Yet another thread about Fellow AI suggestions
Hello community representatives and developers.
This time, I would like to bring up the topic of our adventuring fellow's artificial intelligence, or lack thereof.
While I understand that the dev team wants to let these have a mind of their own, and not just be a submissive pet, such as avatars and automatons are, they really should not be as dumb as they are now.
For example, a fierce attacker NPC will tell me when he or she has enough TP to perform a weapon skill, which I assume is because we should be able to prepare to skillchain with them. However, the NPC then proceeds to use a more or less random WS, that usually performs much worse than other WSes they have access to, and also do not skillchain well with the better WSes the player has access to.
I suggest that the fierce attacker NPCs should do their best to skillchain well with us, and choose some of the better WSes available to them. This could either be done by having the NPC pay attention to which WSes the player uses most often, and then use WSes that SC well with our WSes, or by letting us set 2-3 favourite WSes at the Rendezvous Point.
If my fierce attacker NPC is wielding a great katana, and sees me use stardiver 90% of the time, she should start performing tachi gekko, which creates darkness, or kasha, which creates gravitation. She should not keep using Jinpu, Hobaku, Kagero and Goten, which all perform worse than Gekko, and don't SC at all with stardiver.
If it is hard to give the NPC this sort of behaviour, however, I would be satisfied with being able to suggest 2-3 WSes for my NPC while we are in town. These 2-3 WSes wouldn't even have to be guaranteed, the NPC could retain some sort of mind of her own, but I would like for the three WSes I suggested to be used perhaps as often as 85% of the time.
Additionally, I would like the fierce attacker NPCs to use more of the tools they have available. If they are not the target of the enemy's attention, they should use berserk, and if their accuracy is poor, they should use aggressor or Focus. If they are taking damage from the enemy,they should switch to defender and use Dodge.
Well, that about covers the concerns I have about the offensive NPCs, now over to soothing healer.
A common concern for this AI pattern is that the NPC often wastes MP on debuffs that aren't necessary. I suggest that the NPC shouldn't use debuffs on enemies that check as decent challenge and below for the NPC, because these will commonly die very fast anyway. Instead, if the NPC really wants to keep using debuffs, they should use them at monsters that are strong enough for them to make a difference, such as level 95 enemies and up.
There should also be a way to tell the NPC how frequently they should cure us. If we have access to our own tools of curing hp, such as when subbing dnc or whm, or if we are on drg with Healing Breath, it would be nice to be able to tell them to save their MP for when we go below 50% hp, or whichever treshold we want, depending on which job/subjob combination we plan on using.
Furthermore, it would be nice if the soothing healer NPC got access to the refresh spell, and would use it on themselves regularly. Additionally, to help with keeping their MP up, they should prioritize MP-recovery WSes if we equip them with weapons that have such WSes. I think that if my npc is wielding a staff, and is below 50% MP, she should use Spirit Taker to restore her MP as often as she can, and if she is wielding a club, she should be using mystic boon.
That brings me over to another topic. Now that the NPCs can achieve level 95, I think it is about time they gained access to the mythic WSes.
As for stalwart shield, I'm not really sure what improvements should be done. I have very little experience with using that for my fellow.