Force Heroes to use a skill repetitively. "Skill spam"

Sometimes I'll give a hero an awesome build but it can't use it because the key skill doesn't get used at all. Usually, it's a stance.

• W/D hero using Primal Rage. I discovered how powerful Primal Rage is on my warrior, but the whole thing is lost because the AI doesn't know that PR is meant to be held up or used at all. Manual cast a skill every few seconds? :P
• P/W hero using Flurry. If you have a lot of adrenal skills, shouldn't you have an IAS skill that suits you like Flurry? It's another one of those skills that lasts a short while and must be recast.
• Warrior hero using Warrior's Endurance. From what I saw, they just don't use it at all. Another stance that doesn't get used. This, like Primal Rage, is an elite stance that should be kept up full time (in battle).

I'd really like to see a way to make a certain skill be spammed regardless of whether it uses it once in a while or never. The way I imagine it, you'd click right above a skill in a hero's skill bar on a little toggle button. Maybe you could even designate 2 skills as spam buttons. Also, you could have a second option to spam only in battle. It obviously wouldn't get saved in the template file, but that would be fine.

Does anyone else wish they could force a skill to be used constantly or constantly while in battle?

I thought maybe adding to the hero interface by creating a user-specified skill activation panel. Obviously it would be pretty basic, but a player can tell the AI to use a set of skills in a certain order or to auto-activate a skill when it fails/falters/dies/gets stripped away as the next thing regardless. As I said, I imagine it would only allow the most basic things, but the one thing it should definitely do is allow the player to tell Lina to stop casting spell after spell while standing in aoe/lava/etc.

Dear lord woman!

The AI does this to some extent, and I hate micromanaging things in GW, but I would like this.
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Storytelling by the fire at Gunnar's Hold? You bet!

I thought I'd get a lot more than one reply so far. I'm sure many of you have had the same thing happen with hero AI, so I'm surprised that with 40 view more people would have commented. I'm talking about something that would seriously help hero AI and I'm sure it'd be easy to implement.

Wonder if I should call it a petition in all-caps and make the topic something stupid like "I DEMAND AN ALLOWANCE FROM ANET.. 100k.." just to get attention, and then switch up the thread.

I tend to agree. I stuck [skill]Faithful Intervention[/skill] on Melonni to be maintained, only to find the AI uses it like an emergency heal, only casting after the <50% health condition is met.

It's only a few skills that seem to have the problem though, and if we are then able to start programming conditions into our own heros similar to Gambits from FFXII, then it almost completely eradicates the need to ever group with other players. Plus such a system would take a lot of time to develop, whereas it's not that hard to have your hero skillbar open and click the skill occassionally (it'd be nice if there were a keyboard shortcut though).

I find heroes work quite well for PvE as they are, so I'm going to have to

/notsigned

It's not like I made another auction house request. That would actually take time and effort. Don't we invent things to make our lives easier, though? What you are saying is that it would take a lot of time to develop a hero panel option to force repeated use of a skill? How much time could it possibly take to make a feature that uses a skill over and over?

I watch the operations of my heroes when I use them, and often find myself micromanaging them, but why should a person click in the same spot every 5 seconds to keep up a stance?

While it would be nice to change skill priority and the AI on certain skills, your examples are mostly terrible. Here's why:
1. Primal Rage disables ALL skills. Who cares if you have armor penetration and extra chance to critical, when you CANNOT use any other skill, most importantly, your adrenal attack skills which would end up being stronger than Primal Rage. Lastly, as it is a stance, you LOSE the increased attack speed skill, since all Warrior IAS skills are stances.

2. Flurry is an extremely energy hungry stance (exactly 3 pips of energy regeneration) that drops your damage output (albeit, only base damage). Paragons have Aggressive Refrain, which they will upkeep nicely so long as you have a shout ending before it ends. The 17% less attacks you get is probably outweighed by the fact that you aren't being penalised 25% of your base damage output. It also doesn't take your stance.

