So I just got this game about 3 weeks ago and have been addicted to it but I mostly just play with bots. I finally got all my characters 35 and in orange gear and beaten all the maps on legend difficulty, but I don’t have the expansion yet to play cataclysm.
I have tried to play with some people in the past but I main engineer and ranged classes that require precision and finess and it’s mostly a negative experience. People just want to get the most kills so they dash to the front and stand in my line of fire or just run way ahead. If I get attacked by a leech or hook rat they call me bad and don’t come back to help me. I had alot of people call me bad and slow which is ironic because they are worse than the bots. And it’s always someone playing grail knight, warrior priest, or slayer so they don’t have any responsibilities besides spamming click against hordes of vermin.
When I play with bots they do their roles well and have great teamwork. They always revive me and don’t run ahead. Now If I can easily beat legend with bots is it just because bots are overpowered or something? I am thinking about getting the next expansion to try cataclysm but if I can’t beat it with bots I don’t know if I want to bother since I don’t have any friends in this game and it’s a negative experience for me just doing quick matches with random people.
I think I have never fired the minigun without at least one of the bots suddenly deciding to quickly dash “out” of my line of fire crossing it in the process.
Bots generally stick close to you, but have often trouble prioritising revival, and they generally go insane at the sight of a special.
It’s true some random players are a bit clueless and some even unpleasant, but it’s generally speaking a much better experience (more fun, mostly, but you can also get to play much harder stuff with them).
I think part of your problem may lie in the fact that most veteran players have moved to cata by now (also, legend can induce bad habits because it requires less cooperation and it’s the best difficulty to grind for reds, which can bring out the worst in players).
I suggest you try coop play (at least when you have cata) and you start sending friend requests there.
It’s true I generally don’t play engineer unless I know there’s at least a player I trust in the team. Playing cata with bots is possible, but it probably requires you to tweak their builds and to play some kind of monster killer so they don’t get wrecked.
I played all the classes so I can say for certain the easiest ones are the pure melee ones like grail knight and warrior priest. The kind of people who play these do it so they don’t have to have any awareness regarding their team positioning or kill specials. All they do is run forward and spam their melee combos to clear hordes. And at the end of the match they call you bad because they killed 400 vermin rats.
I have had his happen dozens of time. I play kerillian or engineer in the backline so I can snipe specials and do boss dps and my team just runs wayyy ahead. Every game I’m killing like 40 + specials and they literally have 0 special kills but they just run ahead thinking they are highly skilled. If I mess up a dodge and a hookrat gets me they literally never come rescue me they just call me bad and say I should have dodged it and keep running ahead.
I guess I just don’t get why its always the pure melee players who are doing 0 boss damage and killing 0 specials and just clearing vermin who think they are the best because they run ahead totally unaware of the fact they are getting carried by their team. If you are a melee player maybe its harder to solo legendary with bots… but if you play lot of FPS games and you have good aim and you build yourself for sniping specials and taking out bosses, the bots are competent enough at clearing the hordes out.
I mean think about the missions you have lost, how many did you lose because you didn’t have enough horde clear and got overrun by rats. No… you lose when someone gets hooked or gutter rat or a bunch of specials just light you up. But people for some reason believe you’re carrying if you have the most kills. Clearing out 300 vermin is a job a monkey could do… so I just don’t see the point of playing with people if you are the one carrying and nobody gives you appreciation for it because they have more “kills” than you. When I play legend with players I probably lose 75% of missions. When I play with bots I can do 2 grimoire and 3 tome runs with 100% success, the only issue is sometimes I lose a grimoire if a bot dies but I don’t think I’ve ever actually failed a mission running with bots.
Maybe I’ll just buy darktide. It seems like shooting in this game is not really of much value when you can just play coghammer and spam left click and get 500 kills.
Margin for error on cata+ is basically non-existent when you play w/ bots. Cruise through 95% of a map, then mistime one dodge and get disabled or eat an overhead, surely the bots will save you, right? Nope, 2 of them are getting sucked off by leeches that they completely ignored while the other bot waddles through a horde to try to save them and you get beat to death by trash mobs. Or they all run off to melee the gasrats/blightstormers that spawned on the other side of the map.
Pretty much any elite overhead is almost guaranteed to down at least one bot, and with the amount of ambient elites that spawn on cata, you won’t always be in a position to delete all of them before the bots start eating overheads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Patrols are damn near impossible to avoid if specials spawn in a position where you can’t safely snipe them before the bots run directly into the patrol’s path, especially if you’re playing a melee only class. And good luck soloing a chaos pat + whatever hordes & specials are spawning without a strength pot + bomb or a class that can immediately nuke half of them before they inevitably down the bots.
