What surprise me the most is that they went for the Ai with health bar type minion, many games have done minions well but they don’t delve completly into the undependant AI-based minion type.
Lets us look at some examples:
Team Fortress 2 – Engineer’s Turret:
- Imobile (No problems with path finding or walking away)
- Can be picked up and moved freely (Solves the lack of mobility)
- Extreamly simple minded (Makes it predictable by both the engineer and the enemy)
- Strongest attack in the game (Makes up for the lack of intelligence)
- Requires player attention once a while for refuel and repair.
- No hard cooldown limit, instead requires the player to focus on getting it back up (like a channel, except it can be paused).
However, half of the classes in TF2 have methodes to deal with the turrets power, such as:
- Invulnerability.
- Curved attacks that lets you attack from out of sight.
- Longer range, leting them hit the turret from outside it’s sensor range.
- Zappers, the Spy-class have access to a special weapon just to deal with turrets.
- Players can change class at any time durring the game, letting them counter the well placed and long lived turrets.
A lot of the points above don’t fit well with GuildWars 2, so the stationary powerfull permanent turrets don’t work well. But I think there is a lot to learn here.
League of Legends – Azir’s sand soldier
- Short life time, even shorter cooldown that starts right away
- Invulnerable and untargetable
- Imobie
- Can be moved with a medium-long cooldown ability
- No AI, they attack when the player attacks, extending his range and damage.
- Short range
- Scales with player stats
In this case, the minion mechanic is designed around a frontline concept. Your character will use them to zone enemies back and the counterplay is to get around them and get to the player in the back to take him out or attacking from range. Since the minions are limited to only act when the Azir acts, you never feel like you got defeated by an AI, and the player playing Azir have to be active durring the whole fight.
However, this mechanic depend heavily on the slow movement and short range of the game, if players moved as quickly as you do in Guild Wars 2 and had as long range as you can have they would easily counter this character. However, there is still alot to learn here.
For the last example, lets look at something that moves, and have a healthbar.
League of Legends – Annie’s bear Tibbers
- High health, needs tons of focus dmg to take down.
- Deals pulsing dmg passivly in a small AoE.
- AI goes for the enemy you attack.
- AI movement can be overrided by reactivating the ability.
- Cooldown starts on cast.
- The main functionality of the skill is on cast (AoE stund and DMG, much like suply crate)
There are a few important points here, especially the last one. Since the main function is on cast, even if your minion gets bursted down, the skill have done it’s job. It is also important for a movement based AI to let the player override the AI in case it walks off like an idiot. The minion main dmg after summon is a passive short range AoE, this solves the problem of depending on the AI attacking when it should. And since the cooldown starts on cast you don’t feel punished for keeping it alive.
Conclusion
I think the follwoing points should be used when redesigning Minions in Guild Wars 2:
- Cooldown starts on cast. (This is VERY important, if you are punished for keeping your minion alive then playing with minions will feel extreamly unforgiving and lack fun.)
- Main function on cast. (If your minions can die, having them destroyed right away should not completly devalue the skill, they are still victim to normal skill counters like interupts)
- AI override. (If your Minion is dependant on AI, let us override it when it goes wrong)
- Don’t Stack AI (Your Minions should not depend on AI for both movement and attacks, pick one)
- Having Invulnerable minions is possible (There are already Banners and Ventari-Tablets in game, and they work worderfully, just make sure that the minion effect requires input from the player, or is not in heavy need of counterplay, aka support abilities).
