Glitch in Mhenlo's healing AI?

Hello, weird question, but has anyone else noticed recently that Mhenlo has a tendency to stop healing a character after passing a certain point of life? I've recently come up against twwo equally frustrating scenarios of this... both involved health degen.

First, I was going through Grenth's footprint, fighting a group of enemies, and they were focus firing me. Naturally, I thought, Mhenlo'd heal me at least a bit, since I was the only person taking damage, but he just sat there as I got pummeled. I managed to run to the backlines, but promptly died of poison/phantasm/bleeding combo.

More recently, in Thunderhead Keep, the home of Jalis the suicide King, I was in a similar situation. Jalis in his usual drug-induced battle fury, went off to solo some rangers while the rest of the team concentrated on gnashers no less than a few spaces away. The end result was Jalis taking a huge amount of damage, but Mhenlo healing him once or twice then just standing there like a retard while the king died.

This is really frustrating, and I don't think it's an energy problem, because I was watching him... it doesn't take over a minute to get 5mp for word of healing...

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone else's noticed this.... thanks in advance.

Well he could've been hit with an energy reduction skill from an enemy. Also, you're lucky he even healed King Jarlis once, I've never seen henchmen heal NPCs ever.

Jarlis is part of your party, so therefore is healed by the AI which spans to pretty much everything in your little box (P). As for a mhenlo, I have noticed him just stop healing one character and start healing others who are nearly at full or well above average while the one he left behind is holding on by a thread. I don't know why, Lina does not do this as can be told by the large amount of enchants you get spammed on you, sadly its usually not enough... poor lina not thanked for her efforts while mhenlo does his stupid stuff :P

It just happened again.. I watched Jalis go from half life to 0 life, as the rest of the party was at full life. This is getting absurd. Mhenlo SAT there, doing absolutely NOTHING as the king died. It took about 10 seconds for him to even get into the danger zone, he wasn't getting attacked at all (died from phantasm), yet nobody healed him. Frustrating, since Thunderhead is a really freaking long mission, and I was 2 enemies away from getting past the escort part.

As a monk secondary I had no problems completing this mission with henchmen, it may sound silly but it might be worth it for all the frustration you are having. Why don't you change your secondary to monk and go grab Mending. With a +3 Mending on Jarlis I did this mission easily with henchmen, I didn't have to heal him once.

Yes, I believe I HAVE noticed this, although it's only now that you bring it up when it occurrs to me that's what's been going on.

But yeah, just yesterday my buddy and I were commenting to one another that with Menhlo in the party, we both have to resort to running around a lot more than when he's not with us.. Bet this is why, because it's a pretty drastic difference.

I think it's more a problem with all the bots though, and not just Mhenlo. Sadly, MOST of the bots will stand around like retards from time to time. I find it's usually because some quirk of pathing has made them decide they haven't yet reached their destination, but they won't keep trying to find another path to get themselves unstuck and continue on with their orders.

Example is you call a target, bot takes off to attack it, unrelated enemy unit charges up to bot and begins pounding on it blocking bot's path to the called target, bot stands in place getting killed.

I'm wondering if something similar isn't happening with Mhenlo, and something about the skills he uses makes it happen to him more frequently than the others. Next time it happens, try to see if he might simply be 'stuck' enroute to the teammate that needs healing..

it's not a glitch..AI doesn't exist therefore this game can't be utilizing it.

and I've never seen mhenlo heal Jalis...<3 mhenlo, but he's a shitty healer.

Mhenlo was a decent healer back at Lion's Arch, when you escorted him with the others, but when he became an NPC, it was all downhill from there.

I think I recall something like that happening, wondering, "Why isn't Mhenlo healing me?", when it was the beginning of the battle, and there no Mesmers or purple hex arrows on him.

Interesting...

I recently gave up my attempts to find a group that could pull off Thunderhead. I knew it was a tough mission, but I figured why not give the Henchies a try. Afterall they got Elona Reach for me as well (after hours of failing with humans).

