Factions Complaint Department

[Lurker Wyrm]

I know the second monk hench in the Marketplace (there were two), which had the skillset equal to the rest of the Factions monks, had Purge Signet, the other was the same as Mhenlo, but with a different look. Once you went into Luxon/Kurzick territory, all of the healing henches carried the sig, not just the Luxon one. It's the worst example of skill selection on henches to date (even moreso than the brilliant Healing Touch idea (and using it on people who were in melee), or putting Restore Life on Lina without giving her any points in healing whatsoever), I really have no idea what the devs were thinking.

I had a spirit-based ritualist build going, but not very well optimized as I didn't have any extra skills unlocked.

Another problem was that there were at least 3 of us who were Rits, and I'm pretty sure we were all trying to summon the same spirits, which really nullified things a lot. Just like with MMs and rangers using nature rituals, there should never be more than 1, maybe 2 if different spirits from different attribute lines need to be used, in a given party. This past weekend, we were just trying out the new stuff in the game and weren't putting much thought into builds (not at first, anyway). I doubt that'll be a problem once Factions is released.

[Zed-F]

I really have no idea what the devs were thinking.

I imagine they might have been thinking that they don't want to make the henches so good that you'd prefer to take them over forming a group with human players. If so, it's rather unfortunate, since the average quality of a PuG group is so abysmal to begin with as to render the measure ineffective and merely frustrating.

[Xyngynkynyn]

Vile henches are nice, but they tend to spam Putrid Explosion, even if there's no enemy near the area of the corpse, making life as a MM a complete pain.

We do have more choices for henchies. A healer monk player would probably not take Alesia for instance. Likewise, a MM would probably refrain from taking the Vile henchman. Otherwise, builds that don't exploit corpses should be fine with the Vile henchie. I used it (over the Blood henchie) and it was fine. That it sometimes explodes corpses away from mobs may be more indicative of Putrid Explosions nuances such as exploding the nearest corpse. I fall prey to this problem occasionally. I doubt they'll make it any smarter to compensate for this problem anytime soon but in my limited experience, the Vile henchman sufficed. Good AoE damage when it worked and chewed up corpses. No enemy corpse exploiters encountered but the Vile hanchman has possibilities in countering them.

If you've got more than one character with a perm res, they're both going to activate the res at the same time and neither will cancel out (the spirit hench will start using Flesh, the healer will start Restoration Chant, spirit's will go off first, healer will keep casting RC - this happens every tiem something is being ressed). Priority for res sigs among AI is still to not bring back the healer, but rather the protection/spirit hench.

Yeah this is a big problem which I've noticed although strangely enough, it only affected the Kurzick henchies. The Luxon henchies on the other hand seemed to handle rezzes a bit more competently; at least that's my impression of it. We'll see how it goes in a month's time.

The healer seems to have slowed down a bit on reaction times, I've noticed them watching and waiting for someone to be practically dead before using Orison/WoH. This might be in reaction to the henches overhealing before, but the way it is now is the other extreme. Last time I was taking a dirt nap, I watched the healer hench sit there and do nothing while the deadly one's life was completely drained away, only to start the res chant skill after it died.

This may be because they keep using Purge Signet. It drains their energy for each condition it removes so it may have bumped their energy into the negative. I also noticed this but it's more a failure of the skill design I think.


As for my impressions...

The Kurzick territory's too dark. I have a hard time navigating through House zu Heltzer and as was stated, the pathfinding there is poor. If the place is beautiful, I can't see enough of it to appreciate it. Also I've died numerous times in the explorable areas because I couldn't SEE the narrow paths I came from when retreating. The map in the compass also showed the escape routes to be dark (shadows of the nearby cliff maybe) so basically I was navigating blindly. I know it's aesthetically supposed to be like that but it hampers the playability of the area.

As for character creations, I do want to recreate my ranger and monk in Cantha (to play the new pre-searing equivalent if there is such a thing) but I'm a little concerned that, as was presented in the preview, we will be restricted to only the Cantha hair and faces. I wanted to mix and match.

Aside from that and some questionable skills that may not be finalized yet (Lyssa's Balance among others), I had no issues with the Preview. Well there is the 6 slot limitation...

[Havral]

Rebirth seems to be utterly useless on the healer henchmen that are fortunate to get it. They will combat revive dead party members using it, but if you've got one deadbie lying near an unaggroed pack (Which I had happen quite a few times) they simply won't use it at the maximum distance away from the corpse.

In fact, if you get close enough where a human player could cast Rebirth safely, Redemptor Klaus will actually run up to the body and cast it at touching distance, and therefore get reamed by the pack.

Whatever, it seems that the henchmen aren't familiar with Rebirth's life-saving range. I've even witnessed the healer run up to touching distance to cast in while in combat.

[WarBlade]

That Rebirth problem is yet another example of situations where I think devs could drastically overhaul the player/henchman relationship with the addition of a few simple commands to override their default AI with several preset alternatives.

The structure I'm thinking of is the old MechWarrior and X-Wing wingman command setup from those games in their mid 90's incarnation. I forget the exact keys to hold down (different default for each game), but it was basically just:
SHIFT-A: "Attack My Target"
SHIFT-D: "Defend My Target"

...With about six or seven options in each game.

I'm also reminded of the Unreal Tournament bots in CTF missions who would slip into base defence and base attack modes by default with a few assigned to a target of opportunity type role. When one of the team captured the enemy flag all of the bots assigned to capture duty would automatically switch to a defend the flagrunner routine.

For Guild Wars you'd have to assign a caller for the Henchmen, but then the party leader could easily default to that and maybe have the ability to assign specific henchies to the command of particular players.

Attack could be rigged properly to the "I'm attacking..." call or given a command like those mentioned above.
Defend would be handy to include. Have Alesia stay with the ghost in the Dunes of Dispair mission for example. Have Eve focus her battery power exclusively on a selected Monk or daisy chain your henchies into an amusing conga line like I did with the peasants in Warcraft 2 a few times.
Engage at Will was a standard addition in those earlier games I mentioned to cut a wingman from the particular orders you gave them and return them to their standard AI pattern.
Retreat was used in some of the X-Wing games. If you noticed a unit under your command had become smashed up excuse for a fighter craft on 5% structure and failing shields, you could tell it to bugger off home and save yourself a few lost points. In Guild Wars it would be a much simpler "disengage" override for those times when Devona insists on smacking the daylights out of something that three other survivors in the party are desperately running away from.


Ooh I'm rambling again.


Back to Rebirth.

Remember those times when Alesia is standing right next to you standing next to a pile of corpses, but you have only an expired sig and Lina is having a sleep way over there under those red dots?

Wouldn't you just love to give Alesia a "Defend my target!" order that sets off a cycle through a skill list something like: Rez if dead > Heal if hurt more than 10% > Attack nearest attacker of the target?

I used to love the 'AI' of MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries. They more or less did what I wanted them to. 8)


And of course the closing obvious one that Rebirth should be activated as soon as the target is in range and it should probably replace Restore Life on Lina.