Guild Wars 2

Is it me or did the minions ai become better?

mine all vanish … bug? … so I would say NO!

The AI isn’t noticeably better, but now they all die when you have flesh of the master and are downed, so that’s cool

Solus ..having the same problem ..it happens every time you cross a sub-area..it seems

I’m quite new to the Necromancer, but I’ve noticed that all my minions are lagging behind me quite considerably a lot of the time. Such to the extent that I’ll get into a battle and they’ll kind of stop and not do anything. I need to literally pull them right into a mob for them to start attacking…

Shadow Fiend and Flesh Golem appear to be very reluctant to enter a battle… But sometimes they’re really on form and really eager? And they will charge in quite valiantly so…. I don’t know what to think?

Its pathing. It is highly tied to their AI, but pathing issues tend to be what messes them up.

Why not Fix? It is impossible to play for the necromancer MM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OedJ4oqpcU

Because minion AI is tied to all AI in the game, and its not an easy fix.

If AI pets bound AI to all of the game. Why ranger pets not buggy?

I’m waiting for 2 years, when the correct AI?

The state of minion ai

On release:

-Minions occasionally get stuck on terrain, sometimes slow to attack.
-Minions don’t attack static objects.
-Various/all minion traits don’t work as intended, including Flesh of the Master.
-Minions are super aggressive. Some minions, like Flesh Golem, take very long to disengage.

One year ago:

-Many of the previous problems from the game’s release,
except for the minion trait issues, and minion aggression which are now (mostly) fixed.
-Leash range added to minions.
-Minion aggro mechanics changed.
-Minions now stand around not attacking 50% of the time.
-Minions spawned from Lich Form tend to run back and forth between their transformed master and their target.

September patch:

-All of the previous unresolved problems, however…..
-….Flesh of the master now kills all minions if you are downed.
-Flesh Golem is slower, charges less fast, and can no longer do a wall-charge for additional damage.

Great track record Anet, we’re moving backward!

SoGut.1506:

If AI pets bound AI to all of the game. Why ranger pets not buggy?

Well if the ranger forums are correct the ranger pet also has its “issues”…

Ranger pets are very reliable atm

Least rangers can order their pets to attack and not just stare off into the distant void…

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The state of minion ai

On release:

-Minions occasionally get stuck on terrain, sometimes slow to attack.
-Minions don’t attack static objects.
-Various/all minion traits don’t work as intended, including Flesh of the Master.

You missed the biggest issue which people tend to forget, and that was that minions were super aggressive, to the point where Flesh Golem would sometimes follow people all the way to mid from a side point. This was a major thing they fixed.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

One year ago:

-All the previous problems from the game’s release,
except for the minion trait issues, most of which are now fixed.
-Minions now stand around not attacking 50% of the time.
-Minions spawned from Lich Form tend to run back and forth between their transformed master and their target.

Again, not strictly true. In addition to fixing their hyper aggression, they also made it so that they had a leash range (around 1900, forgot the exact range) and so minions themselves would not be the target of mob aggro. Also around 1.5 years ago, minions worked 100% of the time if you understood their fairly strange aggro mechanics. In attempting to fix this by making them work in a much simpler manner, they ended up removing the guaranteed but difficult methods of forcing them to attack.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

September patch:

-All the previous problems, except for the trait issues, however…..
-….Flesh of the master now kills all minions if you are downed.
-Flesh Golem is slower, charges less fast, and can no longer do a wall-charge for additional damage.

Great track record Anet, we’re moving backward!

We aren’t at all moving backwards. If you want to do overviews by this you can’t miss the major strides they’ve made. A lot of the issues of “backwards” movement were due to fixing other issues that had side effects.

Bhawb.7408:

You missed the biggest issue which people tend to forget, and that was that minions were super aggressive, to the point where Flesh Golem would sometimes follow people all the way to mid from a side point. This was a major thing they fixed.

I had forgotten about that one. I’ll add it to the list.

Bhawb.7408:

Again, not strictly true. In addition to fixing their hyper aggression, they also made it so that they had a leash range (around 1900, forgot the exact range) and so minions themselves would not be the target of mob aggro. Also around 1.5 years ago, minions worked 100% of the time if you understood their fairly strange aggro mechanics. In attempting to fix this by making them work in a much simpler manner, they ended up removing the guaranteed but difficult methods of forcing them to attack.

I’ll add that as well.

Bhawb.7408:

We aren’t at all moving backwards. If you want to do overviews by this you can’t miss the major strides they’ve made. A lot of the issues of “backwards” movement were due to fixing other issues that had side effects.

In the end what matters is the current state of minion ai. And the current state is that they are often unresponsive, standing around and not attacking when we want them to. This is worse than how they behaved on release. So in that respect, it is definitely a few steps backward (even if they solved many other issues along the way).