My first attempt I got all the way to the Fort and killed of Ragnar. All that was left was the 2 groups of 4, which are too close to each other to draw apart (with henchies). I tried none the less, however the King went running into the group and ended up being killed... it was close though, and he was getting healed. Since I was a Ranger I know it wasn't my healing.

Second attempt I made it all the way through, completed successfully I just about had goose bumps. I think I got lucky though. The waves of baddies coming through the gates were at most two at a time and my group could run back and forth nailing them. One named Mursaat guy got through with a few thugs and went up to where the King usually sits. But for some reason the King had already come down and was sitting the middle of the open space, the Mursaat couldn't find him! It was kinda funny. Then after a while I was starting to wonder where that Perfect Armor guy was, when something happened I'd never seen before. Big group of Mantle and that Confessor Dorian guy showed up. I was thinking "crap, I'm toast." But they were relatively low level and I walked all over them, which as it turned out was the end of the mission!

So anyway, I have seen Mhenlo do a good job (trying) to keep the King alive (my first attempt). Throughout the second attempt he wasn't really in any danger, but what happened to Perfect Armor dude I still don't know; I guess he took a wrong turn...

Oh WELL then! Let's all stop discussing this subject at once, since apparently the problem never existed in the first place. Thanks, Semantics! You've once again freed us from our pointless explorations



Everyone else OK with using the term 'AI' when we actually mean to be talking about simple scripts? Good.

Mhenlo heals better than 65% of the human healers out there. He is not perfect. His healing scripts do MAKE SENSE, however: you can tell after playing with the henchies a lot how they prioritize human players in the group, other healers, themselves, and so forth. He ABSOLUTELY DOES HEAL JALIS AND OTHER NPCs. Anyone who says henchmen don't heal the King is just frustrated because they cannot win a pretty straight forward mission and want to blame it on something.

You can tell how the henchmen think by watching their resurrection priorities. Henchmen do get stuck, but so do human players from time to time when they target the wrong guy or the battlefield is so congested that they cannot hit the intended target. The ones that get stuck, though, are the warriors. The casters rarely get stuck, but they sometimes don't move into casting range. What you are probably noticing is the "blame mhenlo" syndrome where several things happen at once: henchmen over aggro archanists and player frantically struggles to kill things, praying that the king doesn't die. Mhenlo depletes his energy supply healing throughout the team as several members suffer health degeneration at the same time. Mhenlo gets hit with some energy drain from those same enemy archanists, who also have pretty good AI scripting. Player is extremely frustrated by not knowing what Mhenlo's energy level is because Mhenlo never says things like: "My energy is 2 of 43." Player's perception of time passage during the intense combat is distorted. Player becomes convinced Mhenlo is conspiring to cause him to lose the mission. Player tears out hair, smashes computer, calms down, and eventually seeks psychiatric help.

That is normal progress of the syndrome. Get professional help if you need it.

Deepest apologies for my terrible bungle. It must've been hard understanding my post with such a tragic flaw in it.

But onto other things more pertinent and conducive to the issue--I didn't think about this until I was in class not paying attention today, but I've seen that enemies, when reaching a critical health level, will stop healing themselves altogether. Perhaps something similar is worked into the reactionary, scripted henchmen programming which is in no way, of course, related to or remotely synonymous with AI but to a higher threshold of hp for henchmen.

Example: Mhenlo's set to stop healing a member at 25% health because the player is most likely to die. Mhenlo lets the player die as he heals other players who are most likely to survive.

This might be a reason for his odd behavior.... he's still pretty quirky tho... and he likes to use Restore Life on people in the middle of battle

I'm fairly certain that this isn't the case. I've played monk and I know it takes no more than 3 seconds (more to 4 seconds since I know someone will call me out on semantics again) at 4 mp regeneration to get 5 mp for word of healing. Fighting 2 arcanists, both of which do little damage to players through means of direct attack, and having two support mages, does not logically lead to the conclusion that Mhenlo was out of energy.

