The New AI: The Unpragmatic Rationale

Player A with 5 hp left vs. dead Player B with -4 hp = Player A wins due to superior vigor and Player B loses due to being too poor.
That's not prestige, that's a tangible in-game advantage.

"Wins"? Are we talking PvP here? Because, if so, sup vigor is free for PvP chars.

For PvE, if you ever get down to 5 hp, you have already lost. Might as well slit your wrists at that point.

No, it's not worth 30K, so why are the prices so high then? Why can't Anet make Rune drops more common? Is it because it might affect the economy? Well it can't possibly hurt the economy more than the AoE update, not to mention the new White/Brown dyes, which sell for 100K or more.

As stated earlier in this thread, I actually think the new AI changes will make it EASIER to kill large groups. If you're soloing and getting pounded, and half of your enemies scatter away because they are being damaged, that will allow you to focus fire on the remaining enemies.

Yes, it will take longer to kill them off, but IMO killing 10 enemies one at a time is a whole lot easier than trying to kill them all at the same time.

This definitely hurts the repetitive farmer, but can only benefit the true solo PvE players like myself. Nice update A-Net!

Actually I found monsters to be much more retarded and less realistic after the update. I think their AI still needs the new changes to be tweaked quite a bit.

I went on two separate pug runs last night after the update - one in uw, one in for, and it was ridiculously easy. after 3 people in our fow drop, we cleared out the burning forest area w/ fair ease w/ only one monk. With 6 people in our group, we cleared out the infernul wurms are still w/ only one monk. I was SS, and we had 2 nukers. What made it so easy? The mob aggro targets just one player, regardless of aggro range. No more chain aggro. you could be standing right behind your aggro warrior, and as soon as that first shot it fired, they stick to him like glue. And since they think they'll be most likely to kill him, they don't bother to run much from aoe. When they do run from aoe, they will invariably go right back to attacking the warrior. Even better was when the warrior went down and someone resurrected him, all mobs would do a immediate 180 and run for the warrior lol.

Our warrior wasn't bearing a load of sup runes, had no dp 90% of the time, and was well armored.

Similar thing in UW, I've never had an easier time in a pug. It wasn't even that great of a pug (and i've been in many of them for uw), 3/8 people had never been there before had were skilled completely inappropriately. Aggro range was a mess, but it didn't matter. The mobs would just stick to one target.

Sort of like how none of the 5 casters in my fow gruop was interrupted even once by the spiders in the fow spider cave. They loved attacking our warrior too much, even if the spiders dropped right on top of our heads. It seemed like the AI would pick just one player and go for him, even if they were brought into aggro by someone else in the party.

Anyway.. AI now seems to be broken. Ridiculously easy, but broken.

Counter Arguments to the OP:
1) The people who don't spend their lives on GW generally are not the ones spending massive amounts of time farming. The people with relatively little time should actually be the least inclined to farm, because they actually have to play the game and have fun when they get the chance. If a player is struggling to get on for a half hour a day, and during that entire half hour all he/she ever did was troll runs...that player needs help. If you can't farm for hours, you're not going to make more money than you would doing a mission, and you'd have a lot more fun doing that.

2) The fact that it is, and continues to be, incredibly easy to get perfect weapons NEVER had anything to do with the ease of farming. There are collectors and dirt-cheap greens everywhere, as well as cheap to medium priced golds and purples. Even the rarest skins are cheap as hell if you don't mind a req of 12 or so (and most players have builds that are perfectly fine with that). The fact that hardcore farmers' gold supplies are now going to dry up substantially will not drive up prices on most items, because 1) the supply of most items is either infinite (collectors) or near-infinite (most greens), and 2) the items that were cheap already are of no importance to the hardcore farmers. They already had weapons better than that; just because they're running out of their millions now doesn't mean they'd speculate on weapons they wouldn't have touched before this update.

