Usually they don’t go into an existing gas cloud.
But when they get it thrown on them, the player that is chosen to be followed, has to actively distance himself from the cloud for the bot to start moving out of it. It’s not enough if I stand around the edge of the cloud and not take damage, the bot will stand inside the cloud and die happily, because it obeyed the law of always sniff a players *sshole.
Or when the player chosen to be followed is on the other side of the cloud and starts moving, the bot won’t hesitate to run through the cloud to follow.
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I’ve never seen scenario 1; that one’s a totally new ballpark for me.
Scenario 2 is totally reasonable and way my desired behavior type; would you rather the bot be with you if things hit the fan or somewhere off on the side waiting for some gas? “Yeah, sorry, I let the player die because I was afraid of losing 10% of my max HP”. That would be bad; I way prefer a bot coming to my aid now. This is desired behavior, for sure.
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Rather then fixing their AI, it might be simpler to make them respond to the chat wheel. Yell “Come Here!” and they stop whatever they are doing and run towards the player. Yell “Monster!” and they attack the nearest monster. Yell “Patrol” and their aggro radius decreases and the don’t use ranged weapons.
That makes the bots a lot more functional but puts the burden on the actual player to make them work right, they aren’t just automatically better then everything else.
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Now that is a cool improvement idea. I like that a lot, actually. The ability to tailor their playstyle based on what was called would be great.
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Even the stupidest bots can be useable if you have a bit of control over them. Simply calling them to an open area instead of getting pummeled into a corner would save so many runs. Also on the plus side, when they still aren’t good enough, we have only ourselves to blame 
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Th problem with scenario 2 is that if you have 2 bots and 2 players, BOTH bots stick to the SAME player. So if they decide to camp on my side and the player on the other side gets attacked, they will indeed sit with me while the gas ticks down.
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Would like to add that bots seem to be hesitant to use their ranged weapons if their ammo falls below half of max capacity. This might be adding to the issue reported by OP.
Also when the bots’ ammo is above half of max capacity, they shoot all enemies, be it a special, elite, or a… slave rat. (Why is why I took off the handgun from my IB bot and Merc Kruber bot. This does not work well with low ammo capacity weapons.)
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Fiddling with the Bot UI to keep them realistic is pretty tricky I can imagine.
You need to intentionally let them miss sometimes. Intentionally failing a block…
Making bots living gods is the death of a Coop game, I believe.
And ey if you find so many “bad” players, how about you take them under your wings for the round? Teach them some stuff, if you are motivated enough.
Remembers me of the big story of a bot in Dota 2 beating apparently legendary Dota Players…
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No one, including OP, said anything about that. This post is about a specific bug/(feature?) where bots will insist on getting to melee range of a special, getting themselves and other players killed, even though they can shoot the specials with their ranged weapons from farther away. Aside from the example OP gave, when a disabler has caught someone, bots also like to facetank warpfire throwers.
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True. I did try to explain in a poor way, keeping bots a worse option than real players is probably beneficial.
The question then is if you should tweak the AI according to the difficulty.
Of course new players will usually be not as good.
I think that already works. I don’t think they immediately drop every action they are currently doing but they seem to prioritize moving closer to me when I give that command.
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They need a bit of improvements tho. Like; keep falling down like an idiot or something. They just need to be better than now, at least.
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Make them invisible to patrols and more than half my wipes would have never happened. It’s not because I can’t draw them away from their path, it’s their incessant desire to run into specials regardless of the danger between.
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