AI Changes for monster/henchmen 10/31..for the worse?

On the flipside.

Me name Ugh. I smash stupid humans. Here comes big human covered in metal. Behind him is small human in his underwear.

ME SMASH BIG HUMAN!!!!

...and how realistic is that?

ehhh not a slightest bit of realism there. Why would I risk my live rushing through dangerous warriors, assassins and dervishes just to attack a monk who heals him/herself anyway? Not to mention that the melee users would chase me and still attack me from behind.

I like the update. The first time I went out in the sulfurous waste areas, it was a bit rough fighting the 6-7 group undead parties as I was still using a duo monk backline with only a little damage mitigation. Now I use a triple monk backline with a bit more damage mitigation and it's back to being pretty easy.

The key thing about this update is it is hopefully teaching the art of actually using damage mitigation. Having 2 monks, sometimes neither one a prot monk, just heal the tank while no one else is getting hit allows the cookie cutter builds to go do the damage unmolested from the rear. Now your cookie cutters will change, and they should think of packing blinds/snares/hexes to reduce effectiveness of enemy monsters going through your backline.

When I finish unlocking some more paragon and necro skills I might go back to the two monk backline but we'll see. The henchmen tend to be kind of bad compared to your heroes.

If the warriors/dervishes/assassins are attacking you instead of your backline, then you just did your job^^

So basically, the monsters are doing their job in owning players.

Also, warriors have the highest DPS in the game, so if they're not getting targetted, use them to go after their backline.

If monster's jobs were to own players, they'd have spells that hit for 500 dmg each, a permament Sprint on them, the ability to interrupt spells that are casted in 1/4 of a second, over a 16 points in Fast Casting, regardless which profession they were, and they'd have more armor than 2 real warriors have combined...


Ohhh wait monsters already have that :O

I'd say that ALONE gives them quite the advantage over real players.

lol i love it when people refer to builds as cookie cutter.. thats gotta be the most ignorant statment i have ever heard.. and i have heard it a few times already in this thread.

At one point in time.. they where all brand new and top of the line.. they worked.. and they kept working.. they where the most practical... and most efficent.. so they should be known as "the right"

You go ahead and use your stoopid little i will do all this fancy smancy original crap and take 4 hours to kill

i will use my same old build that is tried and true.. and i will win...


its like this.. lets say we are both getting ready to drive to the store..

I get in my care and drive the same way i have for my whole life.. while you decide for some stoopid reason that "i dont wanna be like the rest of those lameass cardrivers.. they all use the same way of driving. im gonna change it up and be smeart" so you decide to steer with your feet.

WHO IS GOING TO GET TO THE STORE FIRST!!..

point proven.

Actually this doesn't affect only Wammos, it also affects a small group of people I consider myself in:

Rangers who bring a pet. Being since, how now, the pet will follow your target to the end of the world, and there isn't a quick fix to get them to return to you.

And for all you people who say pets suck, don't use one, and all that other crap, tell it to someone else.

I have no problems with monk bosses running when they are attacked, I DO have a problem with no quick way to get my pet to stop following them into the next mob of monsters...

And that should have been fixed when it would get exploited during Alliance Battles in Factions...

^^ I wouldn't argue point proven but meh, that's just my opinion.

When did this update come into effect, I was up till 11pm pst playing last night with no problems. Granted I've been using a sin and keep a couple of deadly art skills to hex slow or shadowstep/kd to those annoying kiters but it doesn't sound like the mayhem that's going on here!

Ahhh...the lemming versus trailblazer argument.

To put a proper spin on your example:

You get in your car and sit in 45 minutes of traffic in the mainlanes of the freeway.

I get in my car and notice that there is no one on the "feeder" lane of the freeway - that is, the on and off ramps.

I decide to take a risk and exit the freeway. I may get stuck at the light on the feeder, I may not. But it's a risk because NO ONE ELSE IS DOING IT.

In the long run, I get to the store in 30 minutes because I took that risk of not following the "tried and true" herd method.

Ten drivers notice me do this. They try it tommorrow. It works. More drivers notice and try it. Now the "feeder" lane is the next "cookie cutter" build. Now all traffic is moving smoother due to my idea.

Guild Wars without innovation is...a game I simply don't want to play.

