as how much damage it would be likely to take.
First, it’d consult the aggro tables to decide on a target. Then, it could use AoE awareness to path to the target. If there’s too many AoEs for it to approach safely, it could compare its own HP to the HP of its target, how much damage it’s likely to do and take, and then act accordingly – either rush through the AoE or switch target. It could also build up some sort of counter, which might be taken into account to make the AI able to break a pattern of being warded off.
no it wouldn’t be bad. gw2 is a game where you should have to learn how to adapt. the new queen’s pavilion is a step in that direction. i would love for champs to have counters to player damage, IE champs in wvw having a sort of block mechanic and an interrupt.
The queens pavilion champs don’t show much intelligence. They have some tricky abilities, but they don’t react to players at all.
my point was is that you can’t just zerg them. you’ll never complete the event.
It is still a zerg except now people have to split up. The queens pavilion champs aren’t much smarter.
you’re right, but the point being is that people had to adapt.
As quick as the Valkyries ride,
As true as Odin’s spear flies,
There is nowhere to hide.
no it wouldn’t be bad. gw2 is a game where you should have to learn how to adapt. the new queen’s pavilion is a step in that direction. i would love for champs to have counters to player damage, IE champs in wvw having a sort of block mechanic and an interrupt.
The queens pavilion champs don’t show much intelligence. They have some tricky abilities, but they don’t react to players at all.
my point was is that you can’t just zerg them. you’ll never complete the event.
It is still a zerg except now people have to split up. The queens pavilion champs aren’t much smarter.
you’re right, but the point being is that people had to adapt.
Or people find it more trouble than it is worth and leave for easier more rewarding content. Making harder content isn’t that hard. However, not everyone like harder content. You can stack all queen pavilion champions together and make everyone fight all 6 champions at the same time, that will sure make things difficult. Might make everyone pull their hair out and rage quit though. The problem is making harder content feel fun and rewarding.
It could be really bad. Not because PvE isn’t mostly easy, but because it is occasionally and sporadically quite hard, due to weird balancing, and if the AI were smarter, those cases in which PvE content is hard would be absolutely brutal.
Also, it’s nice being able to solo a veteran mob, but realistically that’s only possible because they attack 4x slower than players do and rarely move.
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We now have large open world populations in most maps, content needs to be (re)designed around this but scale properly to different size dynamics. I’m sure their looking over the metrics for the events they’ve recently redesigned and are working to better incorporate some of that into new/existing events over time.
AI needs a boost though, and not just ‘dodge out of aoe when present’, I want to FIGHT monsters, not just sit there and 1 them to death. Currently about the only one I ever have to watch out for is a poison spamming ranger monster or one that can toss torment on me in multiple stacks. And that pretty much only applies in the Pavilion right now so…
I wouldn’t mind the occasional additional flag to enemy behavior. The idea I have is that a ranged mob will never voluntarily enter within 600 range of a player, instead choosing to orbit to get LoS instead of just stacking like a bunch of mindless animals.
Though most difficulty will have to come from better skill design, and not necessarily smarter AI.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
If mobs did gain the ability to avoid them, what would be the pros and cons? I think they’d actually give people some practice at setting up their high-damage effects with control effects. I can’t think of any cons, although the HP pools would probably need retuned afterward.
There is a concern that people would just spam AoEs on themselves to keep mobs at bay, but that could be handled by having the mobs perform some sort of risk assessment – HP vs Aggro tables, maybe, with Armor Classes and Professions coming up as well.
And what about when you have a single boss against a whole zerg? What kind of an assessment could the AI make when it’s literally surrounded by constant aoes? It couldn’t go after the aoe casters because there’s so many of them that even if the boss kills one, it’ll be replaced by another, while the dead one is revived within seconds.
Do GW2 community want harder content in the first place? They are sending mixed signal when a bunch of people qq about content being too easy and another bunch qq about content being too hard.
I would love it AI gets smarter, not more powerful (actualy want them quantity over quality – like in a diablo game, than hack’n’slash).
