ATTN: Community Reps/Dev Team: PUPs of Vanadiel DEMAND a response on Automaton A.I.!

[Psion]

I'm sorry if the title was so rude. But this is getting ridiculous.

Puppetmasters have been clamoring ever since the soulsoother and spiritreaver automaton heads came out, demanding changes to the priorities of automatons spellcasting. This isn't some preference that some pups want, it's broken. B.R.O.K.E.N. We have been demanding, pleading, bargaining, bribing, doing everything in our power to get it through to the development team, that automatons are, to put it bluntly, stupid when it comes to casting their spells.

Here's the issues:

White mage (Soulsoother):

1) Soulsoother will always cure status ailments off itself or the master with the appropriate -na spell like silena or poisona instead of curing, regardless of how close to death either is. We do not want this. If we want to truly get rid of status ailments we will use the eraser, which by the way, really shouldn't remove light maneuvers when used. Change this so that the first, very FIRST priority of the automaton, is this: CURE. Preferably it should be, if it were like gambits and it goes down the list starting from the top:

cast cure on person with most hate if they meet the cure trigger threshold (~80% HP or below with 1 light maneuver and optic fiber/damage gauge equipped)

Cast cure on party member with lowest HP if they meet the cure trigger threshold

Cast highest regen on person with most hate if their HP is above 90% and target monster is Decent challange or higher

Remove status ailments from itself/master if any are present

Remove status ailments from person with most hate if any are present and a water maneuver is up

Remove status ailments from party members if any are present and a water maneuver is up

Enfeeble the monster

There, automaton casting is fixed in regards to healing. We are sick and tired of dying because the red mage dancing weapon or whatever decides to cast silence on our PUP/WAR or whatever and our automaton decided silena is more important than a cure when we have 5 HP remaining. It's no longer cute after the first incident, and it's firaja-inducing infuriating when it happens the ten thousanth time. We can't even use stormwaker to get around it anymore, because cure IV just does not cut it at level 90 every ~20 seconds. I lose that much HP every 2 melee rounds sometimes. If the dev team is really worried about people whining over automaton AI changes however, just add in the gambit system of FF12 to automatons, and pets in general. You could even make gambits craftable and grant a boon to the crafting community too. Gambits would be the most ideal, but at least fix the broken healing automaton AI if the dev team can't implement that.

And while we're on the topic of enfeebling:

2) Enfeebling. Our automaton decides to cast silence on monsters that have MP, even if they can't actually cast anything? Come on, this was fixed for NPC fellows years ago, why can't our automatons get some love too? Fix it so our automatons only silence things that actually can cast something. This applies to stormwaker head as well, not just soulsoother.

And now, for our other pal, the wonderous black mage head. . .

Black Mage (Spiritreaver):

1) Aspir sucks. Drain sucks. We don't want it. Honestly, you should just get rid of these two spells. We got cheap automaton oils. We have Role Reversal. We got healing salves in certain battlefields, we got Deus Ex Automata. (we seriously love you for that ability by the way.) We do not need the not so helpful drain, but we are forgiving. Make it so that drain only is chosen if the automaton has 50% hp or less (75% hp or less with damage gauge), AND a dark maneuver is present. Right now if the automaton falls below this HP threshold, we cannot avoid it. That means even if the big bad NM is one blizzard V away from dying and turning a bad fight to victory... we get drain. Which normally does like 40 damage, and we don't win. In the heat of battle, we cannot avoid damage in a lot of fights, nor can our automatons, especially since we can't even deploy our automaton at spellcasting range like a black mage. Sure we can deploy, retrieve and run back... but that's still precious seconds we're in the line of fire, and our automatons will often get trashed. We already have to wait 20 seconds to cast a new spell, we don't appreciate wasting it on a spell that doesn't even help us.

2) Aspir. Same deal as drain, only worse. MP is NOT an issue for us. Aspir II sucks anyways on anything that matters. We got ways of restoring mp to make a black mage green with envy, we don't need aspir at all. Get rid of it, or at least make it require a dark maneuver as well as less than 50% MP (75% with damage gauge) to fire off.

