Guild Wars 2

Hi there,

Following my previous post about 1/3 HP in downed state for necro and it
success ( Got an answer within 1 hour, while We posted it for 3 weeks ++ in the bug and class forum without any answer), here we go for another MAJOR bug plaguing our necromancer communty.(no punt intended)

Minions AI, especially in World vs World.

There are many issue with them, and it has been posted many times in various sub forum. If you resume :

- They go AFK during fight. Mainly the melee minions. Flesh Goelm (an Elite) is a big culprit, as are our bone minions. They will randomly stop attack, and sometime they won’t do anythning for the entire fight duration.

They have many other design issue(like Flesh golem dispeling when entering water), but them going AFK during fights is the worse in my opinion.

Here a link to Xsorus video, where you can see a lot of AFK’ing from minions :

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Scarecrow-Army-Volume-1-MM-WvW/

For those that don’t know him, Xsorus is the maker of pains inverters videos and he mainly played a Ranger. He started playing a MM necromancer lately, and here what he had to say about minions :

" I didn’t think it was possible to get a dumber pet then a Rangers…I was wrong…Now I don’t so much mind my pets having a hard time getting to a target, which they do..What i do mind in any MMO is when i’m fighting someone to look 3 feet to the left and see my Pet standing there…."

It’s an horrible bug, and it’s one of the reason why I stopped playing my necro 4 month ago. Always waiting for the next patch only to find out Anet didn’t do anything about it yet.

It’s unacceptable, and it has been what? 7 month since release? We have to do something.

Once again, I’m asking the WvW communty to keep this thread alive. We need Anet WvW team to see this, since they seems to be more communicative then the rest of the team.

We need this, for the sake of Minion Master in WvW.

Yeap, the only time I’ve come across an AI as awful as the one i’ve seen from the Minion Mancer in World vs World is when I played a Ranger in beta in this game.

I’ve never seen anything remotely as bad as the AI in this game when it comes to pets from any other game….

I’ve played a lot of them…

UO/DAOC/EQ/Rift/Shadowbane/SWTOR/Warhammer Online ect ect…and none have anything remotely as bad as what i’ve seen in this game.

Think about that…That’s 16 years of playing MMO’s, and the worst AI i’ve seen for a pet has been in a game released last year that claims to be a Triple A quality MMO.

Here is how bad the AI is, It’s actually worse then the Necromancer AI in DAOC when crossing a bridge.

If anyone played a Necromancer in DAOC, they’ll insantly know what i’m talking about.

Simply put, the Pet AI in this game should of been a Priority in beta….and it should of been fixed before release.

A lot of us Rangers pretty much expected the game to go live with pet problems, Cause Rangers were experiencing it in beta, and over the past few months Anet has tried to “fix” our pets…..But Necromancers are in FAR FAR worse shape then my Ranger is when it comes to this.

My pet will attack things i’m fighting…It’s never just stood there with its thumb up its butt….My Necro Pets do it consistently…every bloody fight.

I played a Mage for many years in EQ. For the most part, EQ pet AI was excellent. Pets attacked what you told it to and didn’t attack what you didn’t specify (if you had pet hold). The only issue sometimes was pathing, which is to be expected (I guess, pets should ignore pathing imo, which they do on many emulated EQ servers).

I’ve leveled both a Ranger and a Necro to 80, so I understand your pain. I constantly wished for the EQ interface / system over the current GW2 system. I’m not sure how it is so bad considering how amazing the rest of the game is.

Xirin.8593:

I played a Mage for many years in EQ. For the most part, EQ pet AI was excellent. Pets attacked what you told it to and didn’t attack what you didn’t specify (if you had pet hold). The only issue sometimes was pathing, which is to be expected (I guess, pets should ignore pathing imo, which they do on many emulated EQ servers).

I’ve leveled both a Ranger and a Necro to 80, so I understand your pain. I constantly wished for the EQ interface / system over the current GW2 system. I’m not sure how it is so bad considering how amazing the rest of the game is.

