A.I. in this game are next to useless. They cannot perform very basic functions like soaking or camping by themselves, most are useless in a fight, and sometimes the best thing they can do for us is just sit in the base doing nothing.
Currently, bots are only capable of following you, or staying in base. This means that they cannot go out to do the very simplest of tasks by themselves as they require being babysat to do anything. As a result, they cannot help with soaking and cannot take merc camps. Soaking is especially important and doesn’t require many brain cells to perform, but AI are currently incapable of doing this.
We need more control over what the A.I. does, rather than turn it on/off as you would a switch. We need to be able to assign different tasks for the A.I. to perform from some sort of menu or by using slash commands, or by using different types of pings.
This is the list of tasks that the bot should most definitely be able to perform:
- Soak (Default): Attempts to soak EXP as safely as possible, preferably by practically hugging allied structures and waiting for the minions to come to them.
- Camp: The A.I. will go out and attempt to secure non-boss merc camps, but will not attempt to take ones in the enemy’s territory.
- Follow: The A.I. will follow whoever pinged it last.
- Wait: The A.I. will sit in the spawn area and do nothing
In the event the A.I cannot perform its given task (for example there are no safe merc camps left to cap) it should default to soaking.
This way, if bots are too stupid to fight with us, we could at least have them soak or camp for us while we focus on more important tasks.
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Issue is that as soon as the AI is alone, it will be killed and start to feed. There is no such thing as “soak EXP as safely as possible” due to huge flaws with the AI. For example Deathwing and Sonya can literally turn the AI into headless chickens at the touch of a button for a free secured kill.
This is why the auto soak behaviour was removed from droppers. It often cost more games than it saved.
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Having the bots follow you is a HUGE upgrade over what they used to do. Some AI’s are actually upgrades over their humans because they do what you expect, and they rarely miss.
Other bots are well just shadows that follow you and might do something useful.
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Meibot God, blinding Tychus’s D, doing the W+E combo, Ice Wall 2 targets.
Exactly. Some bots are good while others not so much.
In the case where a bot isn’t useful in a fight, it would be better if players could send them to perform other more useful tasks like soaking or mercing.
If a bot is killed a few times despite soaking underneath their towers, with this system players could always have them go do something else instead, or wait in spawn like they are already able to do.
The point is to tack on more ways the A.I. can potentially assist you, while still maintaining what they can already do.
Because right now all they are able to do is sit in base doing absolutely nothing, or fight beside you. And if you happen to have a bot that can’t really do anything in a fight besides feed, it might as well not be there.
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Which is even more depressing when you are the tank, and no one else knows to ping it to follow. Having a melee Ana is not ideal.
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It’s more complicated that that though. It depends what hero pings the AI, and what AI hero is being pinged. If you’re a ranged hero and you ping a tank, that tank will almost never get into melee range. The guy working on the AI changed the leash range last year, but it only helped a little.
Things are not helped by the fact people either don’t know how to ping the AI, or simply won’t. This is where at least in ranked, some kind of loss forgiveness needs to be in place when you have a leaver.
I do feel very sorry for those vs AI mains though. It is their main mode and from what I’ve read on the forums it’s no longer fun for them. At least those of us in PVP modes don’t get an AI replacement all that often.
You beat me to it as always Hoku! Though you could probably tell my anecdote was from that of a healer. 
Before the AI went wonky, it was optimal to ping it as a healer as you could at least attempt to keep it alive.
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