Guild Wars 2

Minions in GW1 would at times have issues with responsiveness in PvP as well. I played a lot of fort aspenwood as an MM, and there were a couple of specific corners where all your minions could get stuck.

The difference in GW2 is that minions are much more valuable since this game has a much more action oriented combat system where your minions abilities and attacks can have a big impact on how well the fight goes for you. There simply is no excuse for bone minions to idle behind you when the enemy you need them next to is far in front of you, or for your elite skill (flesh golem) to idle next to you while you’re downed when his attacks would let you rally.

Minion AI simply needs to be more responsive for PvP. Reverting the AI back to it’s release version for PvP exclusively might help tremendously.

striker.3704:

Minions in GW1 would at times have issues with responsiveness in PvP as well. I played a lot of fort aspenwood as an MM, and there were a couple of specific corners where all your minions could get stuck.

The difference in GW2 is that minions are much more valuable since this game has a much more action oriented combat system where your minions abilities and attacks can have a big impact on how well the fight goes for you. There simply is no excuse for bone minions to idle behind you when the enemy you need them next to is far in front of you, or for your elite skill (flesh golem) to idle next to you while you’re downed when his attacks would let you rally.

Minion AI simply needs to be more responsive for PvP. Reverting the AI back to it’s release version for PvP exclusively might help tremendously.

Minion needs a nerf in PvP. If you want to make the AI more responsive, then it would need even more of a nerf.

When you agree or not isn’t the point. Whenever an AI (ie minimal skill) build becomes strong in PvP, it is nerfed. Minions, turrets, and spirit rangers have all seem that happen in the past and will happen again in the future.

style.6173:

striker.3704:

Minions in GW1 would at times have issues with responsiveness in PvP as well. I played a lot of fort aspenwood as an MM, and there were a couple of specific corners where all your minions could get stuck.

The difference in GW2 is that minions are much more valuable since this game has a much more action oriented combat system where your minions abilities and attacks can have a big impact on how well the fight goes for you. There simply is no excuse for bone minions to idle behind you when the enemy you need them next to is far in front of you, or for your elite skill (flesh golem) to idle next to you while you’re downed when his attacks would let you rally.

Minion AI simply needs to be more responsive for PvP. Reverting the AI back to it’s release version for PvP exclusively might help tremendously.

Minion needs a nerf in PvP. If you want to make the AI more responsive, then it would need even more of a nerf.

When you agree or not isn’t the point. Whenever an AI (ie minimal skill) build becomes strong in PvP, it is nerfed. Minions, turrets, and spirit rangers have all seem that happen in the past and will happen again in the future.

nerf a minnion that dies in 2 hits wow. why make a useless minnion more useless?
all they need is a AI fix they will be ok not a nerf -_-

style.6173:

striker.3704:

Minions in GW1 would at times have issues with responsiveness in PvP as well. I played a lot of fort aspenwood as an MM, and there were a couple of specific corners where all your minions could get stuck.

The difference in GW2 is that minions are much more valuable since this game has a much more action oriented combat system where your minions abilities and attacks can have a big impact on how well the fight goes for you. There simply is no excuse for bone minions to idle behind you when the enemy you need them next to is far in front of you, or for your elite skill (flesh golem) to idle next to you while you’re downed when his attacks would let you rally.

Minion AI simply needs to be more responsive for PvP. Reverting the AI back to it’s release version for PvP exclusively might help tremendously.

Whenever an AI (ie minimal skill)

You need to play the game to add to the discussion.

Reverting AI to release won’t work, it was changed for good reason, namely that it was a complete pain in the butt to work with.

The first thing they need to do is implement AI that just flat out works. The current system would be close to fine if it just simply never bugged out, fix that first. After that I honestly think minions would be fine, there COULD be other changes, but I think they would be unnecessary if minions just attacked consistently.

Most of the problems with MM builds being too strong have literally nothing to do with minions and everything to do with the fact that ANet has a fetish for throwing more and more sustain at us instead of giving us other forms of defense. After a certain point this becomes unkillable in 1v1s, you regain HP/LF too quickly for an enemy to burn through it, and all you need is a useful set of utilities to 1v1. MM happens to bring a good set of 1v1 utilities, but it isn’t MM that’s the problem, its all the crap ANet keeps throwing at us for sustain that only adds to 1v1 sustain.

GW2 minion AI is glitchy as heck!!!

They don’t attack your target, nor do they attack monsters attacking you. Activating tehri abilities only procs occasionally.

The Flesh Golem especially has a problem with standing around twiddling its thumbs instead of fighting. The shade does zero damage, the scorpion gets lost, and the bone minions get killed before they enter melee range. All in all, the whole system is poorly designed.

GW 1, had many similar issues, but at least you had many more of them and they could at least body block enemies as they were milling about being useless idiots. Now, they are too few, as well as being too stupid.

Increase the minion cap, and make some new interesting ones. Death knights, banshees, minions you can specialize yourself, anything…. Anything but the same glitchness we got to deal with now.

style.6173:

striker.3704:

Minions in GW1 would at times have issues with responsiveness in PvP as well. I played a lot of fort aspenwood as an MM, and there were a couple of specific corners where all your minions could get stuck.

The difference in GW2 is that minions are much more valuable since this game has a much more action oriented combat system where your minions abilities and attacks can have a big impact on how well the fight goes for you. There simply is no excuse for bone minions to idle behind you when the enemy you need them next to is far in front of you, or for your elite skill (flesh golem) to idle next to you while you’re downed when his attacks would let you rally.

Minion AI simply needs to be more responsive for PvP. Reverting the AI back to it’s release version for PvP exclusively might help tremendously.

Minion needs a nerf in PvP. If you want to make the AI more responsive, then it would need even more of a nerf.