3. Warrior's Endurance, like Primal Rage, takes your stance, leaving IAS impossible. Most good Warrior builds aren't too energy intensive that the 2 pips of energy regeneration is problematic to work with. Take an adrenal skill or three.

As far as my own experience shows though, sometimes skills used badly by heroes isn't a good build, period. Other times, those skills are better used by someone else in your team. Just adjust their build slightly and it will work.

You want them to run a build they don't want to.

Rather than fighting with them, change their build.

Heroes are a backup, not replacement for real humans. If you want to run builds perfectly, humans players are the best.

The problem with programmable skills is that outside of a few very specific builds, they just wouldn't work. Everyone would go for echo/whatever, but it wouldn't really help, since hero targetting would put the same thing on same target.

Heroes are just backup. They don't really need to pass the Turing test.

You simply haven't tried it. Primal Rage, 16 strength, a customized hand of the forgotten, and a full set of sentinel armor is better than you imagine. Typical range is 45 to 150 per hit, and combined with Heart of Holy Flame it's even better. Used against the undead I've had numbers around 480. I really hope that's the last of the Primal Rage discussion. If they ever buff the skill it will be amazing to me. So, by all means, go push for a buff!
I never liked spear builds, and the way I like to play paragon is as support. Flurry is an excellent stance for paragons. Are monks concerned about damage output? No. My paragon is dedicated to support and that's the way I want to have my paragon heros play too, otherwise I just wouldn't use them. Do they have any issue with energy? Absolutely not. Once again, I did not enter a new players forum seeking help with broken builds or to make sure I'm staying clear of skills that certain people think are useless to me.
I had fun with this skill, being able to use attack skills without a break. I wanted to see Jora use her skills a little more often too. A warrior hero not ever using a warrior elite skill. Does that even make sense to you? I hate that you've prompted me to defend the use of any certain skill on myself or on heroes. I meant for this to be discussion about my suggestion not about skill selection.

Stance. For 5 seconds, your attack rate is increased by 33%, but you deal 25% less damage.

Lets say your average base dps is 100 to make the calculations eaiser. So a +33% attack rate would bring it to 133 (100 * 1.33). The -25% damage would drop it to 99.75 (133 * 0.75).

So we are only talking about a 0.25% damage decrease here. But since the damage dealt is always rounded it will be very rare for it to make a difference in your base attack, without taking the increased adrenaline gain or other per hit damage boosts (such as a vamp weapon) into account.

You do have a point about the upkeep cost though. But if you have a lot of skills that give energy (such as shouts with high leadership), or simply not use any, this can be accounted for.

I'd like to see little switches/drop downs on the skills which you can use to activate/deactivate skill usage triggers.

- maintain at all times (stances/enchantments/spirits)
- only use when - target is hexed/enchanted/conditioned
I'd like to be able to deactivate these. Often AI does not use certain skills because 'optimal' conditions for skill usage are not met.
- use togetter with skill ... to make skill combo's.

But this really shouldn't be necessarry, maybe making threads about faulty AI behaviour in the bug forum would be better and we could get those skills fixed for everyone.

if there would be a shortcut key for heroes skills, HB that is allrdy wrecked up becomes a spike enviroment with ppl playing 3 R/E spikers or something......

/signed maybe a check box on their skill set for maintained. Though the eles seem good at keeping up atunements.

~the rat~

Eh, okay then.

Spears are the strongest one handed DPS available in the game. If they're not using Flurry, give them Aggressive Refrain instead, and part of your example crumbles.

Given that the best attack skills on Warriors are generally adrenal, there are few reasons why you'd need the ridiculous energy generation taking up your elite slot AND your stance.

All your calculations are wrong.