3) Has no one else noticed that AoE spells actually got a buff in this update? Monsters no longer flee from them if they have a decent amount of health; this turns AoE spells from "useless" to "opening spells to soften up a large group". MELEE monsters no longer bunch up; hitting a group of casters with an AoE is still just as effective.

Just did Tombs with a good 8 man balanced group which included one newbie warrior. It was the same or perhaps a little easier then before the update (I refuse to call it a nerf since more skills got buffed then nerfed), frankly I fail to see the reason for all the whining and shouting.

I used to be a pro water ele elona mino farmer. I would only be there for an hour or two to get a few k to help save up for something nice since I knew nightfall weapons/shields would be great. And especially for armor and stuff....

with this new update its become incredibly difficult to farm there now with my watery invincimentalist (mist form + serpent's quikness ftw) people say I have to keep them aggroed which means running around and such but at times when you are surrounded and cant move out of your spot that becomes pretty much impossible.... I was wondering why the minos weren't dieing after 10 minutes (takes like 3-4 minutes for one farm).

This made me very sad I wanted to farm on the hope of a white dye for quick cash... well scratch that idea. </3

I like to farm with unique builds, not 55 because its just lame, now its like they are forcing me to do it!!!!!

How the heck can Anet make things like white dye drop only so players can set the price themselves and nerf farming even more!? I have become slowly more and more tired of this game. But now its just... ugh. my only livelihood is gone... all i have left is jade arena farming or w/e its called left but my comp overheats and stuff when i go in there so scratch that out too what do i do for cash now? AND DONT TELL ME YOU GET ENOUGH CASH THROUGHOUT THE STORY BECAUSE YOU DONT! I know I played through prophecies 5-6 times and factions twice!!! you get about 10-15k total in prophecies but you spend that on keeping up to date with armor and such, not to mention the big sink at drognars.

Exactly, the elitist attitudes annoy me far more than the farmers' whining XD

Your casual, "I'd really like this nifty green" farmers don't farm because they want to experiment with builds; they farm because they want money, and why not use a proven and tested build to do just that? There's no need to go flaming other people's playing preferences just because the flamer might have some vague, probably unjustified sense of gaming superiority.

This thread sounds familiar.

...the first Aoe whinefest, saying that Gw was totally broken and impossible to farm...?
...nope, not that.
The whinefest about warrior armour's elemental damage being reduced, so warriors were broken and impossible to tank with now?
..nope.
The -damage bonus for shields being made to reduce against phsycal only, so tanking was broken and impossible to do?
The bugfix (note that-BUGFIX) that stopped the -2 armour bonus from Ascalon armour applying to the entire body, and just to the bodypart?

....Hm. Nope. It sounds like-all of them!

Suck it up-if tens of thousands didn't use the same build 24/7 and you actually displayed a little flair and originality then maybe you wouldn't suffer-I don't use any of these farming builds and I got my full fissure armour just FINE! Hell, this patch BUFFED my builds.

My big question in all this is what is going to happen to Dervishes now? Monsters now scatter on any aoe effect or defense that counter attacks. Scythes are AoE weapons. If a dervish attacks a group of monsters they will split up which not only makes things more difficult on the team, it also renders the dervish weapon's benifits as useless now.

Now a dervish might be able to keep himself from being overwhelmed, but it'll still be a problem.

And from personal experience and from what I've heard the following cause fleeing:
SoJ
Glad's defense
Riposte / DRiposte
Sym Visage (maybe)

I don't see it this way, but perhaps you play a different profession or use different builds. With only a few mobs on you after they start to scatter, you will be unable to charge your energy fast enough with benetti's or won't get enough heals from live vicariously or a vampiric axe....this causes several problems for the a cyclone axe or glads defense build because you are TRYING to get all the mobs to die at the same time.

Granted, I'm sure this will have some positive affects somewhere, I just don't see it being solo farming.

What will happen to Dervishes,? Well at first things'll go fine I guess, not everyone knows about the AoE effects, and there will be new players who buy Nightfall, but later, when everyone knows what missions are about, Dervishes will only be accepted in certain missions, and will be left alone on some other missions, cause scattering might mean death there.

