Hi SE,

I just read a nice long post about the grievances made my Puppetmasters about their automation and I felt something needed to be said about the basic AI of avatars.

While it is true that Avatar usefulness has been improving steadily over the last few years, there are still MAJOR bugs in the AI of the Avatars and Spirits themselves. I won't get into Spirits today, since they are far too underused to be of any worth in the immediate future. Here are the problems that I see:

1. Avatar aggression is very badly handled. There are many times where I have run up to an enemy, used my attack macro, and had my lagging behind Avatar simply float up to me and do nothing. Not to mention that because of the cool down, I have to twiddle my thumbs before I can say "Hey, Avatar, go attack that thing like I asked you to the first time." This is HIGHLY annoying and should be fixed.

2. Another problem with aggression is the behavior an Avatar displays when attacking a monster showing aggression towards a player. All too often in situations where there are multiple slept enemies I have had my avatar go and attack one of them. I can spam the retreat command, but it ignores me to the point where I have to unsummon and resummon. If I tell an Avatar not to attack, it should not attack until I tell it otherwise.

3. Let me start off by saying thank you for fixing the problem of mobs being out of range when using a blood pact attack. However, the problem still rears it's head when a mob dies before the avatar can finish their attack. If this occurs, the timer should be reset. I shouldn't have to stand and wait another 45 seconds because my avatar took too long to attack and now the mob is dead. This is silly.

These are three easy fixes that would go miles to improving the job. I'm not asking for much here.