Guild Wars 2

I havnt seen a post on this so I thought id bring it up.

I loaded up my necro to test some of the bug fixes…And ive noticed that my minions RARELY bugged out. Like once in 30 or so fights. And they seemed to fix themselves on the next fight.

Has anyone else been seeing an improvement in the minion ai?

My flesh golem has actually attacked o.o its been so long since ive TRUSTED the thing to do his job im not entirely sure how to deal with the fact that im effectively stronger than I was yesterday.

I’ve noticed no difference to the Flesh Golem…. but I’ve learnt to just ignore what he does, so maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

For a moment, I though so too but nope, same worthless meat-bags as always.

It seems better. I messed around with minions about a week ago and I was frequently noticing that MOST of them weren’t attacking.

Just ran around in Orr right now with the standard 4/0/6/4/0 build killing enemies and the flesh golem was only attacking about 50% of the time, shadow fiend about 75% of the time, but blood fiend, bone minions, and bone fiend were all working the way I expected them to. Kill speed was slightly slower then daggers build but the difference in survivability was insane.

It’s now at a point where I would consider them a good option for doing map completion or other solo pve content. They still need to move faster and be more aggressive and also regenerate health when out of combat.

Have not noticed anything different on my end.. Flesh Golem still zones out starring at what i’m attacking and i can’t tell with bone friend or shadow fiend

hmm thats wierd. I did an entire SW run with them. They bugged out ONE TIME on platinum. And thats becuase the teleports throw them off I think. ANd hte fact that theres no “path” between rooms.

I dont think there perfect. But I can’t believe they worked THAT LONG without significant issues. Ill do some more testing tommorow to verify.

They can be slow to lock on. Sometimes one or two seconds. But so far they havnt abandoned me to fight alone like they have before.

actually, did anyone notice that the flesh golem dies so fast now? Seems to go down really quickly

The ranged minions have always been very reliable and Shadow Fiend has a nice “force attack” button (albeit, doesn’t always work). Bone Minions, since they are constantly being resummoned, tend to not have the pathing problems the other melee minions do.

As for Flesh Golem, yeah. He’s a kitten of the highest caliber.

hmm the flesh golem is hte one im noticing ISNT bugging out the most. Im not entirely certain why my experience with them is so radically different now than they were a couple weeks ago. Ive been playing MM since the beggining of the game and this DEFFINETLY feels just like the periods of time where they worked properly before the next big patch shafted them again.

Edit (id rather edit than bump): Flesh golem sometimes waits 2-3 seconds to attack. But its more manegable than what it was before. Where often it would attack through 20-30 seconds of combat

Bone Minions suffer from the same thing. But also seem to “reset” themselves once hte current target is dead. Whether they glitch again immediately after or not is up to luck it looks like.

As mentioned above the other minions have all been fairly reliable. So I doubt id notice a massive change in htem one way or the other.

As for the melee minions. Im now more sure than ever that SOMETHING has changed with them. As before they would ignore over 70% of fights that I sent them too. Ive also been able to do some of the tricks that before would have broken them 100% of the time (engage one target with staff while having another target selected so that the minions attack a different mob than you) succesfully and reliably.

The only thing I can think of at this point is some of the same bugs that affected there behavior when the necromancer downed were tied to teh same issues that caused them to bug out continuously.

But if thats the case the improvement should be seen by a much larger portion of players. Although its deffinetly true that there are fewer dedicated MMancer players than there were before (since alot of MMancers were fotm pvp farmers. and those players would have moved on to the next fotm by now)

Give me till the weekend and I’ll try to give it a good bit of testing to see if there were any noticeable changes.

I thought it was better at first… Then things sort of went back to normal. I even had a few instances of pets not attacking even when Everyone was in range which was weird. It feels… Different, but far from fixed.

Hmm I can agree with ron there. There deffinetly not FIXED yet. But its…god its situationally weird. They FEEL like there more effective the majority of the time. But theres definitely situations where there not effective. However ive found that to be…more predictable now based on terrain and types of mobs im fighting. I can almost predict whether there going to work or not. ANd ive already been able to adapt that into my playstyle.

Bhawb you and ronpierce are porbably the best to do the testing on this. Ronpierce has given us his findings so far. So im eager to see what you find in your own experiences so far.

Ill give you some info that I can.

All of this occured in the silverwastes so far and one PvP match.

Flesh golem and bone minions sometimes have a 2-3 second delay on engage. but will engage more often now than they have before.

They are more likely to glitch on mobs that travel using iFrames. (vines). They still have trouble with inclines. Platinum Thrasher boss fight is hell for them. But using the active on the flesh golem once its teleported to you in the next “room” WILL reset it reliably in my experience.

All in all though ronpierce said it best in his post above “Different, but far from fixed”.

Though it feels like the current chaos can be manipulated alot more than the previous iteration. Where before there bugging seemed random. Now its like you can manipulate there performance a bit. though its a bit harder to prove that now without me spending ALOT more time on it.

I’ll see if tonight, when I get home, if I can do some deeper testing into this and come up with any significant patterns to report. Currently, I had been pretty busy dealing with two other concerns/bugs, but after talking to Karl, I promised I’d keep it all under wraps so they can make design decisions properly and to not raise expectations for anyone where they shouldn’t be. Hopefully soon I’ll have more information to share but not yet. And it’s likely be a totally different thread.

Alas, later tonight I’ll see what I can figure out with Minions. Currently most of my testing has been strictly PvP and very little PvE (which while not perfect felt better than it did at the very least).