3) Stupidcasting is another issue we have. For instance, my Oniwaka will always cast fire on flans, even if hes got more than enough magic accuracy to land blizzard instead for great damage... and even if said flan ABSORBS fire magic like one of the nyzul custards. This is bad. Automatons got a built in scanner for the black mage head, so why is it trying to heal the flan? Are our automatons in some machine/flan conspiracy against humans? Another issue is damage down from certain elements. Oniwaka casts blizzard V on ghosts in apollyon, even though they take -50% damage from ice. In fact, I think all ghosts do, yet he casts blizzard on them, instead of a much more effective fire V. Automatons need to be smarter in their casting, so that they use the highest level spell they can land with fairly good accuracy and does not take any damage cut from that element. I've even had him cast aspir on diabolos. a dark elemental spell on the king of nightmares? Come on.

Sharpshot (Ranger):

1) The main issue with sharpshot, is that for a ranger, it's pretty bad at shooting for TP. It only fires off a shot every 15 seconds or so, and its damage plummets when it's out of melee range. In other words, it's not such a sharpshot after all is it? So for it to be effective in damage, it has to melee as well, but the problem is, it doesn't like to run in and melee. In fact, it likes to stay back like a ranger, as if it has some sort of identity crisis. It would be nice for you to change it so that it runs in to melee, same as valoredge, and add a new command that makes the automaton stay in place, similar to the beastmaster ability stay. That way we can get our meleeing automaton, and if the master wants it to stay back and fire from a distance, they can use stay and deploy to make it stay put and attack from the spot it's in. (using retrieve to cancel stay.) Better yet would be to make it so that when sharpshot is rooted in place and out of melee range, it gets a major bonus to its ranged speed, firing off a shot every 3-5~ seconds, and the sweet spot of it changes to max ranged distance for the automaton, which would be around 17.5 yalms for us, the furthest distance we can deploy our auto barring the monster being really big. By the way, why can't our automaton's ranged attacks do critical hits? that's so lame.

General Automaton adjustments:

Probably one of the biggest demands other than A.I. Fixes I see now, are of course pet survivability (seriously, the armor plates, they do nothing, although thank you dev team for a new shield attachment. What we need though, is adjustments to the damage they take that DON'T require attachments. 12 slots is all we got after all) and the other issue is swapping frames/heads/attachments quickly.

Perhaps we could have something as simple as /equipa head "Valoredge", /equipa body "Valoredge", /equipa slot1 "Attuner", and so on, provided the automaton isn't activated. This would let us swap roles on the fly instead of taking up to a precious minute adapting our role to suit the party. This on the fly flexibility would go a long way to accentuating one of pups strong points, its ability to adapt to changing battle situations. We would still be limited to our 1 minute deactivate, so it's not like it's groundbreaking to change our role instantly after that.
Those are the main issues that I can recall off the top of my head that puppetmasters have been complaining about for years. This isn't just some, it's every single pup's complaint. Every time a new puppetmaster asks me for advice, and one of the questions is how to get the white mage bot to cure over poisona/silena/blindna/etc... I wince, because I have to tell them there is no way.

Community Reps, I'm begging you, from a puppetmaster who's lost his patience over this issue. Respond to our cries, respond to this thread, and communicate to the Dev team just how serious this issue is. This is the sort of problem that should have been fixed in an emergency patch after the soulsoother and spiritreaver first came out. This is a major, fun-crushing bug that is years overdue for a fixing, and is one of the last major issues pups have with the job.

While we're at it, I ask all pups to respond on any other AI glitches they can't stand, and perhaps issues in general. And if the community reps don't respond... I'm thinking perhaps we pups should all make threads requesting this just to get our point across on how much we want this fixed, since nothing else we do seems to get our message through. :/

::Edit:: fixed the accuracy issue from a distance and added attachment swap macro suggestion

[Cymmina]

It only fires off a shot every 15 seconds or so, and its accuracy and damage plummet when it's out of melee range.

http://www.playonline.com/pcd/verup/...38/detail.html

The ranged accuracy of automatons is no longer affected by distance to the target.

