Complete lack of any AI for the monsters

[savaughn]

I don't think anyone is arguing that every battle should be a "free for all" or totally random. WHat I wants at least, and the reason for my initial post, is a veriety in monsters and their behaviour. I don't want every single monster to behave in a specific way, I do want some "smartness" to them though, but it can vary. The outcome to the "smartness" can vary in that some might decide to go for healers if the healers are in fact impacting the battle, while others might ignore healers pretty much, even if they do tons of healing, if they feel they can do something else in battle that oculd work and so on.
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So, just a couple of thoughts here.

Monsters outside of instances or the occassional "elite" areas are intended to be fairly trivial battles. These places are designed for the casual consumer who does not wish to have complex fights. Even these models do use a good variety of heuristics in determining how the fight goes. Just because you understand the targetting system doesn't make it "stupid".

The monsters inside of instances have MUCH more complex heuristics and AI than those outside. It is possible that this is because the instances are run on a battery of servers that have more CPU cycles available to them than the global map.

AI just choosing the attack that most damages a foe and targetting a calculated "weakest opponent" is not "smartness". That's just a different targetting system that is no more complicated than what is already in place. What's more, such a system tends to make bad games. There are a number of games that have implemented such a system and failed. This kind of a targetting system tends to create very boring encounters where one method of attack proves to be the best and you just load up on that and brute force the encounter. BORING. It also creates a system that trivializes classes and you either end up with identical classes or one class that is clearly the best and dominates to exclusion.

There are some things that would improve AI. A good example would be the soldier AI in Half-Life, which created a memorable encounter because the bad guys knew enough to move, hide, snipe, jump out, etc. These kinds of AI improvements would be nice to see, especially in an instance where the instance servers can provide the additional CPU cycles needed. We have seen more and more interesting AI work out of Blizz as the newer instances have come out. I doubt you'll ever see it in the normal monsters, but I fully expect to see this kind of more sophisticated AI as things move forward. That said, I would much prefer a more tactically challenging encounter to a more varied one and I think that the developers have been delivering on that score.