As a Ranger, we’re good in pve mostly because we can kite the AI, so their performance drops. In case these random trash NPCs getting more buff, rangers will end up unplayable/mutch less playable even in PVE, because we lack stuff to handle their kind of “BANG I’m in your face and stunning you hahahah” kind of skills (Risens).
AI improvement is needed, as well as Ranger buff/mech redesign.
Including other class. We need some kind of good regenerating mana-adrenaline-initiative-stamina for all classes IMO, until that, we’re playing with idiotic CoolDowns like back in ’90s. What a shame…
Game Designer || iREVOLUTION.Design \\
“A man chooses; a slave obeys.” | “Want HardMode? Play Ranger!”
And what about when you have a single boss against a whole zerg? What kind of an assessment could the AI make when it’s literally surrounded by constant aoes? It couldn’t go after the aoe casters because there’s so many of them that even if the boss kills one, it’ll be replaced by another, while the dead one is revived within seconds.
Well they are bosses. While other mobs can use certain type of evade, they are the “legendaries” ones, making them flee would be pretty awkward. Instead itcould use some blocking, agressive dashing to dodge AoE, maybe just dodging like we do with certain weapons (aka performing a certain attach animation while dodging like Rangers (great)sword etc).
Dear Santa,
For christmas I’d like to get a crossbow for my characters.
With love, a cute kitty.
i think its fine as it is. personally play only by me self (and i see many other players who are alone as well) so if they would change the AI, it can lead to some frustrating battles.
It’s been bandied about a lot, but GW2 AI is significantly more stupid than GW1 largely as a result of the reduction in focus on the class roles.
For those who never played, mobs in GW1 were usually of mixed classes meaning that invariably there would be counters to whatever your class would bring. The other thing was that mobs in GW1 moved together. Aggro one and the whole mob would attack. Certain mobs with long patrols would sometimes split and you could aggro some but not all of the members to make the fight easier. As mentioned before GW1 mob AI also included an anti-AOE code which precluded them from staying in the one place particularly for DoTAOE. Burst and single shot AOE’s were still effective however. The other thing about aggro mechanics was that you really had to try to get a mob to focus on the tank. If your party is too close to you, mobs had target prioritisation that meant spellcasters would target spell casters preferentially while 1 or 2 melee (depending on the size of the mob) would target your melee while other melee and ranged would target your spellcasters as well.
These are the sort of mechanics that are missing in this game because of the need to make it an open world. Anet didn’t build in class blends. It gave the world a bit more realism but lost in party gameplay because everything can be encountered singly and dealt with easily.
I think even the very rare dodge or in-combat mobility on mobs (mostly bandits and centaur i think) are skills. Skills they use rather randomly, but at least they do something.
Things that the mobs could really use (as well as ranger pets actually) are:
skills useable while moving, not just movement skills. Its a clear advantage of player characters that we can use most skills while moving. Mobs and pets need to move in position, stop, target/turn in direction, and use skill. There are some rare ‘charge’ skills that can be used at a range, but that only gives the illusion of free movement while using action.
Shorter auto-attack recharges. Mobs have a short cooldown on their most basic attacks. You can experience how awkward and bad it is when you are transformed on various occasions, and the #1 “auto-attack” skill has a full second cooldown. No wonder they just stand there doing nothing, they are waiting for their 1 second basic attack cooldown. If the mob and pet auto-attacks would be useable while moving and have no cooldown, they would be more active and more of a threat. Confusion and interrupts would be more reliable and more desired as well, with more active skill-use from mobs.
Pathing issues looked at. Ability to jump, measure up and calculate the risk of jumping (falling damage) instead of running on a rail that we human players constantly take shortcuts off of by jumping from ledge to ledge while the AI struggles to move down the ramp and back to us. Mobs and pets seem to use the GW1 system with no consideration to the Z axis.
Reduced or removed skill cooldown dont need AI changes. Skill useage while moving potentially does, as it is a paralel set of actions instead of the serial nature of move-target-attack. Making the AI consider and use the Z axis could be a real head-breaker.