I’ve had almost the exact same thought, comparing a nearly 15 year old experience in EQ to the pets now. It is a little frustrating; I’d almost welcome seeing my pet off fighting Innoruuk by himself and bringing the entire Plane of Hate with him. At least he’d be fighting something.

equally frustrating bug/oversight, the minor trait reanimator actually weakens you in wvw giving your opponents an incredibly easy rally target. seriously needs fixing or at least the option to disable.

@Haz

I thought they removed minions from rallying people?

not as of a week ago, when i last used it to my benefit

Haz.9864:

equally frustrating bug/oversight, the minor trait reanimator actually weakens you in wvw giving your opponents an incredibly easy rally target. seriously needs fixing or at least the option to disable.

Is that true?

Please tell me that’s not true..

Necro minions are plain awful. In PVE we call a minion build: The Aggromancer. In WvW we call it: dead on sight.

Just tested it in Spvp a few minutes ago, its fixed there.

Its tougher to test in wvw, but Ill try this weekend, I know Ive rallied on them multiple times.

Don’t let this thread die! A major bug like this, beeen present since release, is unacceptable.

Especialy since we didn’t get much feedback since like 4-5 month ago when they said : Keep testing it!

I’ll record some video tonight of my pet in PVE doing nothing, and just keep posting it on here.

Mister Mustard.7203:

I’ve had almost the exact same thought, comparing a nearly 15 year old experience in EQ to the pets now. It is a little frustrating; I’d almost welcome seeing my pet off fighting Innoruuk by himself and bringing the entire Plane of Hate with him. At least he’d be fighting something.

Ah, the memories. Standing high up on the PoH wall, accidentally going too far up and your model clipping through the second story’s floor, agro’ing dozens of raid mobs onto your poor, unsuspecting raid. Good times.

But yeah, at least your pet would fight in vain against the first one that hit you.

Pushing it to top! Need an answer!

I’ve experienced this problem a number of times in PvE, especially with my flesh golem. I’ve stopped playing with minions altogether because they’re pretty unreliable.

Yes……quality gaming right there

Yeah this, along with a lot of other stuff needs to be fixed. I never played GW1, but if it is the same development team, did they also get it wrong in that game as well? I just can’t believe a game released in 2012, can have so many issues, and problems games released in the 90s, didn’t have.

jkctmc.8754:

Yeah this, along with a lot of other stuff needs to be fixed. I never played GW1, but if it is the same development team, did they also get it wrong in that game as well? I just can’t believe a game released in 2012, can have so many issues, and problems games released in the 90s, didn’t have.

Minions were amazing in PvE in GW1, and had non of the problems they do in GW1. No one used them in PvP though since it took a corpse to animate minions.

I’m sort of trying to think of worse pet AI out of all MMO’s, but no. GW2 necro minions are pretty much garbage, complete waste of a utility slot.

I went – and then stayed – Condimancer for a bleeding reason. And you lot’ve stated it. Hell, the only “smart” “pets” in this MMO are Mesmer Illusions … and that’s only due to how they’re summoned/targeted. Any “long duration” pet’s got serious issues.

OOTH: pets/minions no longer aggroing every frigging thing under the sun’s a good fix – now to get them to stop diddling themselves in the middle of a fight. Preferably that + finally removing Reanimator (or making it a Major – I took Death Magic for durability, not to have an Undead Ratdog.).

I think it is clear to any necro player that no dev plays a necro, or that dev definitely doent play WvW or sPvP, I wish it wasnt so but thats really how any necro player I know feels

in reality only well or condi builds have much of a chance in WvW, power builds really lack the burst and axe mainhand is still woeful, life transfer is still under powered compared to other self healing classes, and minions are worse than all of that combined

as it stands minions are about as useful as the outmanned buff

I wouldn’t be as bad if at least we knew they were working on it.

They replied about it like 4 month ago, and we didn’t receive an update since then.

Does it really take 4 month to resolve pet AI? Some issue can be complex, but really 4 month?

They said in the next patch they changed AI so they don’t attack any mobs they comes accross.

But they didn’t say anything about the AFK’ing pet. I hope they looked into it.

Still buggy as hell in WvW after patch.

I ran it in sPvP, they runb good 90% of the time. They are really efficient!

Wish it could be like that in WvW.