Smarter enemies, good or bad?

Enemy intelligence should be increased when you up the difficulty level, leaving the lowest level for those who just want to come home and bash a few heads.

I'd love it if the enemies were more 'realistic' in this game, it's really immersion breaking when you blast something that's standing 2 feet away from its friends that don't even flinch.

Is there some way of creating smarter players?

If so, I'm getting in line twice.

Considering the fact that the game has been made progressively easier to play and to level since release, I see no reason to make the enemies during general game play to be made anymore difficult.
I miss some of the chaos and difficulty that there was when the game was originally released. It used to be hard to get across zones at low levels as you would encounter foes that could one-shot you. I remember turning a corner in Steel Canyon to head toward the rail with my level 12 blaster and coming face to face with a level 42 Malta robot - awesome to see as it blasted me into the next Wednesday. I remember jumping over a fence to get to a mission door with the same character and getting gunned down at the mission door by a bunch of level 15 or 17 Outcasts!
Those ambushes aren't left running around in zones any more. The Outcasts near that door are like level 9-10 now.

If you would like to make the enemies more difficult to defeat in both build and by the use of triggered events and/or ambushes - the AE allows you to create missions that do just that. Then play those missions. You can enjoy the increased difficulty, and the players that were having a hard time with the original content can play the easier game.

Honestly, most teams that I've been on recently are running at 0,0 or 1,1.
I was on an upper 20's team running on +2,2 and several of the people on the team complain saying that it is impossible to run a team of 8 on +2.
Seriously! I told them that I do it all the time.
Then they said that the problem was that some of them were 19's.
Seriously! So I told them that I also ran teams with sk'd up players all the time at +2 and that it was just a matter of using strategy.

If the AE was smarter it would just mean that foes would attack you when you aren't ready and/or foes would team up on you.
In most cases that means that the squishes will end up getting the worst of it as the players won't have a chance to Taunt the smarter foe before they attack. The AT's that can take a hit won't take as much alpha as the damage is spread around to the AT's that can't.
Which comes to the point that a smarter enemy would know to take out the squishes first at any rate and concentrate all their fire on them to begin with.

So, I think that smarter enemies are generally a bad idea for a game that is built with AT that are intentionally out of balance with one another in order to build team synergy.

I've played some games that had much smarter AI (Aion and Tabula Rasa leap to mind). There are pros and cons, as everyone's pointing out. However, here are some ways to make the AI smarter:

• Cover and concealment rules. Tabula Rasa nailed this. You got a defense bonus depending on how much of your body was covered by an object between you and the individual(s) targeting you. Say there's a half-height crate between me and Ghost Widow. 50% of my body is covered, which makes it harder to hit me (I'm a smaller target). Enemies could be taught to take advantage of cover and concealment, especially when ranged enemies are engaged.
• Higher Ground Rules. Individual on higher ground (or at higher altitude) gets an attack bonus. This helps to compensate for angles when cover and concealment rules wouldn't normally apply.
• Dispersion Intelligence. All enemies have been in Paragon or the Isles long enough to know what a controller is and how it works. Some of them are smart enough to resist the urge to stay tightly grouped.
• Minions remain canon fodder. Let's face it: that's what they are. However, they become smart enough to have basic dispersion rules and use cover and concealment.
• Enemy Morale. Take out the boss/lieutenant and the enemy suffers a morale penalty. But as long as that boss/lieutenant remains, the minions will rally to his cause with vigor.
• Smarter Lieutenants. Lieutenants don't directly engage in combat until they have to. Further, at any time a lieutenant can "take ownership" of a minion or two and command him/her like a mastermind. Thus, if the lieutenant orders the minions to take out the empath, the minions converge on the empath while the lieutenant remains behind to continue bolstering morale.
• Situational Awareness. Enemies become aware of the makeup of your team after watching you fight for a while. Eventually, it becomes clear to them who your healer, controller, and damage dealers are. Support personnel must be eliminated once the lieutenant has achieved situational awareness (a window of opportunity during which the team can eliminate him). Once that window of opportunity is gone, however, the lietuenants (or bosses)will order the minions to start targeting the support crew so that they can more efficiently eliminate the damage dealers.
• Call for Backup. In addition to patrols, give the Lieutenant/Boss a 1/100 chance of calling for backup when it looks like defeat is imminent. If he does so, a "patrol" spawn charges in to assist. This patrol spawn would generate separately from the patrol spawns generated for the map.

While it's very interesting that Situational Awareness could make control both more dangerous and more important/reward there's something else that went through my head. Situational Awareness would actually give a drastic improvement in worth to Stalkers. Their ability reduce hard targets would actually work perfectly with the system.

I'm pretty sure a weaker version could be applied to the current game without making difficulty spike too hard. Allow heals and some controls to build aggro. The amount would be very low but it would stack over time and degrade slowly. This way a single O2 Boost won't get you blown to kingdom come yet enemies would sort of notice some members of the team. With enough control and aggro management it might not matter, likewise with enough damage.

I'm starting to wonder how much the game can already pull off with this. Vahzilok show a degree of making some parts of a spawn the brains of the operation. It also shows that it's best to limit it to specific groups and/or specific members of those groups.

Also, in response to the concept of the game being made easier over time: It seems like it's more of an issue of smoothing out some of the unneeded spikes like randomly having higher level enemies in a lowbie zone and reducing xp debt. There's a few things that have been added with the explicit point of being harder than the rest of the game.

I enjoyed the AI from Batman: Arkham Asylum. I think AI that would be more aware would be nice. If a guy falls dead in front of a group; they should be alerted but than again who knows how that would play out in the this game? You may aggro the entire room. It would spice things up a bit though. I always enjoyed when fighting a group and a patrol comes by and joins in. Not only does it feel real, it's fun and chaotic.