You can tell when the henchmen will use restore life, too. The script checks the health of the party members and the energy level of the healer monk. If there is no one who needs healing and the energy is there, the monk will try to resurrect, regardless of whether a battle is going on. That is usually okay, and just what I would want him to do, but there are other times when it isn't appropriate. How is a henchman to know, though? Most human beings can't even figure that one out, I've noticed. It would be good if he could disengage the resurrect and heal if players in the party start taking massive damage, but in my experience he will only disengage a restore life if HE is taking massive damage.

wouldn't want you wasting time discussing technology that doesn't yet exist

I have never seen henchmen party members heal NPC "allies." I do not think it is a bug, but I dont think Alesia or Mhenlo ever healed allies.

Oo Oo! I just had to get in on this.. AI is a technology that does exist. That's right ladies and gentlemen (if I can use that those terms), it truely does exist in our time and in our reality. Just not so much in games, that's not a practical application of it.

You'd only really know what I'm talking about if your an Uber Geek like myself, its not like its made leaps and bounds and garnered public attention yet.

Well, you have to be kind of an epistemological philosopher like me to really want the answer to a question like this, but: what are you using as your definition of AI, Teklord? Artificial Intelligence has been defined in litany of different ways and as far as I know, there is no consensus on an operating definition. There has certainly been "artificial intelligence" under some definitions for decades. I have seen some remarkable examples of artificial intelligence in numerous places, so if we want to talk about it, we ought to define it.

what you are seeing/describing is considered Simulated Intelligence...for a machine to BE Artificially Intelligent it has to possess the ability to learn..which is, infact, impossible. Simulated Intelligence, however, has been around for more than a decade and video games have made use of it for years.

Ok, that is a step toward a definition, but it begs the question. How are going to define able to learn? I played a chess program when I was in elementary school over a decade ago that would change its play style based upon my moves and learn how I played chess to improve against me in each successive game it played against me. It adapted, it changed, it became a different program after playing me than it became after playing my friend. I contend that that is learning under most definitions. This is an interesting topic for epistemologists, so keep going, but give me comprehensive definitions and logical proofs if you are going to contend something is impossible.

Yeah, I suppose it would be hard to pin a definite definition onto that term. I was thinking the type of AI that can show to a limited degree (limited by current abilities with said techonology) self awareness. An ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to learn while adapting and be able to anticipate probable changes.

As a very simple example, although quite complex to create in reality, a robot that can 'learn' to walk. Give it a destination clear in plain site and it will walk towards it. Restart the senario, then half way through the walk dump and object in the way. The robot has to realize it cannot travel through the object and to find a new way to reach the destination. With such an AI one could do this test several times over and if landing an obstruction in the same place at the same time eventually it would anticipate the obstruction and begin to change course in order to avoid it before the obstruction appears.

It's out there in today's world, well in R&D departments anyway. Still a ways off before such a technology will be doing more complex tasks such as driving a car and the like. The day is coming though.

Edit: I love the term impossible. Everything is possible. Anything one can every think of is possible, just to very degress of possibility. The very thought that one can think of it makes it possible in your mind. A lot of things have such a small chance of being possible with our limited view of the universe that we have to label it and thus consider it impossible, which in itself is impossible. Nothing is impossible that way. And that leads me to another nice one to wrap ones mind around, Nothing. Nothing doesn't exist in and of itself. Think of this one like this: can you have nothing / hold nothing in your hand? Even if you are holding "nothing" you are in fact holding on to air, or dust particles or "something". Nothing is just another term we had to create to describe a concieved state of being that doesn't actually exist. I love this kind of stuff!

