ResJudicator

Not at all. Phantoms/shades IGNORE engagement. I'm not asking for other enemies to do this. I'm simply asking for enemies to at some point consider whether to disengage -- and eat the disengagement attack -- in order to attack a squishier target. There is no sensible reason why "intelligent" enemies should all clump around a single tank that is doing absolutely no damage, and ignore the super-squishy backline that is presenting all of the threat. Would you have your party beat on a pile of bricks while the enemy rogue sneak attacks you from 5 feet away? Obviously not. So why should the AI do just that? The main issue many people have against this suggestion is really just that it would make the game harder. It seems to me that we could easily reach a compromise where you either add in a "smarter AI" toggle option, or make it so that the AI behaves intelligently only at higher difficulty levels.

I think you misread my post. I didn't say I was min-maxing, only that this proposal would address several issues, including min-maxing. And of course combat feels fine if you're soloing -- at that point the enemy AI doesn't have to make any decisions about who to attack. Of course, soloing is a pretty simple matter that just involves exploiting the AI in other ways that are beyond the scope of this thread. Pretty much this.

Tanks currently don't want might. Combat recovery is unnecessary when your tank isn't getting hit, which is most fights for a properly built tank on PotD. And for the fights where your tank is getting hit, the extra healing you'd get from combat recovery at 18 might vs 3 might is too miniscule to make a difference. Doesn't mean you can't take might on tanks, it just means that it's currently not optimal. On a side note, I don't really care about the min-maxing issue, but some people do so I pointed out how it might be affected. In any difficult setting, you're going to want to optimize stats. But 3/18/x/18/x/18 or whatever wouldn't have to be the "optimal" distribution if the AI were smarter. I mostly just want fights to be more challenging in a way that requires more tactics than just "send the tank in, then bomb the enemy." If you can code an AI that can navigate around a round boulder, why would it not be able to navigate around a character's spherical engagement circle of roughly the same shape and size? The AI also doesn't have to calculate every possibility to figure out its pathing. In terms of coding, you could just treat the circle as a hexagon, or an octagon, or even a square for pathing purposes. This means that the AI might take a very slightly longer path, but the coding would be a lot simpler. Artificially increasing enemy stats is a crude way of injecting artificial difficulty into the game. I'd rather a fight be hard because the enemies behave intelligently, rather than because the street thugs mysteriously all have better stats and gear than my characters. Your suggestion about attacking from multiple directions was something I mentioned in an earlier post re: map design, so I fully agree with you on that. Map design and scripting in general are ways to make enemies appear to behave more intelligently, and I would love if the devs played around with that a lot more in an expansion. But fixing the AI so it gives at least some minimal thought to target selection seems like a no-brainer. Imagine if you were in a boss fight against two targets: one is an Ironwood Fern that constantly misses or grazes you for 2-3 points of damage, but it has 30 DR and 110 deflection/reflex/will/etc. The other is a Wizard with moderate defenses and health that will roast your party in about 5 turns. The Ironwood Furn currently has your entire party engaged. Would you sit there attacking the Ironwood Fern to avoid a 5-damage disengagement attack? Or would you just walk away from it and focus the wizard? The decision seems obvious, yet the AI right now never even considers it.

Making the enemies behave more intelligently would not make the battlefield "chaotic." Sure, it'd introduce some variation between fights, but that's not the same as pure, unpredictable chaos. If your rogue is out of position and plinking away with high-damage sneak attacks, you can bet that some enemies will move to engage him/her. It really sounds to me that your complaint boils down to two components: (1) it would make the game harder; and (2) wizards might not be balanced for fights against intelligent enemies. I think Point #1 is actually a plus for people who want to play POTD, and I'd be happy if this change were limited to POTD. And point #2 may very well be a balance issue that could be looked at later on. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that enemies ignore engagement willy-nilly and run around all over the place. I'm just asking that they evaluate whether or not its worth eating a disengagement attack to go after a squishier, higher-DPS target. The answer to this question should be an obvious yes if you're using a min-maxed fighter that does 0 damage along with a min-maxed mage that has 0 defense. Yet the enemies in this game will happily pillow-fight with your warrior while they get immolated by the wizard who can't defend himself. If you run with a more balanced (i.e. less min-maxed) party, then enemies would probably behave very similarly to how they do now. And when I said that "you have plenty of ways to break engagement," I was referring not only to your wizard's spells, but also to the abilities of your companions. Each of your companions also have multiple skills (some of them per-encounter) that help OTHER characters disengage. For example, your fighter can pull enemies to him (per encounter). Rogues can cripple & blind (both per encounter). Ciphers can paralyze, charm, dominate, or apply DR + endurance regen (multiple times per encounter). Chanters can do an AOE knockdown with a first-level invocation, or summon a phantom that stuns on autoattacks (which allows your wizard to disengage while tying up the enemy in engagement) -- also multiple times per encounter.