Just see a Dervish as an Ele using Firestorm all the time, and everywhere he goes. In some missions, the scattering might turn out favorable, but in most cases, the monsters run off into other mobs, together with the warrior who was attacking, and so the new mob will be aggroed as well.

there are a thousand ways to make money, farming is just one, and by far, not the most profitable.
people who think its impossible to make money just dont know how to. plain and simple.

you're like person number 122 who says that :P
But none of these people actually tell what they do, or their farming build, so I actually doubt you have any.

One of the good things about this game vs other MMOs was that things were achievable by a vast number of player types. If you couldn't play every night, you could still manage to get the nice stuff.

Now that these things have become harder to obtain, a lot of people aren't going to be as happy with the game.

Screw the casual players! This is a MMO damnit! You're not allowed to have a life!

You guys who love criticising:

FARMING IS NOT JUST ABOUT MAKING MONEY, PEOPLE HAVE FUN KILLING HORDES OF MONSTERS BY THEMSELVES AND WITH THE NEW UPDATE WE ARE SCREWED REGARDING SOLO PLAYING. I didn't like factions because the solo farming was boring and i ahve already cancelled my preorder pack for nightfall and i will not buy it!

make a new build if you want to solo...I hope you don't buy it. You ruin the game for others :-p
btw, how come so many w/mo's on this page =.=''

So people are complaing because they can't get every single rare skin/item they want easily? You have got to be kidding....

You people just like to complain. It'd be one thing if this was a valid concern, but seriously.

ArenaNet never said a casual player could get anything they want, just that they'd be on the same playing field as everyone else in PvP. This does not change that.

This will negatively impact solo FARMING due to the speed of the kills. You can still "farm" the trolls outside of Droknar's, but it will take longer.

For pure solo PvEers like me, however, it's very nice, as the speed of the kill isn't as important as getting the kill itself.

I'm going to go back to Thunderhead Keep and see if I can solo it with the new AoE changes. I bet that it becomes very soloable if you pack an AoE specifically to keep the heat off of you and the King.

There's no real difference in farming & soloing, the only thing is your motivatoin. Either you like the challenge of killing stuff alone or you like getting gold/loot that drops or XP.

It does hamper certain classes in solo play & farming

Oh yeah, Hook em Horns!

Hah-hah, who cares?

I like this new patch!
Solo farming now is much more interactive.
Actually, I spend all gold to create the new solo builds, LOL. Henches are smarter and heroes are part of gameplay now.

The underlying point that many people here are saying is totally valid: that something needs to be fixed. Some of those comments were NOT coming from the so-called "mindless farmer" crowds, either. Had those reactions been solely from the farmers, labeling it as complaining for the sake of complaining or even invalid would have been appropriate.

But it's not only farmers. It's most people who play PvE. The comments don't focus only on how incredibly difficult it's now become to farm anything; there's a major focus on how PvE is going to play (and what these after-effects hold in store) in conventional combat strategies.

In the update notes, the AI changes dealt specifically with how monsters reacted when met with AoE. In conventional combat strats in PvE (and combat strats do exist in varying ways, despite what some may say), AoE is not all that is used. I'm a big fan of FoC+Dese/Defile Enchants, but even that's not a prolonged AoE effect, just like how VwK is not a prolonged AoE effect. Just like how Barrage really isn't a prolonged AoE effect. Shield of Judgment is not a prolonged AoE effect. Hell, Reckless Haste+Spiteful is barely a prolonged AoE effect (it's more packet damage than DoT).

This change didn't only hurt farmers. It hurt everyone who uses any type of Cyclone Axe attack skills or indirect spell-casting in PvE. And that's the truth. If these errors aren't corrected, we're going from a pretty solid and playable PvE experience where there can be a fairly wide diversity of workable builds, to an extremely, extremely limited vacuum of only a small handful of mildly viable single-target builds. But it's not only existing PvE that's in danger here. It's the future PvE that's in danger, as well.