what you described would be simulated intelligence. The robot can guess that the object is going to be there based on several runs that told the application that controls the robots motor movements that the object was in the way. This isn't learning, it's self programming. There have been numerous applications that have used self programming to complete complex objectives without being hard coded. The ability to 'learn' requires an understanding of the concept of knowledge. A computer runs entirely on a series of 0's and 1's calculated to run complex mathematical equations. It's preset in it's nature, it can only do what you tell it to do. And it can only calculate. Simulated Intelligence takes advantage of this and calculates various variables and constants in a scenario to ultimately come to a reasonable conclusion. Like Teklord mentioned in his Robot example. The robot can calculate the odds of an object being there based on repetative runs....but it's not technically learning. It's storing information and calculating that information into reasonable odds.

Technically speaking, the brain is a computer controlled by complex sodium-potassium gateways across the neurons

It's hard to think about it, but the human behavior is similar to those of computers, in early life. A baby will feel pain caused by say, a hot cup, and will form a set of reactionary precautions to assure that it won't happen again. The human situation is just a lot more complex than that of computers up to this point--the basic programming is still there, though. Cause, effect, and adapt. It's the initial instillment of the ability to adapt that we haven't been able to move into computers. If we can do that, and give such a thing an ample amount of time to create complexes of reactions to situations, then it would be very much like us

Fair enough. Definition of Artificial via Dictionary.com

2. Made in imitation of something natural; simulated: artificial teeth.

I guess what I need to understand now is the difference (if any) between Artificial Intelligence and Simulated Intelligence.

Addition: I'm not gonna get an answer... am I?

ive seen mhenlo in action.hells precipice. i was dead so i decided to watch mhenlo to see what skills he uses.i found out which ones he used.none of them.the whole time i watched him,he used allmost nothing.just sat there until our whole team was dead.

Wouldn't this be reallly creepy and bad for online gaming. Imagine a game where thousands of people played and the AI learned how to adapt to every way these thousand people played to the point that it changes the way monsters stacked and spawned and flanked and so forth. I don't think the game would be beatable after the first person beat it, with thousands behind that first person still wanting that same goal to beat the game. The only beatable game would be the one where only you played it. Even then as you played it would adapt, then you would have to adapt, then it would have to adapt, and so on till I'm guessing the computer would be the only winner. Its like Wargames, "the only winning move is not to play."

Man, I tell ya, that Mhenlo is an evil selfish dude. You all think he has no intelligence. Well, you are all fooled by him. The way I see it, he has intelligence, and lots of it. You see, ANET wants him to use his skills, but he refuses because he doesn't like to be told by us players what to do. You see, he was our master trainer in pre-searing and he thinks it's beneath him to take orders from us. But he doesn't want us to find out, so he secretly chooses not to heal our allie (especially, King Jarlis the dwarf) to sabotage our missions. Remember how he got lost in Ironhorse Mine all by himself (the quest Cynn asked us to find him)? He was actually a stone summit spy on his way to warn stone summit our coming. Lol, now you have exposed his evil scheme, lets hope ANET does something about this traitor. So, you guys still think there's no AI in henchies?

LOL! Mhenlo's only there to cap skills!

The henchies would not be so mysterious to you guys if you could see their energy levels. If a human player died, you are taking damage WAY too fast for them to keep up and they are already out of energy. They prioritize humans extremely high on the heal order, and if you died, Mhenlo isn't going to do a thing until he has energy again, and depending on the hexes and situation that may be a while, but more likely he will be dead before he gets the chance to heal anyone else, either. Henchmen monks operate under the same constraints as human monks: energy conservation, skill recharge times, and so forth. They just don't call out their energy level ever, so you cannot know where they are at. Wait longer than you would normally between battles, and give the henchies the benefit of the doubt. A good way to know if you are pressing attacks too fast for the henchmen to keep up is by seeing how often Lina uses Aegis. If you waited long enough between battles, she will give you an aegis, a protective spirit, and a regeneration shield when the next battle gets intense. If not, you didn't give her enough time to recover.