And as bad as a lot of randos can be, at least the run doesn’t immediately end if you die.
Forgive me for being a little incredulous, but I haven’t experienced anywhere near the same level of toxicity you’re describing here. Mind, I haven’t played the game for a few months, but this is wild to me.
In my experience, on Legend difficulty and up, people don’t diss teammates for stats in the end screen very much, because they’re experienced enough to understand that the stats don’t tell the whole story.
So it’s great that you’re good at taking out specials and damaging bosses. Waystalker and Engineer are both really good for that. But unlike bots, players aren’t going to be leashed to you automatically. So you gotta be flexible and move up with them if they’re moving at a faster pace. Don’t worry about shooting into a horde if the melee people seem to have a handle on it. Just use the space they create to move up with them and keep watching their backs.
And heck, if you’re getting hooked/leeched/pinned far enough back that teammates consistently don’t come back to help you, you’re probably sitting way too far back? It’s also worth noting that the AI director will spawn enemies (specials included) to specifically target players who are separated from the team. All disabler specials can be dodged/pushed with the right timing, but if you spend too much time trying to shoot over teammates’ heads, you’re probably gonna get nabbed.
Yeah engineer was designed horribly. All gamers inevitably turn PVE games into a competition and pick the pack of least resistance, which is just playing melee classes. You can sit on the front line and spam left click and top kills so this becomes the norm.
I’m not consistently dying to specials on the backline, I’m just saying when it happens, they don’t come back for me because they are busy chasing kills. That’s the typical attitude of competitive PVE players. When I play with bots on melee classes its worse because they don’t do what you need them to and are only good for horde clearing. But if you play engineer you’ll see you actually have much higher rate of success playing with bots, because they avoid your friendly fire and revive you. I just think its kind of stupid that you have higher rates of success and more fun playing engineer with bots than real players. It’s like they didn’t take into consideration the personality of antisocial gamers being competitive in a PVE environment and the melee meta when designing engineer. They just give you a bunch of crap that melee can do better.
I made the expierence that players on legend are more toxic than on cata. But i have to admit i rarely play legend so it was a small sample.
You have to kill the specials. The bots have massive AI issues when specials are up.
If you kill them fast enough. The bots will do fine with the elites and hordes.
There’s not a good reason honestly, besides the achievements that require more players to activate things at once. From my experience human players just choose DPS classes, every time its me as Grail Knight, Bounty Hunter, Shade, and a Slayer. I’d much rather have my bots some days, but power smacking patrols with an all dps crew is pretty badass when it works.
I think it depends a lot on the difficulty. Many players enjoy the DPS careers, but if you are with a competent cata team, you’ll generally see one or two of them switch if you’d end up with a full glass cannon party.
In my experience a full tank team has more chances to finish a map than a full DPS team. Sure, the run will take longer, feel less smooth, but then again, full DPS teams have a tendency for cascade failure.
That’s literally exactly what I just said. I said its easy to solo when you play ranged classes and just take out the specials and the bots can kill the hordes.
What do you just go through people’s posts looking for a way to correct them?
@bdemar2k23 have you tried shade with bots? You can still snipe the specials and at the same time you are engaging more with the melee gameplay. You mentioned her alot along with the grailknight that they are oneshotting monster and bosses. Maybe you would have more fun with her.
And if you dont consider her melee enough, you can try slayer in your game with bots as well. His leap ult is nice to take out disablers which caught your bots.
Bots are good for bare minimum team tasks ie holding horde attention, revives holding stuff etc.
Better than players? Yes and No.
They generally suffer from specials so since you’re engineer you can basically get your bots to be your wall and kill specials to cover them. They don’t complain when accidently hit and they do their best to stick with you. Overall bots a re great if you’re playing alone.
I think bots suffer when you have at least one teammate who drags the bots with them when they rush ahead leaving you alone and usually getting you killed.
However if you get lucky and queue with really good and chill teammates you can have a blast playing with them chatting and making new friends though I admit this is a rather rare experience.
Bots fall rather quick in Cata so if you plan to attempt bot runs I would be wary about how to keep your bots alive and safe from the special spawns as number one priority to keep your momentum going.
So to sum it up. Bots have a solid baseline competency and let you make the calls and never complain. They hold your stuff and always prioritize YOU.
Players are varied and can be great or terrible. Finding good player groups to play with is an excellent boon to the multiplayer experience. Having to block another toxic teammate sucks although I only have blocked one person ever in this game.
I have done Cata runs solo bots before. It’s tough and I fail often but it is possible and can be done with any class I believe. You picked one of the tougher characters to take into higher difficulty so I wish you luck if you attempt those Cata runs.
