Guild Wars 2

Bas.7406:

It’s a weapon and pathing issue. It’s not a Minion AI issue as it’s not prevalent with every single minion. Flesh Golem and Bone Minions seem to run into the NPC wonky AI more than others.

In my 500 plus pvp games as a MM. I can guarantee you their rate is closer to 90 percent. The problems in pvp is Engineer and burst ele train wreck a full minion build so quickly it’s a joke. Let’s not even get started with talking about how badly they perform against Shatter Mesmers.

Kravick, you fought me, and my minions were on you the whole time except when you disappeared.

We released a video about this, and did basic tests.

We also confirmed several well known issues.

1) Weapons have a huge effect on Minions performance. Staff and Scepter are awful with their Minion responsiveness. Axe Auto and Dagger Auto have the greatest success.

2) Weapon skills with piercing or AOE cause a delayed response on minion action. (Our unproven theory is that this is to help with pulls).

3) Marks seem to have their own world in terms of Minion AI, while Scepter causes the most noticeable issues and we are unsure why since it’s random.

4) Any AoE attack not followed immediately by a single target Auto Attack has a real high probability of bugging out your melee minions.

5) The only way to get constant minion attacks is to use only Single target attacks on an enemy.

6) Another easy way to get a minion to attack is to use a single target attack and then hide behind your minion until they are attacked (there will be delays as they have to identify your target).

7. We also noticed that server response time can create an issue with noticing the responsiveness. Bhawb and I are both west coast and so closer to the main server. I have noticed while playing with an EU player, that while his seems to take longer to respond it has more to do with server communication as they still respond he just doesn’t see it or the server communication is slower.

I like running around with minions out in open world PvE purely because it looks kinda cool, but I do struggle to get them to behave on a regular basis as I’ve posted before.

Your point above about weapon choice is very interesting as I exclusively use sceptre/dagger/staff and find my minions bugging out much more frequently than you suggest in your testing. If nothing else it confirms I’m not going mad, at least not this time.

My main rotation is to pull with sceptre 2 before going into autos to stack bleeds which again seems to go against the optimum way to play with minions.

7) is also an interesting point given the problems everyone is having with skill lag in WvW right now.

As I only PvE to do my dailies these days it’s kind of moot I guess, but it is an unintentional forcing of a certain playstyle and certain weapons on those who would use minions which can’t be a good thing.

+1 for the LoS change needing a fix as it was OP when sieging. However in WvW I have pretty much given up trying to get an epi off on an “up” player – the number of times it misses because of the cast time + cleanse, cast time + down as it did previously was bad enough, now it has the added unreliability of being able to be dodged and blocked means I rarely hit with it. It’s a gamble rather than a calculated choice – is that guy going to be alive/in range/in the same place in 1s time? Players dodge and run away when getting focussed after all. I tend to use it on downed players almost exclusively now.

I think Engels is talking about diminishing returns when it comes to maxing out condition damage scaling. At level 80 go from 0-1000 CD and you double your damage per tick from ~50 to ~100. If you then double your CD ie go from 1000-2000 you only add a further 50% damage per tick, this is because of the base 0.5*level part of the equation.

Whether or not that tradeoff is worth it I couldn’t say though – I don’t have the inclination to run the maths. Personally I do well enough with something of a hybrid setup but do lean towards conditions and use staff/scepter/dagger. I can get my condition damage up to 2k with food and stacks on sigil of corruption but still have ~1500 power.

Someone in my guild jumped from the top of Rata Sum in DS to see what happened the other day and survived. I live in hope of having a zerg chase me off a cliff in WvW one day!

Sounds the same as the Elementalist mechanic; they get weapon swap procs on attunement change. Whether or not DS is intentionally working like that is another matter of course

Bhawb.7408:

Palmski.6419:

Don’t want to turn this into another minion AI thread but I found that running around Frostsound Gorge last night farming Colossi with the golem, shadow and blood fiends (just for the lulz) the only minion who attacked reliably was the good old Jagged Horror. It was as though he realised he only had limited time in the world and had multiple Leroy Jenkins moments, especially amusing considering their relative sizes

I did over an hour of AI testing yesterday, I will go into PvE today just to confirm what I got against “real” mobs, but I can pretty much guarantee all the stuff about minion AI is a load of BS. In all the time that I was testing with them, they predictably aggro’d according to a few pretty simple rules.