But that's enough deviation from the subject.

Isn't that what most players do in PvE? Take out the monks/casters first, and focus on the hard targets later?

Sorry, but these Ai changes do not work in the realm of torment.

having been there before and after the changes, i can say its not working


when i try to cap stunning strike and one regular demon mob can wipe my party of henchies and heros repeatedly despite whatever i try to do, its just messed up.

I haven't had a single problem hero'ing my way through Nightfall so far. My friend and I + 6 heroes and we've rarely had our heroes have DP. If there's a difference, I haven't noticed it.

Im finding the new system of using the flags to tell them where to go doesnt always work. I will tell all my henchies and Heros to stay put while I go do some aggroing and right as I hit the group and start to pull Dunkoro runs right past me and gets wasted in seconds while the rest of the hench and heros stay put. This also has happened to me with Koss. The AI changes are terrible, its almost unplayable in certain parts with henchies now.

I'm beginning to think that which classes your players are, and which ones are controlled by NPCs, matters in the new AI calculation.

When I was mapping alone, I had relatively few issues, even after the new update (I actually didnt know what the update was for until Yun start talking to me about the AI problem). I'm a monk. I flag my henchies to stand at about longbow distance from the group I want to fight, assign targets to my interrupter(s), then call a target and let everyone get to work. Devona runs in, monsters attack her, nuking starts up, everything dies. Works out pretty well all around. Ranged monsters do target my backline, but it doesn't happen that often unless the monsters were too close to begin with. I, myself, don't get targetted that often either. I fought Margonites, Djinn, etc. and didn't really have problems unless there were bosses with 300+ damage aoe skills.

When I was mapping with Yun, I noticed things changed. Yun (warrior) runs in, all of the monsters ignore him and go straight for backline. They still don't target me that much, but our henchmen aren't so lucky. There's melee in our backline, choking gas and interrupts flying everywhere, and it's just an ugly situation overall.

My main problem was that flagging is the only way to get your henchmen to stand still and fight. However, flagging also makes all non-melee hench/heroes bunch up at one spot, allowing eles, dervs, and mesmers to take them out en-masse with their super-powered aoe (djinn, for instance, with their esurge/searing flames spikes).

Kiting is ridiculous, because of how the AI kites (both henchmen and monsters). You'll notice that if you pressure casters, but dazed on them, etc. they will run from you in practically a straight line path, as far away from the battle as they can. They don't even stay in the vicinity. The henchmen do tend to kite in circles, but very wide, liberal circles that makes aggro management extremely unpredictable when multiple groups are in the area.

To those who think this change was a good thing, please try doing late-game areas (Desolation/Torment) with henchmen before posting comments. From what I've read, a lot of you have no idea what the end-game content looks like. When every group you meet is like a GvG team, your backline is being completely shut down, and your team is being wiped out by aoe spikes, it ceases to be a game. You just die. And please don't talk about how it's good that PvE is getting closer to PvP. PvE requires you to face groups of 4~10 enemies again and again, monsters are lvl24~28, they often have their own special monster abilities, and they have boss monsters that do double damage. If it takes you 20 minutes to kill a single group, and a few of your people are dying each time, it is going to take you damn near forever to do anything or get anywhere, if you even manage to finish in the first place.

I agree with this, a few weeks before release I was actually able to witness the henchies get retarded after an update, and the update notes stated they made "upgrades" to the henchmen AI or some such. I was hoping that this was temporary and that the henchmen would go back to heavily scripted AI routines, that they were just trying to polish hero AI by dropping it on henchies before Nightfall was released, but now I don't think it's going to go back. Missions I could solo and get masters are now more difficult (I can still get masters solo, but it's tougher) and places that I used to get past with ease now slaughter the henchies.. Warriors leeroy in ways I haven't seen since the BWEs, Monks kite into more aggressive monsters, these problems were virtually nonexistent and now they're back.

At least Heroes will sort of make up for this, after I get all 126 of my heros on my 9 characters level 20

DumbNET screwing up their own game again trying to turn PvE into PvP.

I feel your pain dood...

Maybe that's the point - for the final late-game areas, maybe A-Net is actually pushing you to team up with *gasp* Human Beings *gasp*?