Dervishes operate SOLELY on the same type of punctuated burst-style AoE damage you see in Barrage, FoC, or even SS. They use packets of damage as opposed to the prolonged AoEDoTs like Firestorm.

I have no problem with the AI reacting intelligently to damage (in fact, they were reacting just fine to damage before this update). I want the AI to back-off and come at me from a new angle if I slap them with a FoC spike that's doing 140 damage. I want the AI to get creative when they try to kill me.

But scatter aggro, random movements, and arbitrary focus drops are neither intelligent nor creative.

I agree totally.

And yes I am a farmer, I had a 605, I used to 55/ss dual all the time but they were only a few of many many farming options. The reason I like farming is for the challenge, and after this update a lot of old stale things are a fresh challenge. It's all good.

GG Anet, ignore the whiners, a lot of players love this update.

actually, as ive stated WELL over 1,000 times, i was a trader. and a very well-known trader in the community at that...
as for me actually not having money, i'm not going to entertain that with a response here.

Omg, the monsters will no longer be brainlessly bashing away at a warrior using a tank build while SS is on them!
WTF? the solo/duo farmers need to come up with new builds!
Zomg, the monsters might scatter and the casters will need to learn how to kite!
Oh noes, pve teams won't consist of the same professions using the same builds over and over!

How dare they take away the boredom of pve!
I paid 50 bucks so I could "enjoy" the repetitive builds and gaming of the snoozefest known as pve!
I'm sure there must be another boring game out there where I can mindlessly do the same thing over and over!
GG, Anet. No thanks for making pve exciting again.

/end sarcasm

I just wish a few folks would actually go and play the game a little with the new update in place BEFORE announcing the end of the world/the end of their lives/the beginning of their WoW career etc. The totally baseless speculation is ridiculous.

Logging for 10 minutes to find out your favourite farming build doesn't work is a bit lame, tbh. If you really enjoy GW, find a way of thinking around the new problem. Use your skill > time played, lawwl.

Personally I don't notice too much difference apart from things being a bit more interesting, and that is having tried out all my characters in both group and solo situations.

You're confusing player preference/stagnancy with game structure. We saw the same professions using the same builds over and over again because players felt that those builds were the most desirable. But other builds still worked just as well, if not better. What we saw there was player consensus, albeit a very lame player consensus.

What we may very well see here in terms of PvE builds is going to be totally dependent on these new limitations of the game design. What we're probably going to see will be based on game structure rather than player preference.

Don't fool yourself into seeing this change as opening up options. It's actually closing down and limiting options when you really think about it. You think PvE build design is boring and stagnant now, just wait until you try playing against a totally scattered AI and come to realize that maybe half of the builds you previously knew can be totally scrapped, and the remaining half are marginally effective. You might argue that it'll force players to get creative. Creative to what end? Snare-based gameplay? In order to mitigate what we're seeing here, you're going to need an entire character solely devoted to snares. Team build design isn't going to expand...quite the opposite. It's just going to hyperfocus on keeping enemies in range.

I still think that monsters should "sprint/rush" out of the battle, kiting works for real players and if Anet can code it, it should work for monsters too.

There is a reason Monsters are Monsters, and players are players.

GuildWars is world dominated by the human race at large. All the big cities are human (some dwarf too).

There is also a reason Monster parties (i.e., mobs) are larger then human, and higher lvl too.

Monsters are there to be killed. Thats why everytime you enter an explorable area, new fresh mobs of monsters are there.

Some mobs, yes, should be particularly nasty and require some good coordination and interaction by the players in a party, but those should be special monsters that give good rewards, and not some fuking patrol that just happens to be in the road.

Even in PvP human clashes, with the exception of RA and TA, you cant run forever, because you have a hero/guild lord to protect, a flag to capture, a point to control. The monsters dont have any objective other than kill you, and the only way you can defeat them is to kill them.