I tried. The overwhelming majority of them are completely and utterly worthless. They are a waste of time (you can't pre-buff and combat is really fast!), they are a waste of spells and most of the time they're not good enough to avoid being clobbered anyway. You are much, much better off using offensive abilities like Slicken, Confusion, Call to Slumber and Gaze of the Ardagan which are both more likely to stop enemies from hurting you and actually do something useful for the party. The same is true of Cipher abilties (I haven't tried Druid yet) -- they have plenty of stuff which stuns or knocks down or something of the sort. Between the limited spell casting and the lack of pre-buffing, the nature of this game is such that pure defense which only applies to the caster is simply not very useful (with a few exceptions). That said, I'm not sure how much impact the change proposed in the first post would have. The situations where tanking basically wins the encounter by itself were usually those in which I park Eder in a doorway and everybody else attacks from behind. It's not a matter of Engagement doing anything, the enemies simply cannot get past him. In the fight which happen in an open field (e.g. most of the bounties), some of the enemies usually do harass my back line (and promptly get crowd controlled in one way or another). The spells that CC enemies are hard counters to engagement, I'm not sure why you were having difficulty with those. They worked 100% for me the few times an enemy went for my squishies. I think the key is that you have to be quick about it, or even anticipate when the enemy is heading to your squishy. You can't wait until your squishy is <30% hp to begin thinking about how to disengage. Your comment about the doors is more an issue of map design than anything. In open field fights, I still rarely had any enemies going for my backline -- all I had to do was send my frontline in first (this is in POTD). As for the map design issue where you can bottleneck an entire army behind a door, there are a few simple solutions. The easiest solution would be to add more doors in future content. Another would be to add enemies that can push/pull your characters, in order to move your tank out of the door. Another would be for enemies to cast AOE-field spells on the doorway, which would incentivize you to retreat your tank. That said, I'm not against the idea of bottlenecking enemies behind doors -- it's a great mechanic when used sparingly, such those epic enemy-at-the-gate moments. But when every dungeon fight turns into a doorbrawl, the combat ends up feeling a little tedious for me.

I don't consider this to be an anti-engagement suggestion, since I'm not asking for engagement to be removed or diminished in any way. I'm just asking for enemies to be smarter about it (ie not piling on top of the tank where they do absolutely no damage and just wait to get knocked out).

The engagement system, with a smarter AI as I discussed, would be fine. The problems you are raising can be countered by better strategy and control. (1) There are many ways to avoid engagement in the first place via control spells, snares, and repositioning skills. (2) You can also break engagement via repositioning skills or by CCing the enemy. (3) Your "tankier" fighters can still hold aggro, they just need to be built so that they present enough of a threat to justify being attacked. And when you build them this way, the enemy will either continue attacking them or take substantial damage disengaging from them. The problem you're describing with the "backline being dead instantly" is not a problem of the engagement system, it's the result of people min-maxing their characters for the current system. I noted in the OP that one consequence of my proposal would be to disincentivize min-maxing, which is what you'd now have to do so that your squishies don't instantly die when they get looked at. The "DPS Meta" you allude to in your later post would not be an issue, because enemies would not disengage from a high-DPS character. Your hypothetical all-DPS party would just end up with each character engaging with a different enemy. Will this make the game harder? Absolutely. Is that bad? I don't think so. The game is ridiculously easy past Act I right now once you learn the mechanics -- even on POTD difficulty, which should be challenging but isn't. People who don't like the difficulty can always turn everything down to Normal or Hard. Getting rid of the engagement system altogether only reduces tactical depth. Engagement is just a way of controlling the enemy's movement. Right now, it's too strong because enemies will never break away from a minimum-damage-maximum-tank fighter.

Right now, a Fighter with 3 might wielding a wet noodle and a large shield can lock down 3-4 targets in engagement, even though there is absolutely no sensible reason for the enemies to be attacking him. What the enemies should be doing is to disengage from the fighter, eat the fighter's disengagement attack (that will probably miss anyway or graze for 1 dmg), and attack the wizards/rogues/ciphers in the backline that are doing 100+ damage and would die in 2-3 attacks. Under the current system, all the enemies end up clustering around the frontline tank, doing minimal damage (on POTD), while getting nuked by by the backline. This behavior creates several issues: First, it turns every fight into a really dull tank-and-spank. 99% of the fights in this game are easily solved by running your tanks in to lock everything in engagement, and then nuking with your backline. Second, it incentivizes min-maxing. If you know that enemies will never bother to disengage from your tank, then why bother giving your tank any offense? Drop his might to 3, skip over all the accuracy/damage bonuses, focus on defense attributes/stats, give him platemail and a hatchet. And why bother giving any defense to the backline casters? They'll rarely get attacked anyway. Third, it makes overemphasizes engagement slots for tanks. Right now, fighters are the best tanks simply because they have the most engagement slots. The current aggro system doesn't appear to care about how much "threat" the Tank actually presents, so it doesn't matter that a paladin, monk, or barbarian can do more damage. If instead you had a smarter "aggro" system, where enemies would disengage from a min-maxed Tank that does 0 damage, then all of the above min-maxing goes away. Suddenly positioning becomes more than just "keep tanks in front," and you have to worry about figuring out ways to peel enemies off your squishies, setting up disengagement opportunities for your squishies, limiting enemy movement, etc. Also, other classes suddenly become more viable tanks because they'll be able to hold aggro better. A fighter might have more engagement slots, but if he's hitting like a wet noodle, he'll have trouble discouraging enemies from disengaging for the squishies. On the other hand, a paladin might have fewer engagement slots, but will have a much easier time holding aggro with the flames ability.