wassup with ranged pets needing to brawl!

The title says it all! anyone have answers to this. My lower tier thugs feel the need to run up and stick the two cannons they wield up the critters noses! (Thug: see these! I got'cha knife throw,right here!! CoT thorn guardian...pulls out negative energy sword. Thug: Oh my! ummm...boss please call me ba*....dead thug!) Ive heard of up close and personal...but,sheesh.0.o


And I notice my lower tier bots does this as well. I don't remember them doing this they would sit close to me and unleash a photon laser show that is a sight to behold (wishes we had that as a power set) is it a bug or its been there and I haven't paid close attention to it?



-ghoost

I've noticed this trend as well. I thought they've fixed this last two issues and then now it came back.

I use Merc MM. I don't recall the tier 1 soldiers wanting to punch that much. If you ask me, maybe the Pet AI was altered due to Demon tier 1 pets that do melee a lot.


If you ask me, I wish they could just get rid of brawl in range-focused pets. Soldiers have no business running in and punch.

I am not 100% sure of this, but it stands to reason that if they just took the utterly worthless brawl attacks out of the ranged henchmen, they wouldn't run up into melee anymore and get smoked. That would fix a lot of the AI stupidity that MMs have to deal with. Of course they may have tried this and it didn't work. I don't know, and neither does anyone else because they don't communicate these things with players.

The most annoying thing is when the bot shoots, runs into melee range to attack, but then get a ranged attack recharged by the time they get there, and start shooting again...

And we still never got a fix (AFAIK) to the Assault Bot fire swarm missiles that they broke when they changed burn. How many months of beta and they didn't find this? Hope they fix it soon...

EDIT: An easier (harder?) fix to going through every individual pet and changing their powers would be to come up with a command that orders your pets to not move under any circumstances, yet remain aggressive or defensive. They can call it hold ground or something. When ordered to attack, they will attack anything that comes in range, but won't leave their location to chase runners or use melee attacks.

Well, my understanding is that part of the problem with the pet AI is inherited from critters, which is that any one critter in a spawn will choose to close to melee. This is actually to make things easier for players, it gets easier to pick them off one by one when they are running at you that way. Thus, if they fixed that for pets, they would also fix it for critters, and your gameplay would become a lot harder.

However, I'm not sure how removing melee attacks from a pet would effect that AI. It might just run into melee with no attack to actually use. Which might actually be preferential, as long as the remaining attacks do more damage than the brawl.

BTW, in testing I found that Brawl usually did increase pet damage, especially early on when they have few upgrades, since it gave them an additional attack to cycle. I pretty much ran all the tests I could with both Brawl, in melee, and without it at range. I don't think I ever found a case where the damage went up without Brawl, although often it was close. And of course, the issue is not Brawl being used in melee, it is the pet closing to melee when you don't want it to.

my favorite manifestation of this is my ar/dev's gun turret bum-rushing spawns, where it rapidly and predictably gets slaughtered.

I've stopped bothering with it until they get this melee craze sorted out.

This a persistant problem. It's been affecting controller pets for a few issues now too. Phantasm, who has no melee attacks, closes to melee for some reason. With Phanty and his decoy I was able to tackle a few GM's, but now that he gets himself killed it's much more difficult.

Bugged, reported, begged, posted. Frustrated to hell about this AI idiocy. No reply from devs, online support or offline support, nothing.

Can only hope for some kind of acknowledgment someday officially and then after that in the glimmer of the dark future, a resolution.

I don't think lack of Brawl will stop the weirdness. Just like the Phantasm mentioned upthread, my favorite Stalker's Mu companion also has a bad habit of closing to melee distance with his targets...

'Boy doesn't have a Brawl attack to his name, but absolutely still acts as if he does. I can't count the number of times that's gotten him into trouble. (War Hulks are a particular bane. It's like watching a moth drift up to an explosive candle flame. )