When you agree or not isn’t the point. Whenever an AI (ie minimal skill) build becomes strong in PvP, it is nerfed. Minions, turrets, and spirit rangers have all seem that happen in the past and will happen again in the future.

I wish I could downvote this post. MM has an easy learning curve, yes, but it is actually not easy to fully master. It has a high skill cap. You have to be aware what each minion is doing, what your targets are, what your targets are doing, which minion skills to use on what targets, ect. This isn’t a whack-a-mole playstyle where you either leave them auto attacking or brainlessly smash all the minion skill buttons on a target and hope for the best. Just because something seems simple, doesn’t mean it’s requires minimun skill.

I opened another thread about this issue before I found this one so I will also give my say in here too:

Sometimes only one or two of my minions auto attack in my defense when I am being hit. The rest just stand there doing nothing, possibly picking their noses.

Flesh Golem is the minion that for me least works correctly. It often doesn’t register combat and even after activating its skill, it still won’t auto attack my target. I have even tried not doing anything and just use the golem skill over and over, to see if it ever responds, and it doesn’t work when it’s in that mood.

Sometimes they don’t follow me well. I keep running away from a mob, as I often do while I do map completion, as they stay behind trying to kill a monster even long after I got very very far away from said monster. And not all uniformly as some return but others stay behind.

And I wish I had some skill in the F bar like rangers do to call back my minions, instead of being forced to switch to a non-minion skill in my skill bar, which can only be done when out of combat, to avoid unpleasant situations in dungeons. I sincerely don’t understand why we are not given such an option. It really won’t make us too powerful to be able to call back our durpies. But it will be a boon in the sense that, we wouldn’t be so inconvenient then as we are now without such. MM necromancers are feared in dungeons for frequently messing with party strategies because our minions go do their thing and we can’t call them back.

Will ANet ever improve minion AI and allow us actual control of them? I understand that they may have wanted rangers to be the only ones to have control over their pets, but if that is the case, the least they can do for necromancers is fix the minion AI to make up for it. As it is now, minion AI is not consistently reliable. It’s not unusuable, but it is extremely frustrating to see them bug out so frequently.

Anet has already designed a pretty good system for controlling AI henchmen in GW1, they should just polish it up a little and give it to the Necromancer.

Right now playing the Necromancer is line being part of a cult or religion, because you got to always pray that your minions aren’t doing something dumb.

If they can’t fix the AI, at least give us more minions to work with, so some of them will actually do what they are supposed to while the others get lost or do their usual minion foolishness.

We don’t need controls, their current AI system would be fine if it just didn’t bug.

Bhawb.7408:

We don’t need controls, their current AI system would be fine if it just didn’t bug.

I wouldn’t be saddened if we aren’t given controls. But I have noticed as a ranger that when my pet bugs a little, I can rely on my very minuscalr set of controls to avoid further hindrance. However, the times that my pet acts in an unexpected manner have been very very rare on my hunter. I can only count 2 or 3, and they were long ago.

But on necro, our minion AI bugs are plenty and frequent, and we seem to have no way to make up for it. I understand that bugs happen. In fact, sometimes fixing a bug just makes another one pop in it’s place. And if you are terribly unlucky, you fail fixing the bug and get another. Wee! Two for one! So I thought that perhaps a simple set of F bar controls that affect all your minions would help as backup for whenever their AI fails. Perhaps it’s not as good an idea as it sounds in my head, but at least I would be able to call them back to my side without having to wait for me to get out of combat to switch skills, or just patiently wait for them to die while the rest of the party burn kitten into the back of my head with their seething hatred of MM necros.

Another idea I have is that, okay, no controls, and just fixing bugs, but how would that deal with the problem of not being able to call them back to my side or cancel them somehow? Maybe make it possible to explode them (not counting our little bone minions as they can already do that)? I’ve seen it on engineers (I recently got one to 80, yay!). If they lost sight of their turret, they can explode them, and place their turret summoning skill immediately on CD. I’m not wanting to make them like engineers, but I think that is a very simple way of dealing with that peculiar nuisance.

In any case, I would still be very happy if they just fix the bugs at the very least, especially that of Flesh Golem. I love that ugly lumbering beast, but it really annoys me when it just stands there doing nada.

WSG Delen.9203:

You and others are saying (or at least implying) they are unusable under ALL circumstances which is complete and utter BS. Not only that, but there is the general extrapolation that if there is an issue with minion AI then there would notionally be fallout for other forms of subordinates as well since I suspect they all share a large portion of the base behaviours.

If there is a major game breaking issue as some seem to make out, then there are at least some of us that have not witnessed it despite having put in collectively at least 1000’s (if not 10000’s) of hours with our characters. If that is not “doing the work” then I don’t know what is.

I am pretty certain that if I were to dig deep into one area or another of this game I could find an argument to say that some Feature X is broken, that it is game breaking and should be fixed and then proceed to B&M about it till the cows come home (without giving any solid details) and also find that the very same feature is not seen as broken nor game breaking by another section of the community.

At this point in time, there have been little or no specific details about how the AI is supposed to be broken so if anyone is “just talking” it is those that are complaining that it is broken. At the very least provide links to the threads that offer details to support your premise rather than simply dismissing the personal experiences of players who have not put an insignificant amount of time into playing the game and have been playing it since before release.

Whether A-Net are likely to act on such evidence is moot at this point in the discussion, since it has been mostly just hot air so far.

Did you notice the latest release notes:

Profession Skills
Fixed a bug that prevented minions from quickly targeting your attack target.

Note that there are no special conditions or exceptions listed. Not even the oft-used “under rare circumstances” or “under certain circumstances”. Unqualified: there was a bug that kept minions from “quickly” targeting our targets, arguably under a wide variety of conditions.