So if monsters simply run away from you, going to meet with the other 3023242345245 monsters in the map, while your party is composed of 8 players, when hurt, Anet better give good starting skills to chase/slow to every single class, cause I cant see what a monk with orison of healing and banish can do to stop the monsters. And if those monster have 2-3 healers that just kite when attacked/low hp, well...

And remember the game is supposed to be played solo (with henches support) if you want to.

In PvP, teams have the same number of players, cant exceed the others in lvl and have similar objectives. Monsters are a different story.

I officially retract this statement.

While soloing parts of the game last night, I found that I could never kill ANY PvE group.

The new AI update basically requires that parties "spike" individual monsters, so that you can get the kill before they run away. When you solo (or at least when I solo), the goal is to outlast your opponents. With the new AI change, basically I found myself fighting ONE enemy at a time, as the other enemies are running like mad all around the map to get away from me once I get their health low enough.

And it's very difficult for one character that is focused on self-preservation to generate enough offense to spike a single enemy down.

Gotta rethink my entire strategy now. I may simply bring an offensive-minded character, hoping that my damage output will allow me to take down enemies one at a time, while generating enough offense on the others to where they run around like madmen.

Definitely not a complaint from my end - I still think it will make it easier to handle PvE solo - but it definitely will completely shift my way of playing the game.

Surprise surprise. Some of the most vocal farmers here are the same very vocal people who were deadset against inscriptions. As I told them before, they don't care about playing the actual game if they're so willing to quit just because they can't farm and hoarde more wealth.

How childish and irrational is it to threaten to quit when a whole new chapter of content just came out? That tells you that they don't even play the game except to farm and get richer and richer.

Besides, farming isnt dead. But mediocrity and stagnant builds sure are.

A physical-heavy team of henchies just smashed RoF to peices with no deaths last nights (even killing the first seal would kill some henchies prior to this update, unless you happened to be a good monk). It went smoother than most PUGs that I've seen there.

-The fastest killing teams in general PvE missions involved lots of warriors and ranges, with an orders nec. That hasn't changed one bit.
-I didn't see any cases at all of having to chase monsters all around the map. I donno, they could have been just dieing too fast for that to be a problem. But if henchies can drop mobs fast enough, what's the problem? Surely player teams are better than henchies, right? Unless you're running with such brilliant characters such as 9 weaponmastery mending wammos, and the like, there just shouldn't be problems. If henchies can drop Jade Armors and Lava Spitters fast enough, players really should be able to drop anything else fast enough.

With an old trollfarming build, I could still clear trolls as a warrior, it just took longer. I really don't see a problem here. When the trolls ran away from me, I just followed a few of them. The end result? I had 3-5 trolls attacking me at all times. Dervishes should be fine.

Also, the trollfarming example is a bit extreme. It isn't very common for PvE mobs to contain that many melee monsters, nor bunch up so closely. Go and think on what monster mobs are like elsewhere (I mean quests, missions etc, not other old farming spots). It really isn't that common for a warrior to be tanking a silly amount of monsters as it is. The nerf has nearly no negative impact on general PvE. Fortunatly, I care more about that sorta of PvE than farming. Thank god.

Edit: And oh, all you people claiming PvE was made to be more like PvP. It wasn't. The monsters can't build against you, heck, they still don't even have 8 skills, nor are they in well balanced groups for the most part. Static AI, no matter how annoying, should not be able to outplay humans. The update tweaked the AI, and made it smarter reguarding AoE, and general self-preservation. But it did not make fighting monsters similar to fighting players. Is the AI a bit smarter? Yes, is it competitive? No, not at all from what I have seen of it.

And again, all the people complaining about difficulty killing mobs? Seriously, just what are you guys hitting with? 9 weaponmastery mending wammos? Are teams still depending on SS? I don't get it. I took henchies all over the shiverpeaks, and had zero problems.

vwk farming is no different from what ive seen, and thats the only solo-farm i really get into.

this is me not caring.