Like I say; I don’t want to turn it into a minion AI thread as I don’t use them by and large. The problems are well-known and seem to revolve largely around z-axis pathing and this very much tallies with my experience – I have a fair idea of which fights they will be sitting back and chomping the popcorn watching me do the work.

The Jagged Horror seems immune to them though and the main point of my post was my amusement at watching the little undead rat streaking towards the, erm, colossal Colossus while everyone else stood around and applauded

Don’t want to turn this into another minion AI thread but I found that running around Frostsound Gorge last night farming Colossi with the golem, shadow and blood fiends (just for the lulz) the only minion who attacked reliably was the good old Jagged Horror. It was as though he realised he only had limited time in the world and had multiple Leroy Jenkins moments, especially amusing considering their relative sizes

That’s not dissimilar to my PvE setup in terms of traits & gear although I mix in a bit of Rampager’s and Carrion here and there. I go with Terror rather than corruption in Curses and actually don’t bother with either minion traits in Death and go with the staff improvements instead. Having Staff #2 on such a short cooldown enables me to keep regen up on the minions quite a bit and I just cannot live without my greater marks – you can prise them from my cold, dead fingers.

I tend to use the Shadow Fiend with the Golem so it’s easy to get both him and the golem targeted with mark of blood and it seems to give pretty good single target damage. However with the new minion improvements I might try running with a few more to see how it goes just for the lulz.

We have our place; as a conditions build I can keep the walls of a tower clear with staff/scepter/off-dagger AoE and Epidemic. Likewise on defence keeping attackers away from the gate is fun, not to mention the damage I can do with siege now the condi damage scales with yours.

Not so good in the open as burst direct damage classes tend to rule the roost out there, still useful in team support though, laying down AoE on top of the front line.

I will hang my head in shame and admit I am levelling a Mesmer alt who I have taken into WvW as well and while I probably do more damage with that character I don’t feel as useful to the team, especially in a siege situation.

Would love an invite, I’m an EU casual PvE soloist usually with some Wv3 sojourns but would be extremely interested in seeing the inside of a dungeon one day.

As a casual, non-dungeon player (2-3 hours 3-4 times a week?) I have only ever had 1 exotic drop for me, and that was in WvW from a random loot bag. I probably make more when I WvW than PvE although that’s not scientific, just a gut feel. More importantly I enjoy it a hell of a lot more than hanging out in Orr, so everyone’s a winner.

It’s not as bad as it was; since the degen was fixed at level 80 it lands and takes a few hits. It also seems to have a far superior AI to the golem or shadow fiend, I don’t ever recall it sitting back, popping a beer and watching me fight. Making the most of its limited time in the world perhaps

If they bring our AoE damage in line with our single target damage then we’re completely stuffed. As a casual player) I’ve spent ages kitting out my Necro to play with staff AoE in WvW. I enjoy it, especially as it avoids much of the culling/FPS issues you get in the middle of zergs. I don’t have the time or inclination to re-gear or indeed level an alt, This news gives me a sad.

I play loads of WvW on my necro, condition specced 20/30/20/0/0 with the key traits being greater marks and staff mastery. With those two plus liberal use of Epidemic you can clear the enemy off the walls when attacking keeps and equally push them away from the gate when defending. You might not get as many badges (~180 for 1k kills) but I actually feel I’m contributing. Not so great in open field zerging of course but certainly on my server I see less of that as we’re low ranked.

What I find most frustrating is that a stack of 25 bleeds can be removed just as easily as one. Perhaps condition removal should remove a set number of individual conditions? That way passive removals could be configured to remove fewer than active ones making big condition stacks and active condition removal more relevant.

This is a garbage trait at lvl 16 when you can first get it and even in the 50s and 60s, however at 80 in a high density mob area like Orr which I visited for the first time yesterday it actually stays up long enough to be useful and actually tanked a mob for me on occasion with liberal use of staff #2 which I would be spamming anyway. Reviewing my opinion of this trait a little…

To add some further observations to the thread it is most definitely not a numbers problem. I was running through the Cursed Shore last night, on the road around where the Risen Gorillas are with only the Shadow Fiend out and for a number of fights around there he just refused to attack. No Jagged Horror was up at the time.

