"Companions can now Roll Dodge up to 2 times per fight..."

Dinadin

Full change is "Companions can now Roll Dodge up to 2 times per fight, to prevent issues where they endlessly roll dodged away and leashed enemies."

So, instead of fixing the AI problem, you guys just basically disabling the functionality for all fights that lasts more then 10-20 seconds.
Hardcoding the limit for the amount of interactions that user can do is one of the worst and unprofessional ways to fix the issue in IT world.

Joy_Division

Don't understand why it's so hard to have them just roll dodge (or block) heavies as that is what their own tutorial advises players to do.

driosketch

I can kind of see it, because companions just continue to move back farther and farther until they either get stuck in the wall or reset the enemy. But they need to be able to return to their original position or dodge right or left at a certain point. Dodging is a major survival skill, where otherwise the companion will stand there, eat the big hit, and die in any boss battle.

Jayroo

Yup, I'm throwing in the towels. My brother works 3-4 days a week and 12 hour shifts as a nurse, he greatly looks forward to relaxing and playing eso on his days off with me. So it saddens me immensely that they are releasing this throwaway garbage "update"

Hopefully we can find something else we enjoy as much as eso. maybe an mmorpg like ffxiv that releases meaningful content

well here's to hoping ashes of creation is good

kalunte

@Joy_Division if they did so it would be either OP or useless: if they dodge everything they'll become better than players on some fights, if they are to have success %age, they wont be any help.

it's an ugly design to have them rolls limited and not stam based like anything should be ^^

FrancisCrawford

It feels like an emergency fix.

Would a cooldown on dodges solve the same problem the absolute cap is supposed to take care of?

Grandchamp1989

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

It feels like an emergency fix.

Would a cooldown on dodges solve the same problem the absolute cap is supposed to take care of?

This approach seems more reasonable to me.

Would not roll dodge every attack and wouldn't stop doing it altogether in prolonged fights.

crazepdx

kalunte wrote: »

@Joy_Division if they did so it would be either OP or useless: if they dodge everything they'll become better than players on some fights, if they are to have success %age, they wont be any help.

it's an ugly design to have them rolls limited and not stam based like anything should be ^^

Our they could just have them dodge roll towards the player, and leash them to the player so they move with us when we are a certain distance away. That would at least give us some ability to pull them out of red. Nothing more frustrating then hearing Mirri tell me "roll if you can" while she's dying standing in stupid.

tomofhyrule

I'd like it if there was a way to have more control over their placement (please let us do the 'Y+click' command to place them and have them activate levers/pressure plates!).

As a tank, I don't have an issue with them roll dodging out of the red since I'm standing there instead. But they're not all that good as ranged DPS either which is what I need - barely any ranged or AoE skills, so I'm just sitting there with a whole stack that they can't burn down since they'll just light attack one mob at a time. It'd be great if I could tell them "hey, your melee ult is up, so run in and lay it down, then get tf back out!"

I feel like they needed a bit more AI than combat pets, but I'm not seeing it. Hopefully Basti will at least be fun to RP with, because I don't know how useful he'll be for anything else... but then again he won't even give me the number of his hairstylist, so how good of a friend can he really be?

jwellsub17_ESO2

Joy_Division wrote: »

Don't understand why it's so hard to have them just roll dodge (or block) heavies as that is what their own tutorial advises players to do.

It's not so much the heavies, which the companions do try to block, instead the problem is that they don't attempt to evade the "ring of stupid".

YandereGirlfriend

Indeed.

Hard-coding magic numbers into your program violates basic programming best practices. This seems like a desperate move while they (hopefully) explore a more durable solution.

jwellsub17_ESO2

Okay, just tested this in a few fights and at least it works as written. Bastian did not roll backwards more than twice. I also had him engage a mob at extreme range to see if he caused a reset, and I am happy to say he did not. Sadly, he still stood in rings of stupid and took a dirt nap.

GreenHere

The fix that would make more sense is to just change their backwards dodges to be lateral ones.

You know... just like smart players do to move out of AoEs without pulling bosses all over the place. (I think even most enemy NPCs do this.) It's better to strafe around a boss and cause things to pivot in a small arc ~95% of the time vs pulling enemies completely out of your (and your teammates'!) ultimates and abilities and such. This is so basic; most of us learned this in our first or second dungeon run.


Why Companions even do a stupidly basic (and often ineffective/unhelpful) backwards dodge in the first place is just... well, the forum rules prevent me from expressing my true opinion on it.

Vevvev

Reminds me of Elite: Dangerous where ship launched fighters had a netcode issue where spamming them orders bugged out the instance. Instead of fixing the netcode issue they created they just limited how often you could give the fighters orders. The problem was not fixed, but instead it took longer for the issue to rear it's ugly head. People are still livid about the issue and want it truly fixed. Don't copy the devs at Frontier, ZOS.

Dagoth_Rac

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Indeed.

Hard-coding magic numbers into your program violates basic programming best practices. This seems like a desperate move while they (hopefully) explore a more durable solution.

There are only three numbers: 0, 1, and more than 1.