Assuming base 100 DPS, Flurry increases attack rate by 33%. Using the game engine, this is a whopping 50% more attacks, so your DPS would rise to 150. 150x0.75 = 112.5, an increase in DPS by 12.5%. Now take Aggressive Refrain, which is a flat 25% IAS with no drawback, you increase attacks by a nice 33%, so that DPS goes to 133. Net result? You're 18.22% better with Aggressive Refrain EXCEPT if you needed the hits more than the overall damage. Then, you're 12.78% more hits better off with Flurry.

IAS reduces the attack time by the stated amount, rather than increasing your overall attack rate.

The reason why is because the heroes take into account the negative aspects of these skills. Their AI does NOT like being disabled, nor needlessly penalising themself (or using a complicated combo). They don't think like you. Change the builds while thinking like them and you're better off. You may not like to play the build that way, but they sure will.

You could always just micro your heroes.

It's what I do.

GG?

I like your ideas too. I just thought about how a little reset button on the side would be good, too.

To Kale:
When you put 0 points in spear mastery you don't give a shit about DPS. That's what I'm talking about when I say that I play as support. My skillbar and attributes don't include spear mastery/attacks. In the meantime I will consider giving the hero the Agressive Refrain simply because I won't need click Flurry repeatedly. Can we now also drop discussion about Aggressive Refrain, Flurry, and whether or not it sucks for DPS?

Penalizing themselves by using an elite warrior stance that supplies them with energy? It doesn't sacrifice their health. It doesn't put a condition on them. I didn't make it a choice between two good stances. I gave it a single skill that gives it energy from attacking. You're choosing to ignore the fact that they don't use it at all.

Glad there's are some positive posts being made, too.

Probably because they use skills when they need it, never before. They'd have to be down to around 5 energy before they'd use the skill I'd imagine, though I've never used it on a hero before.

Biggest problem with heroes is that they don't use some skills properly, and sometimes refuse to use certain skills completely. You have to remember heroes aren't meant to be as good as experienced players, and you can always micro them if they play stupid...

Definitely. Sounds like a few RPG fans need to play a little more RTS games to learn the secrets of micromanagement. WarCraft 3, the last great game of Blizzard before the plague of WoW came out, is a prime example of meticulous micromanagement. I suggest picking that out.

There's no need to be lazy, folks. Heroes are a great addition to gameplay, but making them identical to an experienced human player is just unrealistic. The AI already has extremely good reflexes in terms of interruptions and the monks are usually adept at keeping the party healed. I think this is just a case of getting the whole arm when you've been given a hand.

Skipped most of the thread, so if someone already mentioned this, congrat's to them.

A priority system should be implemented, with a scale of 1-5 to be placed on their skill bar. 3 being the default, used as currently normal, with 1 being rarely used, and 5 being spam.

I think this would be fairly simple to implement, and be more than acceptable for the spam/micromanagement issue some people have, without harming the play of anyone else.

The overall issue with hero ai is that with so many possible skill combinations, it can't always understand how to use the build it's given.

It will never replace human players, because sometimes we want the ai to do things that don't make conventional sense. For example, the hero ai can't run a standard pvp choking gas ranger properly, because it doesn't understand how the skill practiced stance is implemented. The ai treats it as though the stance needs to be up for its duration, where a human player can see that the recharge effect is immediate after using a preparation, and can change to an IAS stance.
In the majority of cases this behaviour is good because the hero is saving energy by not overlapping stances, so why should the ai treat the above example as being any different? It's a niche usage that would require a far more sophisticated ai... or just the option to micromanage it like we already can.

If there was a "spam" option for skills, players would probably find themselves getting annoyed at heroes not using any other skills and resorting to micromanagement anyway. Facebook has a nice slider system in it's options for showing more or less of a particular type of headline. This might work well for heroes; we could have for example sliders for enchants, stances, attacks, and spells, to tell the ai what we want used more often.

A lot of things are wrong with the ai across the game, but it'll never be perfect and we learn to adapt to it. Imagine how hard elite missions would really be if the mob ai learned to move *around* a tank rather than getting bugged against walls. It's a shame not all builds work on heroes, but that's the side effect for getting the majority to work.