Bhawb.7408:

We aren’t at all moving backwards. If you want to do overviews by this you can’t miss the major strides they’ve made. A lot of the issues of “backwards” movement were due to fixing other issues that had side effects.

I can’t believe there is someone actually DEFENDING necro minion AI.

It is probably the single most embarrassing thing programmed in GW2.

Even WoW 1.0 had better AI on hunter pets than GW2.

If you can’t solve pet pathing in an MMO in 2014 – two full years after the release of a game – then that’s just total incompetency or neglect.

Just because one poster’s standards are really low doesn’t change reality.

I’m not defending it. But if you want to make big posts about how AI has progressed, you can’t avoid the fact that the AI has gotten “better” since launch, its had numerous fixes and is in a better state. Nothing about that means its perfect, it just means it isn’t the same or worse than at launch.

GW2’s pathfinding in general is insufficient for the game. I’m not exactly sure how the monsters and npc’s are pathfinding right now, but it seems that they have a very simplified algorithm. It doesn’t look like they are using nav meshes, and if they are, then the ai is simply not picking it’s paths very well. The ai especially has problems with stepping up on meshes, and navigating around placed objects (large or small). Just today my Flesh Golem got stuck on the side of a mountain at the Oasis in Dry Top… so far that is the biggest thing I’ve seen him get stuck on.

Bhawb is right though, there are of course things they’ve fixed. Important things even. But we, the players, tend to judge it by the end result, which is also not entirely unfair.

Yep. I am not entirely sure how the AI navigates things, but you can screw it up very predictably in certain areas.

I’m curious about what sort of standard we can use for how minion AI should act. Not attacking structures and reliable aggro mechanics seem to me like problems with obvious answers that just haven’t been found yet. What truly puzzles me is what to do about pathing. GW2 combat allows players a decent amount of freedom of motion and npc enemies/pets don’t have that same freedom. In a lot of other mmos that I’ve played, the way players and npcs navigate terrain is almost 1 to 1 in terms of critical limitations. But right now, the difference in mobility advantages that players have versus npcs/mobs is tremendous especially when using dodge and movement speed buffs for offensive positioning. I can’t really imagine a fix for this outside of using a different ruleset for how successful attacks are registered for npcs to compensate for player mobility. It may just be my inexperience with designing combat systems, but it seems like a real quagmire to me, especially since other mmos, that I’ve played, haven’t had similar issues.

Its actually not that rare (although maybe in MMORPGs) that NPCs and players have different movement abilities. The issue with minions isn’t their ability to traverse terrain, its more so that ANet has (somehow) coded it such that they get stuck not on the terrain itself but on internal workings.

As for how the AI should work, it should be very simple. They do absolutely nothing except attack the target you are currently attacking, starting from the beginning of your cast (if targeted skill) or the first target you damage if nothing is targeted (untargeted damage would only affect aggro if no aggro target is currently selected). This means If you sit around doing nothing, so do your minions, even if you or they are attacked. If you target someone and cast a 1s cast time skill, the second you start casting they move to attack. And they continue attacking the target until the target is dead, or targeting is lost, in both cases returning to their standby positions around you.

Which is nearly what they do now, although they have a few extra ways to aggro right now that I think are redundant and also serve really only to give them the possibility for mixups.

And the issue is that even a “simple” AI system isn’t necessarily easy to do. Which is why they hired a consultant who works solely with AI to help them out.

Another problem with GW2’s pathing, is that the game has very large maps, with so many obstacles in them. In games with an environment that has a smaller scope, you can easily place nodes as hints for the ai to get around the environment. But when you’ve got such a large terrain, you need other ways for the ai to find its way (that’s where nav meshes enter the picture). But then you still run into 2 problems:

• The Ai bumps its head against overhanging objects. Most enemies in games have some sort of head-detection, so they don’t walk through objects that they can’t fit underneath. When this occurs, the ai needs to compute a new way around the object.

• The Ai runs into low objects on the floor. The ai bumps into these seemingly insignificant objects, that any player easily hops over. The ai needs some way to climb over these objects. Left 4 Dead solves this issue pretty well, by allowing it’s ai to swarm over small objects, and even jump and climb over objects that are not too high. Additionally, Left 4 Dead has invisible ladder objects, that the level designer can place to allow the ai to climb any object, no matter how tall. This could be a big solution to one of GW2’s biggest problems. Height differences. If monsters and minions were allowed to climb over things, we’d no longer need monsters that turn invulnerable when you hit them from a different floor. They would simply be able to compute a path to the player, and climb up to reach him.

