Behavior Editor Lacking Important Options?

[Tinman200]

The behavior editor is extremely exciting and I'm having a lot of fun tinkering with the various options. As a lover of RPGs but an avid avoider of RTS games, being able to set up autonomy within my party is a godsend and I'm loving it. However it seems like it's lacking some fundamental pieces, and some pieces don't seem to work as intended.

 

--For example, the Ascended Cipher doesn't want to use his cipher powers until he is at max focus, but there is no conditional in the behavior editor "Self: Focus is Full," which means you either don't let the AI handle ANY cipher abilities and just micromanage any ascended character, or you suck it up and get less value out of your character.

 

--There's no option to swap weapons under certain conditions, so I can't have a character automatically swap to a melee weapon set when engaged, or to cycle through dual pistol sets to negate the reload. I understand the latter would be more difficult but the former should have been an option from day 1.

 

--The conditionals for an enemy having >1(more than 1) or >0(more than 0) allies in melee range seems to be broken, or at least bugged, because often times that condition seems to be ignored. Additionally, and option for <1(less than 1) would be nice, so that it's simpler to set up AOE with the NOT clause, so that things like Mind Blast won't be used on an isolated enemy. As it stands now you have to jump through a hoop or two to create that behavior, but that's really only a minor gripe (though again, even the roundabout method seems bugged).

 

--For some reason conditionals like "self: has at least (X) guile" are missing options. Guile, for example, doesn't half an option for 4, it goes from 3 to 5. This isn't a huge issue but it also seems like it would have been really simple to add.

 

--A drop down menu for the conditionals UI would be really nice. For example, every Self, Target, and Ally conditional would have it's own drop down menu to make navigating simpler.

 

--Conditions for different numbers of party members (or certain party members by name or by class, such as "if Eder" or "If Fighter") being unconscious, or affected by certain afflictions. While I understand this would make things cluttered, that would be solved by the drop down menus I mentioned. The issue here being that my priest will often waste her mass revive ability on a single ally and then not have it when 2 more people get downed 5 seconds later. Similarly she will waste a cleansing effect one 1 ally with a single affliction and then 5 seconds later the whole party gets hit with 2 afflictions apiece. 

 

--A few niche conditions would be helpful. These are not overly necessary as, like I said, niche at best, some would only be used to trigger actions that don't exist yet (though I have suggested them in this post) and some of these have similar effects that can be accomplished through other behavior settings to slightly less effect. However these would be convenient to have.

These would be (but not limited to):

-If Target's armor is greater than self's penetration (used to trigger weapon swap, certain afflictions, and certain inspirations) 

-If Self needs to reload (used to trigger weapons swaps, full attacks or other abilities that automatically reload your weapon)

 

--Finally, Being able to toggle stances is another thing that I feel is a must, as fighters often want to toggle through their stances 2 or 3 times in a single fight

 

Does anyone have anything else they feel needs to be added, or feel that any of these are useless or can already be accomplished and I've simply missed how to do so?

[wih]

All good points.

 

Drop down menus are sorely needed. They would be much more user friendly. Dragon Age: Origins had it's conditionals organized in submenus. We shouldn't be forced to scroll all the time through this giant listbox that's full of conditionals. 

It would be nice to have multilevel submenus, like this: Target, Self, Ally and on the next level: Health, Afflictions, Inspirations ...

 

[Tinman200]

Slight edit: The bug regarding allies in melee range of an enemy may not exist, it may just be that allies ALWAYS refers to YOUR allies, and I should have set it up to say enemies in melee range of the target, I'll test that, but the rest of the post should be misunderstanding-free.

[Tinman200]

--Additional option, ability to used items under certain conditions.

[Hades]

Honestly, I find the behavior menu really confusing and it's just not clean with that giant box. Dragon age Origins did "tactics" much better, and it was simple to use and clean. I hope they look at that game for inspiration, either to change this one or maybe for another game of theirs.

[Alienka]

Would be great to have an optimization goal for ability which would let wizards use AoE spells and not hurt allies. Something like - priority: min allies, max targets. For now I had to remove Chill Fog and such spells from AI behaviour just to stop my wizard from blinding party in every battle

[XxGeorge]

Also adding is immune would help, like my poor bleak walker trying to use FOD on fire immune creatures over and over lol

[fortuntek]

A lot of options could be improved all at once by the ability to enter our own values where called for. For example, instead of multiple "Engagers > 0" and "Engagers > 1" and so on, let us choose the value and the ">," <," or "=" option.

 

Same thing with focus. Maybe stick a "max" option as a choosable value? 

 

See I think this would be the best case scenario to drastically improve AI options across the board, but I think the problem right now is how many programming man-hours it would take to implement is probably a lot higher than other patch fixes that would "do the job." 

[TheMetaphysician]

One basic thing they really need to add is an option to direct autoattacks. As it is, I can't command, say, a rogue character to apply an affliction and then attack the afflicted enemy until the affliction expires. If I had an autoattack option, I could just prioritize the conditional "If target has affliction, attack" over the conditional "if target doesn't have affliction, use crippling strike", and it would work great.

[Tinman200]

A lot of options could be improved all at once by the ability to enter our own values where called for. For example, instead of multiple "Engagers > 0" and "Engagers > 1" and so on, let us choose the value and the ">," <," or "=" option." 

Not a bad point at all. More than anything I had a problem with this, because it literally makes it impossible to have an Ascended Cipher controlled by the AI. He had to be completely micromanaged, and while I don't mind managing my AOEs, item usage and auto attacks, having to manage an entire character because of a single missing and easily added ability really bugs me. I think that there's a lot of ways to improve the system as a whole, but I'd settle for the system actually working for all classes and sub-classes in the base game. It seems more like an oversight than anything else.

[Tinman200]

UPDATE: It does seem like a lot of the options have been fixed in the latest (June 1st) update, but I'm not sure about ascended focus level.