It would be nice if the attack penalty was removed, since that is still there and you're already giving up melee damage by having it out of range. As for firing speed, they could just update Drum Magazine to be useful... something like sacrificing melee accuracy for increased ranged attack speed. Right now it is useless because of the huge ranged accuracy penalty it gives.

Eraser is pretty terrible, but it wouldn't be so bad if it removed only Light Maneuvers instead of *all* Maneuvers. But of course, not removing any Maneuvers would be better.

It would be nice if they added attachments that specifically altered the AI, so you can choose how they behave. Something like Inhibitor, but not tied to a stat gain like Store TP. Something that would force them to use their best WS, for example, so you can stack maneuvers without making him use a crappy WS. Something that disables casting status removal or enfeebling spells on the casting frames.

Autos are still more fragile than other pets. What happened to the update to Valoredge that would make him durable enough to tank? Right now, he can't even tank an even match. Meanwhile BST jug pets can tank no problem.

And most importantly, make maneuvers last longer! It's terrible eating up 2 seconds of delay to put up maneuvers as they expire so quickly. With Haste and double Marches, the damage the master loses by refreshing maneuvers is nearly as much as the automaton gains from having the maneuvers up. Three minutes might be enough, five would be better.

[Mercilessturtle]

And most importantly, make maneuvers last longer!

Especially this. Keeping up 3 maneuvers is 6 seconds of JA delay per minute. That is a full 10% of our engaged time eaten up just to try to give our automatons a stat boost that isn't even as good as what a player gets from gear. It is a huge penalty and seems designed to encourage pups to ignore their automaton and play as gimp monks. Make maneuvers last 5 minutes, and adjust "consumes maneuvers" attachments to have their benefit be worth the lost maneuvers. Right now only ice maker is worth it.

Another thing that would be nice is some kind of JA to transfer buffs to your automaton, like empathy for drgs. Pup falls way behind when you have support jobs in the party because automatons damage stays the same, while everyone else's goes up from all the buffs.

[Niyariko]

Although I don't agree with SE, but I bet their response to us would be "Its working as intended".

There are a lot of potential to this job if SE can really put some effort into it, sit back, and take a look at the logic and battle mechanics of our automatons. Is obviously not working as intended.

[Karbuncle]

i agree with just about all aspects of the OP.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

i agree with just about all aspects of the OP.

I'll just agree with Karby as I quit reading half way through the second paragraph.

[TimeMage]

Total agreement with Psion and Cymmina.

[Dauntless]

Don't play pup, but I've seen the stupid A.I. at work. I agree with this.

[Karbuncle]

Especially this. Keeping up 3 maneuvers is 6 seconds of JA delay per minute. That is a full 10% of our engaged time eaten up

I made an entire thread on that in PUP forums! where were you >:O

Oh wait, job Forums! No one goes there :3

[hakrev]

The dev team doesn't read english forums, so someone needs to translate this and put it up in the jp forums for them to even reply to it. I agree wholeheartedly with everything stated here. It's not even slightly amusing to die because auto decides to poisona instead of cure when I'm @ 5hp >.>. Although I've found rng frame to be pretty darn impressive in dishing out damage, i'm not even capped on my rng skills yet and it's surpassing my maxed out (in gear/atma/skill/attachments) magic attack frame. Although keeping hate off of it when it's blasting away can be a pain. The thing that you didn't mention though was the annoying link between fire maneuver and arcubalista, I despise this so much, it's impossible to operate at pique performance when I'm hindered by sloppy programming.

Frankly I'm not going to discourage giving us new attachments like they have been, but the problem is not going to be solved by attachments, we only have so many slots to put attachments into anyways (don't even get me started on the redundancy of the quests involved for getting the attachments). It's time to rework this job, everyone knows this. Pup need love, LOTS of love and I really wish they would read this thread. Even people that despise the pup job know that it's broken and support fixing it over the jobs they play. I'm all for the gambit idea too, makes sense to be able to program your puppet-robot's AI.