Bot Line of Sight- Yay or Nay?

[Kuldiin]

Ok before I start this isnt a complaint to anything the staff here, or EQEmu have done and I and everyone else here more than appreciates the hardwork done by both teams

How do people feel about the way bots work now regarding the line of sight change? Personally I think the change is a pain in the trolls itch part.

Take a look at the below picture. I can perfectly see the mob, my bot cant so refuses to go and attack the mob. I know I can pull the bot into place and then send him to attack, but incases where I would be playing a caster, and dont want to be in LOS of the mob (so it agroes and kills me) this line of sight change can be lethal.

This is just one example of many others where I cant send a tank bot to attack (ledges etc) so the only way to get my tank to go and tank is by exposing myself to the mob.

I just wanted to see how other people feel about the Line of Sight change. I had a few people contact me tonight mentioning how they were not a fan of the change.

Edit:- Sorry I probably should have placed this in the forum Lillu mentioned viewtopic.php?f=34&t=2779. My bad

[Lillu]

It might have minor side effects, thats true. But players wont be able to pull named mobs accross whole zone anymore (not clearing any trash) with bot.. so it has a good reason why it's been changed.

[ChaosSlayer]

yeah I was actually the one advocating LOS restrictions, as it allowed some VERY tricky pulling.
The problem with BOT that it doesn't have faction, which allows it to to run on through zillion of mobs and attack/pull named directly without need to say clear up the room first.

[striat]

I believe some of these issues could be fixed with #bot group summon followed by #bot group attack. Even if you have LoS, the Bot may not.

I'll review this in the future. The reasoning for the change was to address exploits. We eliminated the Bot LoS issue here several months ago (not having LoS check was custom to this server). However, recent exploits have just prevented us from leaving it as is.

I'll try to address this in the next week or so to make things more functional, however.

[Omle]

NO my bot just sat there today while Loremaster raped me, did nothing.
happend several times. Sick of it already.

[Kuldiin]

NO my bot just sat there today while Loremaster raped me, did nothing.
happend several times. Sick of it already.

Which Bot? You using a Paladin or Cleric?

[Koeril]

So, trying to throw out ideas here more for striat than anyone else. It seems to me that people are disgruntled with the fact that heals require LoS to be cast upon yourself (needs verification)? Perhaps the LoS requirement could be limited to NPC's only and bots could still cast their beneficial spells (heals and buffs) without requiring LoS?

[Mortbise]

Actually, using a cleric myself all the time, I'd say that she... plain sucks now.

Basically, she lost a lot of reactivity. She starts heals quite later than before update. Sometimes she just sits doing nothing. Out of combat with my pet at 60%, she does nothing for a good 5 minutes (I ended tossing a heal myself). And, that was on plain, obstacle-free ground. LoS doesn't explain everything here.

Err forgot to add, if there's such a concern about pulling exploit, why not have a relatively small radius for bot to accept to attack, like for pets ?

Adding some more : Just did Terrorantula, friend's palbot would not atack. Just in front of the spires, plain like the back of my hand. So what the heck ?

[aabamzen]

Is it possible just add a range check instead of los if you're worried about cross zone pulls? It won't get past z-axis exploits (unless you can code something differently for that, say range xy<200 and range z<50 to attack), but I think it may work out better than LoS.

[Ydiss]

If the fix is to stop wall pulling then surely the fix should stop that and not ALL spells? So it should stop attack commands and other offensive type commands.

Bots can be difficult enough without hampering them with LOS code for heals and buffs. So far as I know there's no exploit or complaint with a bot healing through a wall (if they gain agro the mob will just warp/summon anyway), so in my mind this fix should be more specific and not whole-sale.

Sounds like it's broken more than it's fixed and the risk/reward of the change has lost scope, to me.