The AI behavior is terrible in general right now. In order to add more information I’ll share my experience from last night.
- Giant Crock near F7, attempted to kill using Narr (T4 Bearer) and all he wanted to do was stand there with sword in hand (Sword of Crom) and look at the crock. Then he started to back away slowly as if retreating 1 step at a time. I reset the fight - my base is near so I grabbed a different thrall (Treasure Seeker Fighter 4) using Blade of Adventurer. Killed the Croc no problem but did significantly less damage than I expected and have experienced recently (within the last 2-3 days).
I figured ok fine it’s just the named bearers but just to be sure I went and grabbed Eina the Light (T4 Bearer) and took her out to fight the queen at the bottom of the spider cave in F7. For about 1/3 of the fight she seemed like she was attacking mostly (Sword of the Adventurer) but then just randomly stopped and stood there like she was stupid.
I felt like my hypothesis was confirmed, went back to my base and grabbed a Captain (From SEP City 7425 health with Jedia’s Lightsaber.) Took her out to the Black Gall to inspect the new changes and she acted ok killing for a bit but then I found a named that I wanted to grab so I swapped her weapon from her inventory to a steel truncheon. Went to KO this named black smith and she just stood there with the Truncheon equipped. She ran up to it like she was going to bash it then just stood there. It is important to mention that I have learned NOT to manually equip weapons on my thralls weapons slots as it bugs them at least half the time so when I swap weapons on my thralls I wait until they return the current weapon to their inventory and then I switch it with the new weapon and allow them to equip it when combat is initiated.
That being said I tried several times to swap in and out different weapon types on this thrall (the captain I was using at Galleon.) I tried Sword and Board, I tried Axe and Board, I tried Whirlwind Blades and I eventually went back to the Jedia’s Lightsaber. The ONLY thing she would use was the Jedia’s Lightsaber and after the bug occurred she attacked like she was constantly stoned out of her mind. Waiting up to 10 seconds between swings, swinging sometimes once and pausing 10 seconds and other times doing the first 2 attacks in a heavy combo then stopping for another 5-8 seconds.
This prompted me to go back to my base and try different thralls in order to see if its a general bug or just specific fighters. Here is what I found.
80% or more of the thralls I tried to swap weapons with immediately became bugged and almost useless instantly and remained that way regardless of what weapons I swapped to them to or if I gave them back their original weapons or not.
100% of the time named bearers were complete and utter garbage regardless of weapon selection and regardless of what I was fighting. If they remain this way they are little more than pack mules. I have every single named bearer in the game by the way and I tried every single one of them against multiple mob types including 1 skull and 3 skulls. Named bearers (in their current state) are almost completely useless.
I realize you nerfed them but this isn’t a nerf this is a hack job. They are stupid, they don’t know what they have equipped, they don’t know where the fight is, they don’t know where to fight.
Fighter Thralls in general are also having MAJOR problems. Even when they weren’t bugged they were slow to initiate combat, slow to react to movement and had rediculously low damage output. When I say rediculously low I mean less than half of their damage output prior to patch.
Summary:
AI is buggy and weird. Weapon swapping is a mess. T4 bearers didn’t get nerfed, they got nuked.
That is all.
