Guild Wars 2

I didn’t notice it this bad before the patch, but definitely after.
My minion will majority of the time be standing off to the side now, not attacking, unless I tell it to charge.

Is this an issue for anyone else?
Or was it an issue even before the patch? I could have sworn it wasn’t like this before. It might have SOMETIMES, but it seems way too often, now.

Also, hi. First post.
/throwsconfetti

I stopped using it completely.

It seems to get worse the longer you have him out. After about 10 minutes he just stands there even if he’s being attacked. The AI on this thing is definitely broken.

Its a pathing issue. The longer he’s out technically the more likely he is to stop attacking. It tends to fix itself over time and can be worked around in any important content.

Bhawb.7408:

Its a pathing issue. The longer he’s out technically the more likely he is to stop attacking. It tends to fix itself over time and can be worked around in any important content.

Darth Llama.9217:

I stopped using it completely.

It seems to get worse the longer you have him out. After about 10 minutes he just stands there even if he’s being attacked. The AI on this thing is definitely broken.

Ahh, alright. Thanks for the replies, guys! Just glad to see it’s not just me, even though I knew it was highly unlikely I was imagining things.

Blagh. Hope this is fixed soon. Guess I’ll also opt out of using it, myself.

Bhawb.7408:

Its a pathing issue. The longer he’s out technically the more likely he is to stop attacking. It tends to fix itself over time and can be worked around in any important content.

Makes sense.

It can be fixed by making him do the charge, that seems to get him back on track.. at least for a bit. Definitely sounds like a pathing issue.

It won’t help even if I was being attacked. Then I asked it to do his charge and knockdown, it did, then stop doing anything again.

Well its actually pretty op when this happens. I ran off to solo a reactor in Eotm the other day and my flesh golem bugged and stood there doing nothing. The vet decided to aggro on the golem. And because the golem was stuck out of combat and wouldnt attack he basically tanked the vet while constantly resetting his hp permanently. Immortal flesh golem tank op.

This bug is around since February patch.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Necromancer-Minion-AI-bugged-again/first#post3998634

/professionality, precedences, organization, accolades, best game 2012.

All the minions are screwed, especially flesh golem. They should fix it asap.

Holl.3109:

All the minions are screwed, especially flesh golem. They should fix it asap.

Funny jokes.

Btw, don’t expect AI fixes soon, if ever. The problem is that summon AI directly inherits its systems from mob AI. Meaning if they kitten it up, every single AI mob in the entire game gets screwed up.

I still stand by my idea that screwing with the minion ai was a stealth nerf to vampirism minion builds.

all melee minions have the same issue with not attacking.

Thanks for the replies, guys.

And since Feb patch? Agh. I wasn’t super active then, but thanks for the clarification.

Not using the flesh golem anymore since the bugs. It’s just too unreliable :/

It’s been bugged since release. Approaching 2 years now. Don’t hold your breath thinking it will be fixed any time soon.

It does seem to be a pathing issue. He knows to attack, he just doesn’t try or know to walk over to his target. Seems to be the same with all necro melee minions.

Never had a single problem with any other classes’ AI companion abilities: ranger pets on auto defensive, elementalist elementals, guardian spirit weapons (kitten near exact clones of necro minions, work perfectly), etc. kittenes me off more than any other thing in this game how they can let this go for so long.

It was fixed for a little while and while it was tanky vamp minion masters were gods.

NeXeD.3042:

It was fixed for a little while and while it was tanky vamp minion masters were gods.

1) Not true.
2) You can get AI to work just fine by not moving very far while melee minions are summoned.

So it really didn’t change anything on that front if you are being mindful.

Your suggestions to wait to summon them did help, but I do remember them being much better for a little while to the point I prefer ed them over the dhuum terror build.

NeXeD.3042:

Your suggestions to wait to summon them did help, but I do remember them being much better for a little while to the point I prefer ed them over the dhuum terror build.

AI was much better for a while yes, I was referencing the vamp. AI has gone through a weird set of changes.

There has been a nice period in which minions worked pretty nicely, when the Minion Master became part of the PVP metagame.
I can assume that Anet left kittened the minion AI because they couldn’t manage to stop the moans for the “petting zoo” meta.

*Disclaimer: Yes minions will still bug out, but not as often, and at times, could end up attacking different (more than 1) targets.

Just thought I should log in and advise on a temporary solution to this minion ai issue until arenanet finally gets the chance to fix them properly. Whenever you are in-combat and your minions forget just what it is they should be doing, you need to (make an attempt to what I would call) ‘reset them’ as if you were out-of-combat by having them return to their out-of-combat default position around your character. We all know that if something argos onto your afk character while your minions are standing guard, all of them will attempt to defend you by attacking the threat. This is what you want to do with your minions while you are heavily engaged in-combat.