I created this Necromancer initially as a mule, back when the bank was too small for junk collectors like me. Since I had a Conditionmancer, if you will, I made this Necro into a Minion Master, or am attempting to do so, as he is only level 65 atm.

I recently started playing this character and have noticed that the minions just stop in the middle of the road and all the minion skills reset. I am in the Fields of Ruin and am at the Ogre Road WP. I am attempting to work on the reknown heart: Harass the ogres of Foulbear. I enable all of my minions and cross the bridge and engage the first ogre and his pet, but my pets/minions are not with me. Why? Because they stopped in the middle of the bridge, except for the Flesh Golem, who is running in place, and all of the minion skills are in the process of recharging. WHY??? A Minion Master is not much of a Minion Master if he/she doesn’t have any minions to master.

I have called out in Map Chat asking if anyone else is having the problem and I got one response saying that his minions seem to disappear in certain areas of the map. It doesn’t seem to matter where I am when the issue happens. When talking to this person, I was located in Diessa Plateau, just north of the Blasted Moores, and was about to attack a ghost infested stairway in an attempt to get to the POI. I set up my minions at the bottom of the stairs, went up the stairs to attack, and again, found myself without any minions and all of my minion skills were recharging.

I am 65 years old and have been playing GW for 8 1/2 years. I play it simply for relaxation from work and now that I am retired, for something to do during the day. I am not into “why the AI doesn’t work” and other types of problems. I do not know what the “pathing” issues mean, though reading the posts seems to lead me to believe they are talking about how the minions get back to me if I jump off of a bridge and the minions have to find a path to get back to me. Simply put, I just know that the minions should at least last the length of a bridge or a stairway or there is no sense to being a Minion Master.

I’d assume you have Flesh of the Master (the Death Magic trait) equipped. The issue is the trait had a change so that whenever you equip the trait, it desummons any minions that are currently alive, presumably so that you can re-summon them with the added HP in a bit. Unfortunately, however they coded, it, it now means that whenever certain changes happen to the minions, they are desummoned.

Basically, in your case, chances are when you cross the bridge the minions change level. When they change level, it changes their HP, which triggers the Flesh of the Master’s new “feature”, and desummons them. Same occurs when you are downed (I’d imagine that downed state is programmed to set you at a certain level, and it changes the minion level, or something of that nature).

So, until its fixed, don’t use Flesh of the Master in minion builds in PvE, except in situations where you will never change level.

Thank you for explaining that situation. I will look at the traits, which I have selected, and make the change.

I appreciate your time to help me in this matter.

Rhok Mhaan.4930:

I am not into “why the AI doesn’t work” and other types of problems. I do not know what the “pathing” issues mean, though reading the posts seems to lead me to believe they are talking about how the minions get back to me if I jump off of a bridge and the minions have to find a path to get back to me.

No, it’s way more basic than that. If you walk a few steps, your minions have to follow you. Which means that they have to find a path from where they are now, to where you are. For any ordinary player, this is simple, you just walk forward. But for ai this isn’t that simple. There might be stones on the road, and they could get stuck on those. So they either need to move around them, or over them. That is what we mean when we talk about ‘pathing’. The ai calculates the most efficient way from where they are, around the obstacle, and to you.

When you hop down a bridge, or cliff, this of course becomes a bit more problematic. The ai might have to take a very long road to reach you, or there may not be a path at all. But you still need to have your minions at your side. Often this is then solved by the computer simply teleporting the minions down to you.

The biggest problem however, is when you need your minions to attack your enemies. Not all of the terrain is flat, in fact most of it isn’t. So the worst case scenario is a Flesh Golem doing it’s charge, and getting stuck on a little pebble in the road… which is what’s happening a lot in the game right now. It’s infuriating when you’re in combat, and you look behind you to see your minions stuck on something silly.

Bhawb.7408:

I’d assume you have Flesh of the Master (the Death Magic trait) equipped. The issue is the trait had a change so that whenever you equip the trait, it desummons any minions that are currently alive, presumably so that you can re-summon them with the added HP in a bit. Unfortunately, however they coded, it, it now means that whenever certain changes happen to the minions, they are desummoned.

Basically, in your case, chances are when you cross the bridge the minions change level. When they change level, it changes their HP, which triggers the Flesh of the Master’s new “feature”, and desummons them. Same occurs when you are downed (I’d imagine that downed state is programmed to set you at a certain level, and it changes the minion level, or something of that nature).

So, until its fixed, don’t use Flesh of the Master in minion builds in PvE, except in situations where you will never change level.

When fix it?

It’ll be fixed whenever they figure out what’s wrong, fix it, and put it into a patch. I wouldn’t expect it soon, at the earliest maybe the next big patch like the LS update.