Joy_Division

kalunte wrote: »

@Joy_Division if they did so it would be either OP or useless: if they dodge everything they'll become better than players on some fights, if they are to have success %age, they wont be any help.

it's an ugly design to have them rolls limited and not stam based like anything should be ^^

They would not dodge everything. They would just dodge attacks the game telegraphs for the very reason so they get dodged or blocked

jwellsub17_ESO2

So did a bit more testing. Again, from extreme range (50 - 70 meters), I told Bastian (flame staff) to attack a daedroth. He attacked the daedroth who moved into range and launched a fireball. It hit Bastian knocking him back, but as soon as he got up, he moved into the ring of stupid and started to burn. A bit later, the daedroth sent another fireball, Bastian gets up and walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning. This time it took him below 50%, so he dodge-rolled backwards, a few seconds later he walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning again.

newtinmpls

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

It feels like an emergency fix.

That would probably because it is.

VaranisArano

jwellsub17_ESO2 wrote: »

So did a bit more testing. Again, from extreme range (50 - 70 meters), I told Bastian (flame staff) to attack a daedroth. He attacked the daedroth who moved into range and launched a fireball. It hit Bastian knocking him back, but as soon as he got up, he moved into the ring of stupid and started to burn. A bit later, the daedroth sent another fireball, Bastian gets up and walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning. This time it took him below 50%, so he dodge-rolled backwards, a few seconds later he walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning again.

It befuddled me how the Devs were originally like "Companions will benefit players who don't want to group up to try out group content" when Companions can't even manage one of the first skills that most players learn in group content: don't stand in stupid.

It's like ZOS literally designed that one damage dealer who insists that it would hurt their DPS if they move out of the fire and whines at the healer when they die.

vgabor

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Indeed.

Hard-coding magic numbers into your program violates basic programming best practices. This seems like a desperate move while they (hopefully) explore a more durable solution.

There are only three numbers: 0, 1, and more than 1.

don't forget the -1, hello overflow

Fuxo

I am afraid ZOS will never implement companion positioning and movement correctly. As already said elsewhere, never make your purchasing decisions based on the promise of future updates/patches. I will certainly wait and probably skip this chapter.

deleted221106-002999

jwellsub17_ESO2 wrote: »

So did a bit more testing. Again, from extreme range (50 - 70 meters), I told Bastian (flame staff) to attack a daedroth. He attacked the daedroth who moved into range and launched a fireball. It hit Bastian knocking him back, but as soon as he got up, he moved into the ring of stupid and started to burn. A bit later, the daedroth sent another fireball, Bastian gets up and walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning. This time it took him below 50%, so he dodge-rolled backwards, a few seconds later he walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning again.

That is hilarious.

Maybe they should make him a Moth Priest as an excuse? Perhaps add in some rp appropriate things to say like, "Does anyone smell burning?"

I guess we can expect the upcoming chapter to be a free daily reward some month soon - and a lot of players deliberately avoiding the log-in rewards that month.

LOL.

Vevvev

VaranisArano wrote: »

jwellsub17_ESO2 wrote: »

So did a bit more testing. Again, from extreme range (50 - 70 meters), I told Bastian (flame staff) to attack a daedroth. He attacked the daedroth who moved into range and launched a fireball. It hit Bastian knocking him back, but as soon as he got up, he moved into the ring of stupid and started to burn. A bit later, the daedroth sent another fireball, Bastian gets up and walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning. This time it took him below 50%, so he dodge-rolled backwards, a few seconds later he walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning again.

It befuddled me how the Devs were originally like "Companions will benefit players who don't want to group up to try out group content" when Companions can't even manage one of the first skills that most players learn in group content: don't stand in stupid.

It's like ZOS literally designed that one damage dealer who insists that it would hurt their DPS if they move out of the fire and whines at the healer when they die.

Well, one only has to look at their current NPC programming to realize they have no idea how to program it. All those cool boss battles where the boss zoomed around the map and kited are preprogrammed and on rails. If they actually implemented smarter NPCs capable of not standing in stupid, and implemented it to our enemies, you'd see a radical shift in PVE gameplay.

VaranisArano

Vevvev wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

jwellsub17_ESO2 wrote: »

So did a bit more testing. Again, from extreme range (50 - 70 meters), I told Bastian (flame staff) to attack a daedroth. He attacked the daedroth who moved into range and launched a fireball. It hit Bastian knocking him back, but as soon as he got up, he moved into the ring of stupid and started to burn. A bit later, the daedroth sent another fireball, Bastian gets up and walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning. This time it took him below 50%, so he dodge-rolled backwards, a few seconds later he walks back into the ring of stupid and starts burning again.

It befuddled me how the Devs were originally like "Companions will benefit players who don't want to group up to try out group content" when Companions can't even manage one of the first skills that most players learn in group content: don't stand in stupid.

It's like ZOS literally designed that one damage dealer who insists that it would hurt their DPS if they move out of the fire and whines at the healer when they die.

