Para heroes keeping up refrains, is this new?

I was just going to get the latest WiK bounty, and had selected a para hero with anthem of flame and aggressive refrain on their bar besides other stuff.

Basically both para heroes used aggressive refrain, then the one with anthem of flame spammed it on recharge.

In the past I or other human players have taken AoF or they're on fire to maintain refrains when going uw with para based teams, and if you take a break, all the refrains would drop or they would in between fights if no human player used a shout.

It now seems with AoF you can leave the maintenance to the heroes. They do reuse their aggressive refrains though when they have the energy and it is recharged, even if another anthem is on them. So I disabled that skill to save their energy, and still, all refrains were maintained.

I tried anthem of weariness, they're on fire, anthem of disruption, and only anthem of flame is spammed on recharge.

Has this always been the case, or is it some sneaky partial update I missed?
Neither Wiki or Wikia mentions this when I look at the page for anthem of flame.

It certainly wasn't the case back when I played with my paragon. Thats pretty awesome. I was always afraid to bring AR on my para heroes because they didnt maintain it effectively leaving them without an energy pool. Im definitely going to start using morgahn and hayda again

lol, that is weird that they only maintain their refrains with AoF but not other anthems...

I've noticed WiK zealots maintaining anthem out of battle, I'll bet these AI changes were related to getting those mobs to work as they wanted.

Its worth noticing that although they now maintain AR they also have a tendency to recast it even though it's still active, sometimes at very poor moments. I disable it after first cast and then try to keep an eye on 1 para hero at least just to make sure they don't "miss" with AoF.

I noticed Hayda using fall back religiously last night. Made the Wanted quest a snap without hitting her on the head to keep us running fast!

Fallback has always been spammed as soon as you start moving.

To answer the OP's question about when this happened, Paragon heroes have been doing this since the mesmer update. I vanquished the day before and had to micro their Aggressives at the start of the zone. When I logged on to start afterwards, they had already cast theirs before I was even ready to get my own going.

I hadn't noticed that they would spam Anthem of Flame on recharge as I don't use it on any of our builds - Anthem of Weariness and Anthem of Disruption definitely are not used on recharge as the OP mentioned.

It's also very, very annoying to have your heroes cast Aggressive Refrain when they're already under its effects. I've just disabled the skill and gone back to microing it.

Quote: Originally Posted by The Riven

Its worth noticing that although they now maintain AR they also have a tendency to recast it even though it's still active, sometimes at very poor moments. I disable it after first cast and then try to keep an eye on 1 para hero at least just to make sure they don't "miss" with AoF. Noticed that re-cast too Jim, its annoying.