Did I miss the memo?

So, did I just miss this conversation, somewhere?

Ever since the preview event, the archer henchmen have been charging wildly into melee range with their target, and I haven't heard it mentioned on the forums, yet.

The monsters seem to do it, too. It actually makes Afflicted Rangers rather nasty.

Archers have newfound Dervish envy, or something? ^_^

As does the monk henchmen and other casters, Karl especially likes to pretend to be a warrior.

This also happened before the event and was fixed for the event duration with the new AI, but now it's back again.

Getting them to break agro is damn near impossible too.

Here....we ....go....again.

Human and how they use AI to their advantages.

yes. you missed this conversation somewhere.

Afflicted Rangers always ran into the middle of combat ever since FBWE. It's because they want to "throw dirt" at everyone. Seriously.

you would think now that they have controls for attack/defence/passive that theyd use appropriate inate modes for henchies, and after all player characters are out of an aggro bubble radius away from an enemy aggro bubble then theyd all switch to passive.

if they already do this, then rangers need to be set to defensive and not attack. i found in the preview, if theyre set to attack theyll just keep on attacking as long as theyre in range, which might be the problem with them not breaking off like other professions.

i agree with the op, even using control+shift+click at a target will still get alesia standing right beside the mobs healing stefan. it's unreal. it's totally stupid that the AI have been made to behave this irrationally.

we're talking of henchmen here, ok, not the heroes who can be set on passive, defensive, or aggressive.

Yea, this has been bothering me too. I recently re-made my assassin and am taking him through the factions campaign and (because of the stero-type most people have for assassins.) I've been henching everything. Let's just say that it gets pretty damn annoying when your air ele hench has to run into melle range to cast evenerating charge and gets killed in the process, especially when this happens at least 5 times during a mission. *sigh*

AI got its pattern. It cannot adjust to anything, but you can adjust to it and untilize it well.

That's EXACTLY what I'm saying.

Seriously, the dev can't possible make hench AI to suit EVERYONE. How would that possible I can't imagine, with each player has his/her own play style. Generic AI should be enough.

As a player, I find myself learning about my henchies' behavior, and use that for my benefit. For example if you want to control aggro on this map/mission, you shouldn't take certain henchmen withyou because they'll aggro everything. But on the other hand when mob-aggroing isn't the problem, you can freely use that hench.

It's our job to learn and adapt, really.

Yes, but someting got broken after the Nightfall preview weekend. It's virtually impossible to keep caster hench at casting distance. They all run into melee range now almost every time.

The healer hench have ran up to the melee hench to heal since Factions came out, and then proceed to almost instantly die. This is why, unless I'm playing my monk, I never take a melee hench with me.

However, the ranger hench doing this is new to me and would be quite annoying because of my current strategy of keeping the healers back. But someone explained above why the afflicted do it.

I haven't had any serious problems with hench agro until this past week.

There was a stretch a few months back where hench were broken like this, and it was fixed rather quickly.

I noticed the Ranger Hench do this a few days before the NPE. The first time was when I was doing D'Alessio Seaboard with a Factions Ele, Reyna insisted to be right next to Stefan all the time. The same type of behavior can be seen when you fight the Degeneration team at the Zaishen Challenge. However, since then, I haven't seen the any Ranger Hench do that again, at least in Factions.

However, the monks have also been doing this for a long time. If you're melee, it can be annoying, but they're still likely to live.

Man, this is really pissing me off, been trying to hench Sunjiang District(Need to get my assassin to HzH) and every single time, mhenlo ALWAYS runs into melle range(He seems to especially like trying to tank the S'hiroken) and dies every time, causing me to restart. And I haven't experienced this before the NPE either, but, I guess that's why they call it a beta......

???
I was henching yesterday and I didnt those problems...

Alesia uses Healing Touch, which is adjacent range. That's probably what's going on. For other henchmen, it's an unfortunate AI problem that Anet should fix by NF's release.