I think the AI buff was long overdue- although my mesmer misses using echo chaos storm, I made different builds and got over it.

I agree. I haven't had any trouble either from this update. In fact, I really like it. I've found its actually easier now to kill mobs with henchies (as their fleeing means they do less damage), and the minor farming I do is going as well as ever. I realize some of you use real specific builds that are no longer very useful, but if you change some skills, some tactics, or try a new build I think everything will be okay.

Does this mean life transfer will become viable in PVE?

Degeneration in general just became a powerful PvE tool.

Get some damage on your baddies, then spread the degeneration love...and watch them die like chickens with their heads cut off.

I'm going to try this tonight and see if I can get some amusing screenshot/video footage. Maybe I can get in some dancing while they all die as well, to show how amusing this AI change will be.

lol, you really have no idea do you?

that's exactly what the monsters do now after the new update!
I've never seen mobs act sooo stupid before.. They run in, regardless of which party member aggro'd them and make a beeline straight for the warrior or whoever has the highest armor rating.

What sort of idiotic enemy heads straight for the single guy who can generally withstand the most damage? They so singlemindly attack the warrior that they ignore all the nukers and ss necros casting merrily away. So what if aggro scatters a bit more than before, the stupid enemy runs away a few steps, then proceeds to charge right back into the fray w/ the warrior at the center. Few seconds later, SS and meteor shower finish their job even quicker than before the new update.

The warrior might as well have a huge sign over his head saying "attack me! attack me"
No need for the monks or other casters to keep out of aggro range anymore. They are never in danger if they overlap w/ the warrior, because the mobs will just chain aggro straight to the warrior.

If anything the new update has made AI more stupid than it was before.
You know something is wrong with PVE when you can clear all of FOW in a little over one and a half hours w/ any old PUG you get in TOA. In fact, not a single pug I've been in, even the worst of the worst has been unable to make it to at least the first chamber in UW.

If this keeps up into the release of nightfall, it will be training a whole new generation of players completely clueless about aggro, cast range, or kiting.

Well so far I have had no problems farming. Went out of Camp Rankor with a healer and protector henchie, my character is Wa/Mo. Yeah, the mobs run when low health but, I learned to use a crippling strike more often. Slows them down tremendously and I go in for the kill.

Seems like the idea of running away when low health is a normal thing to do. Run and recover, well most of us will figure out the best way to counter that move. I know I can still farm and have a good time. I go out with a fellow guildie and we can farm together pretty well. Usually dont need a full group. We will be testing out other areas tonite and see what we get.

Good luck to us all.

Well said. I haven't played in months but this patch has made me want to test the waters again. I look forward to seeing some old timers in-game

Are you nuts? I didn't farm at all (until I got bored beating the game again and again) and never wanted for money in Prophecies (of course, Factions was exactly the opposite but I won't go into that ). You should have been harvesting the little 15g white items you found for materials. I never had to buy materials at Droks. It was 6k for armor for each character (equivalent helmets could be obtained in the desert).

6k per character is nothing. Just because you didn't explore the possibilities of the game doesn't mean that the capability wasn't there. Each and every single one of us started out poor, you know. Some of us complained about it and usually stayed poor. Others of us watched the economy, learned the flow of the game, played through the quests, avoided unnecessary money sinks, and ended up wealthy at the end with little to no farming. I had over 160k before I ever started farming just by playing the market with the items I naturally found.

Now I don't know if you rushed through the game, avoided side quests, didn't salvage white items, didn't sell 200g items for 500-1k, or what. But I do know that asking A.Net to put a halt on AI improvements just so you can make a few gold without having to think while you do it is pretty silly.

Give it a couple months, as someone said earlier in the thread, and you will see tons of solo farming builds pop up. Where you see tedium, other inventive players see opportunity and challenge. Just wait for it and you can reap the rewards of their fun just like before