I dont know what kind of discussion you're trying to push with your aggressive display of rhetoric, but here's my response to your little suggestion:

If I had to find 8 other people to explore the Realm of Torment in, I would never find a single person. Only people who want to do the storyline missions. If ANET wanted people to only play together, why would they offer henchmen in the first place? Henchmen are here so that enterprising people who want to go out but don't have time to sit around and wait XX hours for a possible group can do so. To provide henchmen that can't even progress halfway through an area is absolutely BS imo. GW needs to get their affairs in order.

i dont know if i am the only one who has this problem..but that ai upgrade is shit imo...the henches wont obey wen i call targets sometimes..or other times they just run to a mob even if this one is at the other way of the map, and.."now that they are so intelligent they can run away from nukers"....20 mins ago the entire henches+3 heroes got owned by 2 dryders....god i can almost solo these dudes...grrrrr here is an exemple of the ai


Edit: Oh and Btw..yes i was in the realm of torment..even if that place isnt intended to be easy...getting whiped by 2 dryders is rediculous

Wow how mature. Do you always call people names just because there's a change that you dont like?

Not sure what you mean by your ambiguous semi-inflammatory statement, but in response to this:

I don't believe that A-Net, in determining changes to AI, had high on its priority list the impact it would have on players that wanted to explore some of the toughest areas of the game with henchmen/heroes.

This impact to hero, henchmen and enemy AI may have been deliberate...that is, they may be "stressing" the Multiplayer part of the MMORPG nature of the game (and yes, please spare me the "GuildWars isn't a MMORPG" in essence discussion).

In other words, using henchmen and heroes have limitations. Before, those limitations were well overcome by the sheer stupidity of enemy AI. Now that the enemy AI has arguably been "improved" (or at least more difficult to exploit, those limitations become glaring. The way to overcome those limitations? Insert a human player or two into the equation.

Again, that's just my take, but I have a feeling that's where A-Net is pushing us. See the many threads about "heroes ruining the multiplayer aspect of the game" out there, and you might agree.

Since you edited your post, I'll follow up on this point.

Henchmen are there for CONVENIENCE. They are not meant to completely supplant human players. In no way did A-Net guarantee that they would perform just as well as your random PuG.

Yet, many players believe that they SHOULD be as good as your average PuG, or even BETTER, as they normally follow your commands. I think it is that attitude that A-Net may be addressing here. There must have been a concern from A-Net developers' standpoint that heroes COULD wind up replacing a very large portion of the multiplayer aspect of the PvE game. And maybe A-Net wanted to address that indirectly - to improve enemy AI to show some of the limitations of the henchmen AI.

Again - to "push" us towards multiplayer PvE, but still making the henchable PvE possible.

Go into any town or outpost and advertise, "I am clearing fog from map, LFG to help." You will be there 24 hours and maybe get 1 person to help. I need the henches. If the monsters are smarter, then the henches better be too. After just spending 30 minutes trying to get out the gate at copper hammer mines to clear the map around there, and dieing 10 times, I hereby quit this game.

Freaking @#%@$^%!!!! I'm So Freaking Pissed Right Now!!! I Can't Even Beat Grand Court Of Sebelkeh Because Of This Stupid Ai! Before, This Mission Was A Piece Of Cake To Hench Through, But With This Retarded Ai, I Can't Even Beat This Mission!!!

Wtf Anet, Fix This Shit! I Cannot Describe Just How Freaking Pissed Off I Am!

Copper Hammer was and always will be a bitch to clear even wayyyy back when GW was fresh..

No, it's not a "convenience"! This game requires henchies! Seriously, you try to go through the entire game using only people! See how long it would take to just sit there LFGing. Not only that, not everybody likes to play with shitty PUG. I don't know where you get the idea that henchies shouldn't be good, but if you don't like henchies, don't play with henchies. There are people who prefer playing with henchies and DON'T want to play with PUG. You play your game your way without henchies, we'll play the game our way with henchies/heroes!

Now Anet, freaking fix this stupid crap!

This is awesome, thanks to Anet's failure..well now I can't even explore Domain of Secrets, one of the easiest places in the Realms of Torment. Their awesome placing of mobs on rez shrines has put all of my team at 60DP. Not to mention their fix of the enemy AI's attacks ALL going for the monk. No one else was being damage just him and my prot monk with PS, and him with his heal and the other heal monk couldn't keep him healed.

