User talk:Karlos/The Chronicles of Lamees

Henchmen
I know that situation all too well ;( Skuld  10:07, 25 April 2006 (CDT)


 * Even though this is probably the 100th time they do it to me, it never fails to drive me nuts each time. A testament to the engineering prowess of some very evil developer in ANet. :) I am fairly certain now that those guys never actually play the whole game. I am guessing they PvP against each other to test skills and the like, but I am pretty certain they never get on the actual servers to try and go through the whole game and finish it. Some of the AI bugs are catastrophic. (And filing bugs about henchie AI to their support center results in a request to go talk on game forums about the problem, much like the FoW request I did on Guru.) The game is technically very impressive, but the AI of the henchies is very bad, at best. --Karlos 10:21, 25 April 2006 (CDT)


 * I think everyone can relate to this one. My favorite is when I was to retreat and regroup; several of the henchies will just stand their ground to the end, even though all of their support is now an aggro circle or two distance away.  Getting through the majority of the missions with only henchmen is do-able; but extremely frustrating in needing to get just the right spawn, and at times flat out lucky in order to complete them.  Travelling the explorable areas between them to skill cap can be an excercise in futility at times, and is borderline impossible in some areas.  Instructions to "stand ground", "follow me", or "attack" would seem relatively low-level simple commands that could be incorporated relatively easilly. --161.88.255.140 11:37, 25 April 2006 (CDT)


 * I actually prefer henchies to PuGs whenever possible. There are a few things you simply cannot do with henchies. At least not with any build. Such examples would be the bonus for the Aurora Glade mission or the ending sequence of the Sanctum Cay mission. Anything that requires focusing on multiple fronts is basically impossible. I have gotten to the point where I can do almost anything else with the henchies. I would say that's "despite" the henchie AI not because of it.
 * Still, despite henching for so long, I am amazed that they can still "catch me napping" every now and then and manage to pull something like that. The other day I was doing Abaddon's Mouth with henchies (started out as capping and then I said what the heck, let's just kill everything while we're here). :) They managed to get us all wiped out because the Wurm popped up while they were attacking the Behemoths. Lina got knocked down and when she got up she insisted on casting WHILE the Behemoths were landing 100+ damage shots at her, a simple side step would have occured to any human player, instead she stood right there trying to cast on herself with the Wurm crushing her and the behemoths nailing her (not sure why Mhenlo didn't heal her). Once she died, Mhenlo lost all purpose to his life and immediately followed her and you can see where that went. Just a colossal failure because of the inability to react to a situation.
 * Like you said, these basic commands are incrdibly easy to implement. I remeber back in October or so, I sent them this angry e-mail because they had developed the "sophisticated" resurrection scheme that the monks still follow till today but failed to address much more urgent (and seemingly easier to solve) issues like the pathing problem of going around another creature when going around a corner or healers' inability to heal while moving or even the basic need to be able to know if the henchies are ready (i.e. if I ping my energy, they all ping theirs so I know if they are good to go or not). I personally don't think ANet even wants to make the henchies half-decent, I think they realize that if they do that, most players would not PvE together because of the sad state of PuGs. So, instead of solving the real issue, they keep this broken. --Karlos 22:51, 25 April 2006 (CDT)