Final thoughts of mine of the artifical intelligence debate, if any of you earlier posters are still reading and interested:

How is self-awareness and conceptual understanding of knowledge the measure of intelligence? We have no way of knowing how self-aware a dog is, or how much an infant understands about the concept of knowledge, but we would say both are intelligent, right? Morever, we do know how completely self-aware a machine can be in the sense that it can be equipped with complex sensors to make extremely detailed observations about its environment, be programmed to know its own dimensions, for example, and thus effectively calculate whether it can fit through a tunnel before trying to investigate an area. So what do you mean by self-awareness?

Perhaps by AI, you mean a program that is capable of growing beyond its original limits, and thus adding "new code" in response to experience. Maybe that is what you mean by learning, too. I submit, however, that a program can be designed in such a way that it adds new code. In fact, I can imagine a program that grows with new code based upon an instruction to randomly generate options as a function of a number and a response indexed to that number in an exponentially vast array of combinations of possible solutions to a problem. The program could try a combination of solution ideas that achieve the desired measurable result in such a way that it will add that solution to its reportaire of "good" solutions, create code based upon it, and employ that solution again in future situations that are similar. Isn't that exactly what we as humans do when faced with a new problem? The technology to do that certainly exists today. And it isn't that hard to imagine a machine coming up with a solution that even SURPRISES the inventor of the machine. It might have pulled a random combination of possible solutions that even the original author of the code didn't think of, simply because of the brute force and speed of the computing power. When Deep Blue finally beat Gary Kasparov in chess, the first machine to beat the reigning world champion, Kasparov was shocked by a simple, completely unexpected, and yet absolutely pivotal pawn move that the computer had made. He said at the time that it was like God himself had stepped in and made that critical move because no one else anywhere would have thought of it. That is an example of a machine not only showing human-like intelligence, but of showing in Kasparov's words "God-like intelligence."

But to carry the debate one step further, I think we can find something that Plato and Socrates sought, something that seperates man from animals and humans from machines. And maybe that eluvise idea is what you are intuitively sensing when you say artifical intelligence is not possible; THE MACHINE WILL NEVER GROW OR DEVELOP IN A WAY THAT IS NOT A DIRECT AND EXACT RESULT OF THE RULES AND INSTRUCTIONS IT WAS ORIGINALLY GIVEN. Some day the robots may turn on us and enslave the human race, but if they do it will be because they were able to arrive at that point by following the instructions we originally gave. The machine can add new code, and add it in unexpected ways, but it has to follow the rules. Humans don't always follow the rules. What I believe humans have is a WILL (autonomy, agency, the power to choose). What technologically escapes us is the power to create in a machine a new will. If you believe that humans have no agency, no will of their own, then you believe in psychological determinism (that heredity and environment dictate everything that we do in life) and you have accepted that there is NOTHING that a human can do that a machine cannot also do. Consequently, I reject determinism, as I believe every judgment I make, every word I write, every second I spend doing anything, and every thought I have reflects a choice I have made. So in that sense, I agree with your intuition that humans and machines are different.

Now that was an exciting post to read! I doubt I could do it the justice it deserves in a reply. Very well laid out, I couldn't help but think of movies such as: Matrix, I Robot, and Stealth.

We could easily start getting into whether choice is merely an illusion of control we are given in our lives, and whether or not Destiny can therefore be chosen. I actually don't think about that kind of thing much myself, but I've definitly read things on par with the above post on such topics. Fascinating stuff!

When it come to the missions you really aren't suppose to use NPC or henchies.It is suppose to teach you about competive coopertive play with real ppl and players get fidgety and nervous.There are only 2 ways around this and that is to put a quest inside the mission or do the mission with real ppl as I am having a real hard time with the 3 ascention missions with real players and henchies.The coopertive play is suppose to teach you about playing PVP but the best way to do it is to play PVP.