question about enemy AI

[TheMetaphysician]

By the time POE 1 was tuned, enemies would run to your squishy backliners and ignore your tanks, so it was best to build a party with 6 characters who were all durable and could all deal damage. What is the enemy AI like in this game? Is a low-damaging tank character still pretty useless to the party, or do the AI attack such characters? How easy is it to protect your squishies?

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

By the time POE 1 was tuned, enemies would run to your squishy backliners and ignore your tanks, so it was best to build a party with 6 characters who were all durable and could all deal damage. What is the enemy AI like in this game? Is a low-damaging tank character still pretty useless to the party, or do the AI attack such characters? How easy is it to protect your squishies?

 

 

At least in the beta, it's harder to protect your squishies, but more because of encounter design than because of AI; there are fewer encounters with narrow chokepoints and more in open terrain or with only partial cover (say, a blind corner, but two large open rooms on either side).

 

The AI does seek out your squishies but they'll generally attack what's closest to them first. Fighters also have a good Pull ability and monsters are fairly reluctant to break engagement, so with scripting the fighter will gather in the enemies around himself fairly effectvely.

 

To be fully accurate though I haven't really built any characters who are pure tanks without some other threat, so I'm not sure if they'd get ignored or not. 

Edited April 9, 2018 by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

[THCRaven]

By the time POE 1 was tuned, enemies would run to your squishy backliners and ignore your tanks, so it was best to build a party with 6 characters who were all durable and could all deal damage. What is the enemy AI like in this game? Is a low-damaging tank character still pretty useless to the party, or do the AI attack such characters? How easy is it to protect your squishies?

I guess that with the AI on higher difficulties you want a tank that can deal damage to discourage enemy's disengagement.

 

For example the unbroken gains bonus penetration on enemies' disengage so you can equip a high damage-low pen weapon and the enemy won't risk disengaging.

There should be other active/passive abilities to achieve similar effects.

 

My strategy will be having a main tank to engage 3 melee enemies(I don't think I can position myself consistently to engage more, due to engagement range and models occupying space ), and a hard-hitting offtank to engage another 2.

 

The rest would be burst by 2 dps while the last spot is for the healer to stabilize the situation and provide more buffs. From what I've seen on the beta's videos survivability is not an issue if you manage cool downs well with your dps and use potions.

 

Another thing that I've noticed is that kiting is easier than in PoE 1 as there are many "teleport" like abilities and you can get immunity to dexterity afflictions with the corresponding inspiration + the movement speed of the swift inspiration is 100% although I don't know if it stacks with the Stride stat, if it does you can be as fast as the Flash xD.

[Wormerine]

I found engagement and tanks very useful in PoE1 (even to this day - currently replaying it) so I am not sure how to reply.

 

In Deadfire I found my back line to be targeted much more often - spiders pull mages to the front, ranged units targeting back line, AOE spells etc. Nothin too crazy but in Deadfire beta I find myself much more conscious of my positioning. Sending mage to the front and casting a lengthy spell means drawing a target sign on him as enemies seem to be wired to interrupt spellcasting.

 

Fighters seem especially good in keeping enemies locked, with crazy amount of engagements and some handy interupts&pulls.