Did you play test Squadron Command Missions at all?

So I figured I'd start with Halitali, a nice easy dungeon to figure out how the squad works...

Turns out they work like morons. On the second boss the entire squadron refused to fight anything but the damage immune Guivre, unless I hit engage for every single lightning elemental during the add phase. Fun times, but hey at least they seemed to be immune to the lightning infused puddle on the floor.

Fast forward to the final boss and again, the genius squadmates refuse to fight the fire elementals, instead preferring to stand in a big pool of fire to do zero damage to the boss. But this time they aren't immune to the fire and take damage faster than I can heal it.

No chance I can get them to kill the elements and the Damantus so it becomes a nice fun game of spam heals until they die one by one.

Seriously, did you play test this at all?

The one advantage they have is that they're quite resilient to splash damage. The fire sprites exploding in the first boss dealt more damage to me (a tank) than the dps or healer, so I figured I'd just ignore them.

There needs to be commands like "prioritise adds", though. I don't want the AI to do that by default, though, because it would make Tonberry King unbeatable.

Treat it like an old school FF. You have to control the whole party. Fortunately for you, all that requires here is pointing out which mobs they need to smack. They're not so squishy that you can't take a moment to redirect them.

Seemed a reasonable assumption, given AI responses in solo duties, that this was never going to be perfect. Mechanics were always going to be the shortfall.

They probably could've picked dungeons with fewer mechanics to start with, though.

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Originally Posted by Ekimmak

The one advantage they have is that they're quite resilient to splash damage. The fire sprites exploding in the first boss dealt more damage to me (a tank) than the dps or healer, so I figured I'd just ignore them.

There needs to be commands like "prioritise adds", though. I don't want the AI to do that by default, though, because it would make Tonberry King unbeatable.

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Funny you should bring up Tonberry King. My tank went running after every single add that spawned, even with me repeatedly giving the order to attack the boss. Fortunately I was also running two ranged DPS so the constant kiting wasn't too big a deal.

Unrelated, the whole NPCs not being limited by cooldowns is kind of amazing. Archers basically Barrage every other attack. It is surprisingly difficult to keep ahead of them while tanking if you're not just spamming an enmity combo.

I've yet to heal these squads, but so far I haven ran in as RDM and PLD.

For me, they started doing much better after I got use to them. For the first boss, I ended up pulling the boss towards the set of mobs, and DPS started to take spawns out. Towards the end though I couldn't get them to engage all the flames popping up.

The second one what I ended up doing is Dmg dealing a bit and go on to the next, eventually with that and hitting engage that felt like second nature to me, it wasn't so bad at all.

The final boss I died once and ended up finding if I pull the boss away from the middle, the non-melee DPS get out of the way. As for the sprites that pop up, it was a matter of hitting engage as I was killing the small flames that came around.

the Thousand Maws was difficult because once I started to hit the eggs, the pld went around the entire thing and did it for me. I tanked Brayflox, but will try heal / dps tonight see if they stick to those puddles or move.

Ya but dragoons do their positionals, SE doesn't care if he's doing them to an invulnerable boss, just gotta adjust :P

I've played a lot of games, both MMOs and single player RPGs that use AI controlled parties and I was surprised by how good the AI is. You just can't play the dungeons like you would if you were in a party of 4 players - and you need to do boss encounters "as intended". You need to micro manage your squadron on the normal mobs, and not micro manage them at the bosses - that might seem counter intuitive but they are super resilient if not outright immune to a lot of boss mechanics that would normally wipe players.

Hell in some ways the AI is better than players I've got in DR, they do positionals, the tank tries to face the boss away from the rest of the group, they even get out of AoE.

I've played all the dungeons available in the last few days with squadrons, taking in different jobs myself and while my first few attempts were interesting I treated them as a learning experience to figure out how the AI works. AI healer is a little weak however that may have more to do with them being CNJ and having access only to cure, cure 2, and medica. Of all the encounters the Tonberry King is likely the most confusing for players since the tactics that are used there quite far from what was intended back when players were running the dungeon sub i190.

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Originally Posted by Lozza

[...] the tank tries to face the boss away from the rest of the group, they even get out of AoE.

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That is accidental when it happens.

I did Brayflox several times today and in 5 of the 8 runs, the tank simply kept the boss facing whereever it was, even if that means the entire party gets a bucket full of poison breath. None of my squad members ever bothered to move out of any AoE, regardless of tactics employed. I personally found it easiest to just babysit them as a healer, because their damage reduction and lack of cooldowns allows for fairly big pulls rather easily, even if any AoE they use is accidental. My arcanist loves to spam bane on targets that have no DoTs >_>

I don't believe that this is accidental at all. I struggled with squadrons myself at first but I've played a lot now and their AI is a lot clearer to me now than it was the first few runs that involved a lot of wipes while I was learning their limitations. They will move out of ground targeted aoe - ie those that produce orange circles before they hit, rather than poison pools and burning pools resulting from various boss mechanics. They do get confused if you pull more than one group of foes, So if you pull A,B,C, they will get out of aoe from A,B and C, but if you pull D and E, they will not move from orange circles cast by the new mobs. They don't take direct dmg from most boss mechanics but they can and will pick up conditions like burning and poison.

Honestly of all the combos you could go in as Wanderer's Palace as a tank seems the hardest. You really need to do WP as a ranged DPS or healer. And in Halatali you don't want an AI melee dps with you. Other than that though they seem smarter than the average pug you read about in the "tales from DR" thread provided you don't try wall to walls pulls.

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Originally Posted by Lozza

I don't believe that this is accidental at all.

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It pretty much is.

What the tank does is to run to the position the mob "was" at the time you gave the engage order, regardless of where the mob is now (And he does the same automatically when he loses aggro or another mob enters the fray, hence the dance at the tonberry king and him flashing thin air on occasion). If the mob has moved towards the tank previously, that results in him facing the mob away from the group, as he stands in the spot the mob used to be and the mob moved away. But if someone else gets aggro, he'll run into the new location of the mob and try again, where the mob often retains its facing, which is towards a DPS or two. That happens a lot to me because I got an archer in the squad and he can easily rip hate off the tank with his barrage spam. There's a very high chance my tank ends up running around like a maniac and facing mobs in random directions.

Ranged characters automatically back off from mobs and melees do use positionals, which can be mistaken as dodging AoEs, but they are not sensitive to AoEs as such - at least not the cone of the ash drake, nor the breath attack of the Zix, nor poison breath of Aiatar, nor whatever the light from the Efts is called, nor the gaze attack of the Peiste, nor the blaster from the Coeurl. And those are just those with orange markers.