Well how do you attempt to reset your minions while in-combat? Depending on the weapon you are using it’s actually quite easy. Simply de-select your target. That means no autotargeting at all. Go into your options tab and uncheck it if you have to. As long as you have a target selected, your minions will continue to take a very long time to return to their default area. Once they reach, or get close enough to their default position, they usually start attacking any threat to your character and you should now be free to select a target again.

Now fighting without a target selected can be a real problem, again depending on the weapon you are using. You are only able to reliably land all skills on the staff, provided that you can manually aim your auto attack. Other than that, it’s either dagger1, scepter2 or axe3 until your minion respond to the wake up call. And remember, your minions are only as fast (well just slightly faster) as you are. If they have a great deal of distance to cover to reach you, then warhorn5 can help speed them up to cut down on the response time. That also means that if you are crippled or chilled then so are your minions.

Bhawb.7408:

Holl.3109:

All the minions are screwed, especially flesh golem. They should fix it asap.

Funny jokes.

Btw, don’t expect AI fixes soon, if ever. The problem is that summon AI directly inherits its systems from mob AI. Meaning if they kitten it up, every single AI mob in the entire game gets screwed up.

Do ranger/mesmer pets inherit their AI the same way? I assume not for the ranger, their pets are pretty good at negotiating terrain relative to our minions.

Tried Flesh Golem last week, since I haven’t PvE’d on my necro in forever and decided to do some mapping. Was really disappointed at how useless it is now. If I was still a condi build, it’d be even worse, since FG always helped with attackable objects, where condimancers’ damage is nerfed to almost being nonexistent.

Wouldn’t count on it getting fixed any time soon. Mesmers have been waiting 6-7 months for a fix to our iWarden. Still broken and useless despite several promises for it to be fixed.

Really sucks for minionmancers, though. That’s a lot of damage they’re losing out on.

Yeah. Just got my 2nd Engineer to 80, so I hopped back to finish leveling my 2nd Necro and noticed my Flesh Golem has become significantly worse.

When my golem is unresponsive i jump into a shallow puddle to punish him.

Mine used to work about 50% of the time and now it’s more like 5%. Melee minions have become 100% useless. Figuring out a Rube Goldberg hack to get around the fact that they are obviously 100% bugged is not an acceptable solution.

Terok.7315:

Do ranger/mesmer pets inherit their AI the same way? I assume not for the ranger, their pets are pretty good at negotiating terrain relative to our minions.

Ranger yes, Mesmer not sure. The one thing about Mesmer is that since their summons are out for such a short time the pathing AI issues rarely affect them.

Ranger gets a lot of help because they have buttons to screw around with, and can also swap pets. So instead of waiting for them to have to die, you can just swap your pet out.

Minions have the issue the worst because they are out until they die, and in certain game modes that can be a long time. I suggest in PvE content you just desummon them between areas (especially since skipping content is so common), and only summon them once you are ready for a pull (also please for the love of god don’t be the one to pull with minions out). In PvP try to limit how much you take a path your minions can’t follow you on.

I don’t think it has anything to do directly with time spent summoned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuI1A_SthCs&feature=player_detailpage#t=77

He summons a fresh golem right as the match starts and it bugs out immediately upon reaching midfight. Doesn’t do a single auto attack before it dies 2 minutes later.

Testing this really quick, there is some “feature” with companions that makes them disengage if you get far enough away from them. Presumably so you can keep your summon and not get locked in combat when you just want to run away. Well I tried it out with some of my elementalist summons, earth elemental. Had a mob agro and hit me, the pet auto defended, then I ran away. At a certain distance, he disengaged and came running over to me. I then directly attacked another mob or two. Guess what? Earth elemental stood there dumb as a flesh golem for the last ~25 seconds of his life before expiring as I killed 2 or 3 mobs. I tried it some more with an air elemental but couldn’t get it to bug out. Maybe because it’s ranged, or because it didn’t walk back to me but instantly ported when it disengaged. Curiously, my guardian’s sword spirit weapon would NEVER disengage, no matter how far I ran.

So IMO the problem is this engage/disengage logic based on range is FUBAR. You just only see it with necro minions because besides rangers, who have complete control anyway, everyone else just summons their stuff AT the fight, and it dies or expires without ever traveling to another fight. So in the case of the above video, I think when the warrior shot him from range at the start of the mid fight, the golem AI made the choice “do not engage.” (he’s at range and the necro hasn’t attacked anyone, I shouldn’t run off) Then the necro quickly moved far away after the engineer. The AI however was stuck on “disengage” and never got out of it.

So indirectly time increases the likelihood of the bug occurring due to more “disengage” happenings.

Its an issue of pathing, including what you are saying (but not necessarily limited to that). If you sit on one point an entire game, no problems at all, if you try to move from point to point (even taking a very nice path) they are liable to mess up a bit.

