Curse

Pooper · Nov 18, 2006, 01:03 AM // 01:03

There has been quite a bit of discussion as to which skills the hero AI can or cannot use properly or in combination with others. I'm fairly confident that ArenaNet will continue to develop the AI to make heroes smarter in this regard, however some features allowing more precise hero control would circumvent these AI issues and allow players who enjoy a finer degree of control to not have to wait for the hero AI to "know" how to use a skillbar (which given the possible skill and class combinations would be unrealistic to expect anyway).

Simply, I would like a hero's skillbar to work like the main player's skillbar, with the ability to: 1) Hotkey skills (e.g. CTRL-1 to activate hero 1's first skill, ALT-3 to activate hero 2's third skill, etc.), and 2) Be able to queue skills to execute sequentially as with a normal skillbar.

Currently, the UI makes executing hero skills cumbersome with all the mouse clicking given the different types of targets that a given skill may need to execute on. Executing skills in order is somewhat dangerous in that you click on one skill, wait for it to finish executing, and then click the next hoping that the AI does not begin using another skill in the time between that first skill finishes and you click on the second skill. As those who manually control heroes know, if that occurs (and it occurs often), the hero will cancel out of the currently executing skill and begin executing the clicked one, wasting the energy anyway. Disabling skills with SHIFT-click only partially solves this problem.

If those two features were implemented, again, just make the hero skillbar the same as a normal player's, it would give many who enjoy using heroes an alternative to simply not using certain skills and skill combinations because the hero AI cannot use them properly.

Other features which would be nice but not as important as the above are things like a separate target bar for each hero, allowing heroes to carry relics and flags, hit levers, etc, allowing a hero to follow another player instead of flagging a hero to run across the map which you can't even do all the time since the radar range is limited, creating a more formalized mechanism for assigning skill priorities (for these 3 skills, always execute this skill, then follow with this one, or, always recast this attunement when it recharges, or, if someone dies, cancel whatever you're doing and use this rez skill).

Lastly, and I know this has been addressed in other threads, having a ritualist hero available would be appreciated. As it stands an entire class is unrepresented in primary profession form, unnecessarily denying party builds the full richness of all the available skill combinations in the game. I know Razah is forthcoming, but even with him theoretically being a variable primary, it would be nice to use him in the role of "need an extra x" rather than forcing him to be a ritualist by virtue of there being no other option.

Thanks for reading my feature requests, I hope they are given some weight in terms of dev team proirity, though I suspect some of it has already been considered or even planned internally.