This was just after participating in one of those “defend the camp” events where waves of Risen charge in so I wonder if that bugged him out, there were so many targets I wonder if that caused the problem.

To back up XiL’s point above I would say it did seem worse in Orr in general with its rough terrain, but I don’t have any quantitative data to back that up.

With a 20/30/20/0/0 build running scepter/dagger/staff I was thinking of doing something like:

Rampager armour with 6x undead runes
Carrion weapons with “on crit” sigils
Rabid jewellery with Chrysocola (carrion) jewels

The idea is that this gives me a balance of power/precision/vitality with lots of condition damage and toughness which I think should be my primary stats. Am I mental and barking up the wrong tree?

Completely agree with this. I would like to be able to see them all in story mode – I couldn’t care less for grinding them in explore mode as that’s just not my idea of fun. Scale the loot down for running story as solo to retain balance, I have no problem with that, just let me see it.

Plus I just found out that I won’t be able to complete my personal story without running Arah, and that has given me a major sad as for me story mode has been the best part of the game for me so not being able to finish it is very disappointing.

I don’t get many – only 14 tokens on many hours of play, but I play condition spec and have only just hit 80 and still have green lvl 75 gear by and large so I would imagine I’ve just not been doing enough damage to qualify so far. Plus I suck pretty hard at PvP which doesn’t really help so I tend to play quite conservatively as a result.

In general though I would say my low level warrior and elementalist alts seem to get more loot than I ever did in similar events than my necro main.

1. Traits by and large are quite underwhelming and all over the place making the creation of a decent synergistic build hard. I often look at them and pick the one that looks least useless when I’m making a build. And don’t make me take two minion specific traits to get my staff boost (greater marks/staff mastery) when a lot of the time I don’t want to run with minions at all, especially when one of those traits is Reanimator.
2. No way to damage structures/dragons/event bosses/downed players etc reliably in a condition spec. I did my first dragon event the other day and was expecting something awesome, instead I largely stood there pew pew pewing away with the staff auto as nothing else I did seemed to have an effect. Sigh. Similarly the bleed cap makes it difficult to do anything of note in a big world event like the Lost Shores as a condition spec as there is little direct damage output. Finally conditions don’t damage downed players so if I can’t stomp (I’m defending a wall for example) it’s hard to finish them off.
3. Minion AI is broken, no more to say.

I’m sure some of this will be L2P on my part but I’ve managed to muddle through to 80 with this character so I must have a basic idea of what I’m doing by now?

Sorry but I disagree. When I first saw one of these critters I was ~40 and it was gone in seconds. Now I’ve just hit 80 they last a noticeably longer amount of time, almost enough to be semi-not-quite-useful.

They still continue to bleed out once dead though, that hasn’t changed…

My observations from the admittedly limited time I had this weekend; with a “planned” attack ie I pull the mob then there was little problem even at range with aoe or auto-attack, both minions would lumber into battle after perhaps half a second to realise, which is fine. The problems started to occur with adds, whether respawns or just stuff that got caught up in the combat as I was kiting stuff around. Once the initial mob died the minions would sometimes ignore the adds, until I used haunt or charge to “activate” them or they were damaged.

This “ignore” state was not permanent; they would both attack fine in the next fight assuming they survived.

This was all in Sparkfly Fen by and large…

I was doing some map completion stuff in Lornar’s Pass and it happened all over the zone as far as I could tell although I primarily noticed it in the Dredge tunnels where I was in a lot of combat in a short space of time.

When summoning in combat there were no problems, likewise if I was to use the charge or haunt minion skills they would engage (or in the Golem’s case charge on past and engage the rest of the cavern lol).

I run a pretty standard 20/30/20/0/0 scepter/dagger and staff so I was initiating combat at range quite a bit which may have been a factor. I’ll try some more at the weekend and see what transpires and I’ll also try and be a bit more scientific about it if I can – these are somewhat subjective observations at the moment. I only just specced into this very recently so it’s just initial impressions really.

I’ve just started using minions, namely the Shadow Fiend and the Flesh Golem. I find even with just the two of them out they will follow me around and remain out of combat perhaps 30-40% of the time even with just the two of them active (I do have Reanimator unfortunately). Once in this state they only seem to participate in combat when damaged by something, even running right up to the mob so they are in melee range seems to have no effect once they have decided they don’t want to fight.