Well, one only has to look at their current NPC programming to realize they have no idea how to program it. All those cool boss battles where the boss zoomed around the map and kited are preprogrammed and on rails. If they actually implemented smarter NPCs capable of not standing in stupid, and implemented it to our enemies, you'd see a radical shift in PVE gameplay.

Oh, sure! That was one of the biggest mental hurdles I had to overcome when I first started to PVP: "Wait, enemy players can move out my ground-based AOEs?"

Then I learned about chokepoints and caltrops. Good times.


Still, one of the keys to "don't stand in stupid" is the often unstated corollary "unless you can survive it. If ZOS can't build a better AI to avoid the stupid, then they have other options. They control everything about Companions, including their gear. If ZOS wanted to compensate for bad AI with a huge amount of AOE-damage-reduction so that Companioms could survive their decision to stand in fire, I suspect there would be a lot less complaining about them having the survivability if a snowflake in the Deadlands. (There might be other complaints about other things, but less about dirt naps.)

Dragonredux

VaranisArano wrote: »

Still, one of the keys to "don't stand in stupid" is the often unstated corollary "unless you can survive it. If ZOS can't build a better AI to avoid the stupid, then they have other options. They control everything about Companions, including their gear. If ZOS wanted to compensate for bad AI with a huge amount of AOE-damage-reduction so that Companioms could survive their decision to stand in fire, I suspect there would be a lot less complaining about them having the survivability if a snowflake in the Deadlands. (There might be other complaints about other things, but less about dirt naps.)

Honestly, if they took that one suggestion I saw about them being unconscious for 10-30 seconds if they died and then auto-rezzing themselves, I would have less issues with them. They would go from an active liability to "Ok I'll bring you along I guess" for the simple fact that I don't risk my life rezzing someone who's going to die again in the next 20 seconds.

Cireous

Ah, but Bastion is still dragging things too far away with his 2 dodge rolls, lol. Maybe Every dodge roll needs to be in the exact opposite direction of their previous dodge roll? Wouldn't that keep things from being dragged super far away? I don't know. It's kind of funny though, as I am always chasing after my companion, who is dodging out of all the good I'm laying on the ground, taking the boss with him somewhere where leash panic quickly sets in

carlos424

It seems as if companion tanks are going to be the most problematic. Looks like rolling a companion ranged dps or healer is the most semi-useful option, if you plan to use them at all.

Shantu

This is a bit comical. Just program them to block heavy attacks and be unaffected from standing in stupid. Let them be useful.

GreenHere

Shantu wrote: »

This is a bit comical. Just program them to block heavy attacks and be unaffected from standing in stupid. Let them be useful.

Right? I mean, I get that as a totally inexperienced "armchair developer" over here I really don't have much right to assume what should be easy to implement or not... BUT, Companions would be more useful if they literally just used the Guar AI that's already in the game! How sad is that?!

Guars move out of AoEs (at least sometimes, if by accident or not is irrelevant) AND they actively will block incoming heavy attacks! They attempt to flank you! They will interact differently based on if there's more than one of them accosting you at once or not! They might just be big ol' *** with teeth, but they legit feel more clever than Companions do on the PTS. It's kinda funny, but also really disappointing.

I suspect a good portion of the feelings towards companions is more about pre-conceived expectations than how "bad" they actually are, but I just can't help but be disappointed with their current implementation. Maybe Guars aren't actually better than Companions, but they do seem more clever than you'd expect given that they're just dumb animals; and Companions seem dumber than they ought to be, given that they're supposed to be battle-ready "intelligent" people.

WrathOfInnos

jwellsub17_ESO2 wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

Don't understand why it's so hard to have them just roll dodge (or block) heavies as that is what their own tutorial advises players to do.

It's not so much the heavies, which the companions do try to block, instead the problem is that they don't attempt to evade the "ring of stupid".

Yep. It’s not that surprising really. The AI in this game has never been able to react to AoE’s. That’s why they had to make combat pets take reduced damage from AoE, and eventually realized that wasn’t enough so all combat pets were given invincibility in group instances. Companions are just going to spam deaths to every red circle unless the AI is seriously improved or they get the pet treatment.

At least the system works in our favor for most enemies, they have no problem standing in our ground DoTs for the full duration.

GreenHere wrote: »

The fix that would make more sense is to just change their backwards dodges to be lateral ones.

You know... just like smart players do to move out of AoEs without pulling bosses all over the place. (I think even most enemy NPCs do this.) It's better to strafe around a boss and cause things to pivot in a small arc ~95% of the time vs pulling enemies completely out of your (and your teammates'!) ultimates and abilities and such. This is so basic; most of us learned this in our first or second dungeon run.


Why Companions even do a stupidly basic (and often ineffective/unhelpful) backwards dodge in the first place is just... well, the forum rules prevent me from expressing my true opinion on it.

Yep, player tanks would get laughed at if they did multiple backward dodge rolls. Lateral, or directly into/through the enemy would be a much better fix. Do that, and add a few seconds of cooldown, and the problem is solved.

deleted221106-002999

So, to summarise:

guar IQ > plastic spoon IQ > bow light attack spammer IQ > companion IQ

That about right?