Nightfall has been ruined for me now, I no longer have fun in it. I cannot kill anything because I keep being wiped out and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. No skill will protect them.

Nowhere in my posts did I say that "henchies shouldn't be good." What I said is that people expect them to be as good or even better than your average PuG player.

I am also not telling you how to play the game. You can play with henchmen and heroes to your heart's desire. However, you have to realize that there are limitations to doing so, at least in comparison to doing the same with real players.

PvPers and GvGers realized this aspect long ago.

I dont know if anyone is gonna read this reply, but im in total aggreement with the opening poster. I usually dont post much, since i tend to read and watch complaints and/or praises unfold over the game itself.

But this "new" AI has defintely made me rethink whether or not i really intend to do anything after the storyline is finished. Its not the fact that PVE "needs" to be more like PVP, honestly, lvl20 char duking it out w/ skillsets and AI thats human, not computer controlled is quite a ways different from lvl24-30 char w/ insane AI and skills that do more dmg than even the decription can go up in its range. Its not just the henchies kiting/aggroing other groups, the monsters also run and aggro other groups from a single hundred blades strike which is kinda pathethic, ecspecially when its not even a monk or ele, but a warrior based monster. To make matters worse, i find it really funny that mesmers monster can interupt a 1/4 second skill with they're own 1/4 second skill. And no, i didnt cast spells back to back, i make them random and spaced out as hell now thanks to their insane AI. But for some reason, they can still land an interupt even nowadays w/ a 1/2 second skill to interupt a 1/4 second skill. Now that is just mathematically/logically incorrect.

Yes, the monks, eles, all the way to even warriors now run marathons across a whole entire map, and just to give u an idea of what its like, i saw an ice siege golem in GF run from the first hill all the way down to the last hill where the bosses were. Thats a little overwhelming, when as a result, u just aggro-ed around 20+ monsters along the way. I'm not sure how this will turn out, even tho i finished the game, im still weary as to how this AI is making the game "more" fun.

Well it depends if you agree/disagree to my/most others post on this thread or not. Otherwise personal attacks will invite flames dear cheer leader.

Spending time planning an attack on a group of hard enemies and seening it work brings great thrills. But after a while spending 10 mins + on a group of mobs across a map with 20-30 groups of such enemies = frustration. Nor is playing the rez ping pong game with your party and mobs fun neither.

As to why i said what i did, it just pisses me off if Anet actually play their own game/patches and "dumbnet" reference is subtle imo

The problem with your average pickup group is that they tend to have strong biases as to which classes are useable. 2 monks, an MM, a nuker, and a motley of four others is usually the bill. Assassins and Mesmers usually get shafted in favour of another class. Warriors are often considered interchangeable with spellcasting classes. These factors compound the sometimes lengthy wait LFG'ing in a given mission. Henchies are needed to get around this.

The henchies and heroes as is simply can't handle a small bit of pressure from the mobs. A little e-denial or interupting and suddenly both monks are dead, and the team wipes. You hit 60 DP and you suddenly have to rezone and try again. This isn't fun. It's frustrating.

The state of the AI before the Oct. 31/06 update was such that with a few snaring skills, you could comfortably get through most mobs without deaths. As of now, it's aggravating that my Warrior can't do anything to prevent the healer henchmen from being dropped first.

Not if they have invested in Fast Casting....
It is very easy to write an Uber-effective interrupt mesmer AI. But I guess it is far more work to make a good AI cover all situations in the game.

Anet have to balance a lot of factors in the AI equation:
- 10 proffesions, each with a lot of different variants and playstyles.
- Many different party configurations, with or with out henchies.
- About 1000 skills that either are independent of, enhance or cancel out skills used before it.
- Playstyles used early in the game is different from the ones used late in the game.
- Use of terrain features in the battle.
- Farm builds try to take skill combinations and exploitation of monster AI to the limit.
- A too dumb AI is ridiculuos and boring, while a real smart one put people off.
- The AI has to react quick enough to be viable in the game.
etc, etc

I read an interview somewhere, where a ANet developer said they did not do "a lot" testing before releasing. I fully understand that approach. Thoroughly testing a thing like this must take time, a lot time. If things are not "mission-critica"l (and I certainly do not think they are in this case) it is much more efficient to do like Anet seems to do. Some limited testing - then release it and fix the issues the community (non-rivaled testing ground!) discovers. They have done it like that several times when it comes to skill balancing.