Generally speaking, just leave them desummoned when you don’t need them (this should be how you operate anyway for everything except bone/blood fiend).

Bhawb.7408:

If you sit on one point an entire game, no problems at all, if you try to move from point to point (even taking a very nice path) they are liable to mess up a bit.

I’m not sure this is the case, as when I did the test with the earth elemental, I never moved more than maybe 2500-3000 units from (rough estimate, just far enough to get him to disengage), and was killing mobs with him bugged directly on top of the spot that I had summoned him. All over flat ground of course.

Regardless, if this is something beyond their coding capability to fix they need to completely rework the summon cast time, duration, and cooldowns so that being “permanent” isn’t just a liability. IE: 1/2 sec summon cast time, ~1 minute duration, 20-40 second cooldowns.

I thought we were getting a flesh/risen shark for water combat… not sure what happened to that idea – i would like a flesh shark for underwater combat. Having only 1 underwater elite kinda sucks.

it is quite annoying thats for sure what is a necro without his minions wolf packing his enemies T_T

to me the issue is the pathing to the pets the 2 ai dont want to engage eachother for some reason some times u can drag the enemie into the path of the pet and it will engage

other times ive had the npc chace me only to the run back to my first tank pet and engage it all the wile it was just standing there waiting for the npc to come to it just my 2 cents any way

Minion Master is Iconic to GW1 and an absolute joke in GW2..The Flesh Golem was never this bad, Its bad enough that minions suck against anything other than trash mobs.
As for the water issue, why dont all minions die upon entering the water? Why is Flesh Golem so special..does he weigh so much he cant swim? He is undead so he doesnt need to breathe underwater. What makes him die and the others survive?

It is still not fixed a bug with Flesh of the Master. If you have trait Flesh of the Master when you pass in the ruined state of the pets disappear. Fix the AI ??is impossible for them, too weak programmers.Waiting two years is not the limit, they will never fix this bug.

SoGut.1506:

It is still not fixed a bug with Flesh of the Master. If you have trait Flesh of the Master when you pass in the ruined state of the pets disappear. Fix the AI ??is impossible for them, too weak programmers.Waiting two years is not the limit, they will never fix this bug.

I doubt it’s the programmers, I think it’s more like a risk-reward thing ( in other words management decisions). Right now the pathing of minions is tied to mob AI (which in my opinion is stupid, but I don’t know what’s going in the head of the software architect and he might have a good reason for it) and if you change even a very small part of it, it can have unwanted consquences on any mob on any map . That’s a very high risk, the reward on the other hand is a fix for 3 non-obligatory skills of a single class.

Right now the pathing of minions is tied to mob AI

Well, funny you should say that, I have face-tanked plenty a melee NPC mobs in my time, and none of them stood there waiting for me to kill it and not attacking.

However what I do suspect is they tied Golem AI to a RANGED mob NPC, which would explain the following:

• walk along a straight line
  * begin attacking from range 1 npc
  * see golem freeze in it’s tracks, staring down my mob
  * observe npc mob approach
  * observe golem start meleeing the now in melee range NPC
  * observe golem remain rooted in place (dumbfounded, gobsmacked, zomg what happened!) while NPC mob gets some distance from the golem.

Except minions have added aggro patterns on top. They have the core AI of a mob, but they also act like a “group” of mobs (hence why you can “pull” the minions from a necro by attacking the necro), and they have some unique AI from the Necromancer. Back when things were a bit weirder, they had nearly a full page worth of aggro instructions that they followed, which I imagine are still all there.

Does it help if you use the active attack skills (e.g. tell the golem to charge at the start of the fight could get the golem to engage with auto-attacks)?

I know pretty much nothing about necromancer, so sorry if this is a total noob question. I’m slowly learning in my spare time to help my son with his minion-mancer.

Yes and no. Sometimes active skills seem to “reset” the pathing issues, sometimes it actually causes pathing errors, and most of the time it just doesn’t do anything.

The only surefire way I’ve found to ensure my minions will attack correctly in combat is to make sure that they have come to a complete stop before initiating the attack. (Melee minions, that is. Ranged minions have no problem whatsoever.)

Since I’m having that problem after switching to my Necro I can assume it’s still not fixed.
Noticed it in ranked PVP. Golem just standing there looking stupid. Well, I’ll try the ‘full stop before attack’ temporary solution but it’s really a handicap.

What an utter joke this “elite” skill is now. Just completely unusable when it wasn’t this way before.

Getting the flesh golem to charge seems to cause the most issues for me, generally its about 50/50 after that point if it decides to wig out. At least until that enemy is dead. So I save charge until its really really beneficial. Bone minions blow up real good, and thats about all I need from them.

Seems like it could be exploited, cause if you were doing PvE and it became stuck…the AI would go for your pet and not hit it.