Showing Posts For incantator.9381:
This is not the first half-fix. The fix a while ago to Greater Marks increased the Chilblains cursor to the 240 radius but not any of the other mark cursors.
From what I understand about this game, minions seems to have a mostly unmodifed form of the standard enemy mob AI. When a mob doesn’t attack properly, few players notice and even fewer care. Minions are a large part of how a Necromancer functions, so any deficit to their abilities makes a large impact on player experience. I see most of the AI problems of the minions are due to two issues, overly aggressive aggro and pathing problems.
Minions attack too many unintended targets. It appears that minions have their own aggro radius and that their radius can be larger than some enemy mobs. This is hard to measure, however, because even if the player is entering the enemy’s aggro range, the enemy will still go after a minion because the aggro rules for mobs put closer targets at higher priority until damage is factored in. Still, having minions that are busy trying to just catch up with the Necromancer attack enemy mobs along the way is not a good situation. To solve minion aggro problems, I would get rid of any minion aggro radius and have mobs and minions treat each other as neutral until the Necromancer is put on a mob’s aggro list. At that point, all minions are added to the mob’s aggro list and that mob is added to all minion aggro lists. In addition, when the Necromancer is no longer on a mob’s aggro list, the minions should be removed from the mob’s aggro list and the minions should remove the mob from theirs. I might also change mob behavior so that minions are lower on the aggro list until they damage the mob, but the basic aggro change might be enough to “feel right” for the Necromancer. PvP would have to be treated differently, but a similar solution could probably be designed that would link minion aggro to Necromancer combat.
Most of the problems with minion AI seem to be linked to minion pathing, with minions getting stuck on any irregularity of terrain. Creating a more advanced pathing algorithm may not be a good solution at this point in the game’s development due to more sophisticated algorithms needing server side processing power that might not be available. As a workaround I would propose micro-teleportation to get the minion closer to its target where the current pathing algorithm might not be blocked. When the minion AI has been searching for a sufficiently good path to its current target for a fair amount of time – say one to two seconds – without success, the minion would teleport a distance equal to the distance that it can walk (modified by any movement impairing factors) in the time it has been searching. The algorithm for calculating the exact point the minion teleports to would have to be a little sophisticated, taking into account the nearest location the minion could fit in without clipping and prioritizing surfaces near the same height as the target so that future normal pathing would be more likely, but because it would only occasionally need to be used, its would not cause too large of a processing burden.
Fetid Consumption [Minions draw conditions. Each minion can draw one condition every 10 seconds.]
I have been testing Fetid Consumption a bit today, and I think its time to add another bug to the list. Either it should be a tooltip error that says that minions cleanse conditions instead of drawing them or a general bug that says that minions should draw (transfer) conditions instead of cleansing them. A slightly more detailed tooltip would be helpful as well, indicating from where the minions are drawing/cleansing conditions (your character, your character and other player allies, your character and grouped player allies???).