I trust Anet will come up with improvement on some of the issues today. However I never ever expect them to make a perfect AI everyone is content with.

Also one thing to keep in mind, people reading and posting on a thread about "AI problems" is probably biased to the negative side.

Regards,
Cloudbunny

How about spend more time using your brain for strategy so that you dont suck at the game instead of calling me a "cheerleader" simply because I called you out on your immature behaviour?

I mean c'mon, calling ANET "DumbNET" just because you dont like the new A.I. is pretty damn childish.

I agree that this is ANET's mistake, but DumbNET.. lol
Yeah Tyria is a joke now, since everyone is on nightfall and factions there is no one you can team up with. I didn't mind that until they changed the AI and now i cant farm. So guildwars is no unplayable for me now.
Thanks Anet

Well after all that, you still havent mention if you agree on the AI or not, or is your intention here purely here to flamebait and troll soggybottom?

I just find it strange that this update isn't listed on GuildWars.com.

It's almost as if they made these AI changes by mistake as part of some smaller non-noteworthy fix.

It’s a game for having fun not for getting frustrated what was Anet thinking and not even bothering with a clarification this is really rude after all we played money to have fun? If I want a PVP I would go play PVP so why bring PVE to me?
If they want to keep PVP for real humans don’t let heroes in very simple

DA

Played since then, have yet to notice what all the fuss is about. Sure, it's slightly harder than when NF was initially released, I now have to lure enemies instead of charging in and killing everything. But a simple flag for the henchies followed by a longbow pull, and I have yet to suffer at all since then.

The cancelling of skills is annoying, but has yet to be disasterous for me. I still think that heroes makes things a little too easy.

Okay, now I'm just mad.

First the entire Hero nonsense, encouraging people everywhere to play alone or in small human teams and now this.


Now on-topic.

I don't like the new aggro system at all and I'm quickly losing interest in this Brave New World.

The fact that they've wanted to beef up the AI was good. Actually, right after Nightfall came out, the AI was PERFECT. AI front lines aggroed human front lines, while the midlines of both sides were attacking each others backlines. It made interesting fights, where, if one of either sides lines failed, the other group would win.

If the friendly front line failed, the enemy front line would move on the backline. If the friendly midline failed, the enemy front line would outdamage the friendly front line because of the enemy backline's better heals and the friendly frontline would fail too. If the friendly backline would fail at any point whatsoever, the fight would be over.

Who said that balanced PvE wasn't complicated?



Now if you're interested in an actual story, picture this scenario:


I'm a tank. Always been one, always will be. It's what I like to do. Sure I play some PvP where I obviously do not tank, but PvE has always been tanking for me. Maybe you think that's silly and I should "lrn2play othr clazzez nub", but I don't.

So I'm in a guild team with 4 human players (me included), somewhere around Vabbi or Desolation, I don't remember clearly. I'm the main aggro tank; another support tank is waiting in the back with the casters. I run in some mob of Margonites while the rest waits in the back. The mob consists of a few casters and a bunch of Dervishes. The casters just look at me funny for a second but then decide to cast their spells anyway and I take some flak (we didn't bring Spell Breaker for whatever reason).

Then it happens. The Dervishes don't move. At all. They just stand there. At first I'm confused. Is it just a case of broken aggro? This happens sometimes when a few monsters simply don't aggro at all, like the Skeletal Bonds in FoW. So I move towards their main casters. The Dervishes still don't move. At last, I tell my group to come within aggro range, as I'm starting to get in need of hex removal by now.

Then it happens. The Dervishes all spring into action and go straight for the monks. My jaw just drops to the floor as even the caster I'm chopping away at turns his attention towards someone else.


Now in the meantime I've laid my Axe and Shield aside and have been happily Hammer bashing away at uncaring enemies for the past day. I've developed a whole new love for Earthshaker.

But I'm no longer a tank.

I guess I just miss being a tank.