Minotaur combat feedback

lemulet

In the range demo video, it felt like each monster was in there for themselves.

From my understanding of the social NPC factions, they have different classes and hierarchies. I think this should be shown in the actual combat style of those NPCs.

For exemple, the dog-like creatures could bark to alert the other minotaurs. The priest could put a shield on the melee minotaur to help it. Or like in WOW, when a minotaur gets to low hp, they could run to ask for help forcing the player to burst it down before things escalate.

Also, their positioning was clearly meant to make it easy to 1v1 each of them. But it doesn't seem realistic for intelligent beings with complementary skills like shaman and marauders to be alone instead of small squads.

Without being elites, it seems to me that more intelligent monsters should have cooperation. This also adds to the thrill and strategy when engaging these more interesting NPCs.

Kreinster

They were clearly there as training dummies. I wouldn't expect devs to program a proper AI just for a ranged combat demo.

The idea is nice, however.

Abarat

Kreinster wrote: »

They were clearly there as training dummies. I wouldn't expect devs to program a proper AI just for a ranged combat demo.

I would hope they are not programming anything "just" for a demo... these are supposed to highlight what is being done, not specifically to show off.

I agree with the OP. Based upon how they sold the Minotaur as having classes similar to pc's...i, too, was looking forward to seeing them act in a group setting. In fairness, though, they did say these were the solo versions, so we can only hope there will group/epic level guys who act as a pc group might in pvp.

lemulet

I want to say I was wrong for the bubble shield. Rewatching the video mutliple times, there is one occurence where the shaman shields itself and the dog-like creature at the same time.Thus was from one of the shamans that was teamed up with a dog. So maybe the shield only apply if they are in originial group and not if you pull multiple NPCs together.

But for me it seemed to be the direction they wanted to go to have interactions between the NPCs during combat. I just wanted to share a discussion about it since we just saw a demo and see what people thought of the combat in it.

SorcererKingGown

I think everyone should curb their PvE AI expectations a little bit. This would be really cool, but who knows how much work all of this would take? I don't know of many MMO's that have good NPC AI, possibly due to server issues like not having enough CPU for that.

Rhorden

@lemulet

Great idea and couldn't agree with you more. I have played a few games where AI would attempt to circle you and attack from multiple directions at the same time. Those AI were just as dumb as any other but it felt like a far more dangerous situation.
Coordinated efforts, flanking, healing, retreating when low hp and calling for help would make the engagements considerably more intense.
Not only that but spatial awareness and learning how to pull singles from a pack would be huge skills to learn. As a long time tank from WoWs glory days it amazed me then how bad people were at those two traits. From what I have seen in current games it's only gotten worse. If you want people to be able to handle the hard content then don't give them a cake walk to the top.

Mag7spy

I agree people should keep some expectations in check. If you were looking at their damage they hit pretty hard (i know balancing isn't done) I feel that is challenging enough for solo play of that level.

If you are wanting tons of mechanics or to make every low level encounter even more difficult, you will start to be unable to solo it on some classes. People will start looking at it as more group content than solo and create more of a barrier to entry being that early in the game.

Difficulty should scale further on with levels.