Dear Fatshark team,
Please consider reverting the recent changes to bot behavior regarding avoidance of area damage from gunners and gas.
In practice, this change has made bots worse than before. Once a gunner starts shooting in their direction, even from a very long distance, they often drop everything and retreat, abandoning the player. Bots already seem to suffer from priority conflicts, especially when gas rats are reachable and they try to chase them into melee range. The new avoidance behavior makes this worse and can render them almost completely idle.
They retreat from area damage, stop fighting, ignore monsters and enemies directly next to them, and sometimes even stop blocking. This is a major step backwards for the solo player experience.
On higher difficulties such as Cataclysm, where there is a constant barrage of specials, this becomes extremely frustrating. Bots often leave the player alone in the middle of a horde or mixed fight because a distant gunner is shooting at them, even when the actual damage threat is not serious compared to the immediate danger around the player.
As a long-time player with many hours in Vermintide 2, I would say from experience that the main issue with bots has never been their raw combat performance. The real problem is their unpredictable behavior when they either chase specials too aggressively or flee from damage sources.
Both behaviors have the same negative result: the bots leave the player, split the formation, and put both themselves and the player in greater danger. When bots stay close, block, revive, and fight nearby threats, they are usually useful enough. But once they start chasing gas rats into unsafe positions or retreating from distant gunners while ignoring immediate threats, they become unreliable.
I have tried to reduce this problem by playing on the modded realm with bot improvement mods, but the recent avoidance changes, combined with the bots’ tendency to chase specials — especially gas rats — into close-combat range, often breaks their behavior. Their priorities conflict with each other and they become effectively paralyzed.
This change does not feel thoroughly tested enough for live gameplay. Bots still get caught in gas and remain frozen there, taking full damage, while at the same time their “flee” response to gunners and other area damage makes them unreliable teammates.
Since the recent weapon rebalance patch, even bot mods seem unable to fully prevent this conflicted behavior. The result is that bots are less dependable than before, especially in solo or low-player-count runs.
Please review this behavior and consider reverting or heavily adjusting the recent area-damage avoidance changes.