The original Guild Wars actually had some pretty good AI for mobs, so good in fact that it warranted turning it off until the planned hard mode came not too much later where mobs were back to avoiding AoE, using skills reasonably well including heals and interrupts, not spreading out damage too much unless they had some hard hitting AoE themselves, etc.
Of course, most of the time if you expect something good from the original game to have stayed then the answer is it didn’t.
It’s probably too late to bring in mob AI to exit combo fields and aoe now. The game is designed for players to be fighting in fields with combo finishers. It won’t be the same if the mobs run out of those fields so the combos hit thin air. Some weapon sets, like thief offhand pistol, will become instantly broken. AOE fields shouldn’t become become barriers or fear zones that keep mobs out.
1. The reason why they have huge health bars and ridiculous damage is because their AI is terrible.
2. The reason why they have terrible AI is because it is difficult to scale up the “AI Intelligence” when there is more people (open-world), as lazy as ArenaNet is atm they don’t want to, and it’s obviously 1000x easier to make them scale up in HP and damage.
3. The game tries to appeal to the “casual” audience, most of the game is just sit there and smash your buttons until something dies. In this case a dumber AI works better.
Make AI smarter: Did you NOT see The Matrix? Or Terminator? Bad things happen when AI gets smarter.
Seriously though, an improved AI along with an upscaled reward would be awesome! As it is now, PvE is too easy, even dungeons nowdays. Unless you are trying to run dungeons solo of course.
“You know what the chain of command is?
It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
It’s probably too late to bring in mob AI to exit combo fields and aoe now. The game is designed for players to be fighting in fields with combo finishers. It won’t be the same if the mobs run out of those fields so the combos hit thin air. Some weapon sets, like thief offhand pistol, will become instantly broken. AOE fields shouldn’t become become barriers or fear zones that keep mobs out.
Combo fields and finishers are the reason why some classes aren’t wanted in PvE and why some excel in pvp. It was a bad mistake to put these things in.
1. The reason why they have huge health bars and ridiculous damage is because their AI is terrible.
2. The reason why they have terrible AI is because it is difficult to scale up the “AI Intelligence” when there is more people (open-world), as lazy as ArenaNet is atm they don’t want to, and it’s obviously 1000x easier to make them scale up in HP and damage.
3. The game tries to appeal to the “casual” audience, most of the game is just sit there and smash your buttons until something dies. In this case a dumber AI works better.
Why is there a need for smarter A.I. ? It is hard to make A.I. smarter than a human. When you do, they can be absolutely brutal. Teq, which people consider hard, isn’t even smart. The game isn’t specifically design to kill you, there is always lot of leeway for you to beat them. Dumber A.I works better if you want them to die quickly and drop loot, game developer aren’t trying to kill their players.
They just need to add more lvl 80 dungeon made for people with full exotic gear+
Only reason why almost all dungeons are so easy in this game is because they are for low lvls,that make them a joke for lvl80 party that can just zerg.
Who would play still Greatsword Warrior or Scepter Elementalist when Mobs dodge all the time ?
In the end it would lead to less builds since everyone would prefer only instant attacks that can’t be dodged and all skils with longer castime will not be used anymore.
Some people always talk about better AI but gamewise i think most of them will be annoyed very fast if suddenly every stupid little mob reacts faster and better than a real player ever could.
Just imagine a mob would be as smart as players with faster reactions, so mobs already wins most of the time, throw that in the open world where you very often have more than 1 mob at once to fight, and also the respawn problem .. that all would be great “fun”.
EVERY MMO is awesome until it is released then its unfinished. A month after release it just sucks.
Best MMOs are the ones that never make it. Therefore Stargate Online wins.
People got used to AI moving out of AoE in Guildwars 1, they would get used to it in Guildwars 2. Can give mobs different AI, vor variation. Besides, I’d like to see some big svanir champ dodge around, or a pinesoul. And we had lots of fun with that big ol’ abomination chasing around players just outside Caer Shadowfain
we need less ai in this game. most of the strongest builds are built around having as much ai as possible. necro petting zoo, mesmers in general… thief and its bandits, spirit ranger, even ele gets an elemental to annoy the hell out of you..
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