Fixed the ‘drumming’ sound heard whilst “Impenetrable” is active on Ironbreaker whilst venting overcharge/THP decays.
Fixed Grail Knight not receiving THP when killing an enemy with Blessed Blade.
Fixed an issue where Hagbane could doubleshoot, causing unecessary ammo use.
Heroes,
Welcome to patch 4.2 on PC. This patch brings the bot improvements that Gameplay Programmer Ričardas spoke about in the lastest Dev Blog. If you have not read it yet you can find it here!
Patch 4.2 also brings more fixes and tweaks.
Misc.
Fixed various crashes.
Fixed various localisation issues.
Deactivating DLCs in the Steam client should now deactivate them In-Game.
Made alterations to the telemetry tracking the networking issues being reported (increased pings between players, and more frequent lobby breakdowns).
Bot Improvements
Bots are now more willing to give their healing items to players.
Bots now use healing potion if they are at 40% health rather than 50%.
Bots are now more accurate with Drakefire Pistols.
Bots now have sturdier legs if they decide to take fast way down the ladder (they no longer take fall damage).
Removed ping cooldown on bot commands to make pickup and drop grim commands more responsive, they are still bound by social wheel event count limit.
Bots now stick closer when under high threat (many aggroed enemies).
Bots no longer take ammo pouches if any player is missing any ammo.
Bots no longer heal if they have natural bonds unless they have been already been downed once and are about to die again.
Fixed Sienna bot not using heavy attacks on armored units while wielding a dagger.
Reduced damage importance for infantry class enemies, causing bots to prefer faster wide sweep attacks on them.
Added ranged weapon type classification, so bots should only use ranged weapon against targets that match weapon type eg. they won’t fire handguns at infantry.
Bots now fire faster with rapid fire weapons like Bolt Staff.
Bots now try a bit harder to leave poison clouds if they land on them.
Bots should no longer run off cliffs if they are in ratling gunners fire cone or other long sticky AOE threat.
Bots should now be more aware of pinged targets.
Bots should now consider shooting at specials from a bit further away.
Fixed bots getting stuck in Hagbane charge attack.
Ratling Gunners now update bot threat box when they switch direction of fire, so bots have better chance of escaping direct fire.
Made bots stay away from Ratling Gunners and Warpfire Throwers if they engage in ranged combat with them.
Bot Engineers should be less inclined to use his activated ability against every stray rat.
Levels
Empire in Flames: Fixed an issue where early placing of the barrels to the cart could cause further barrels to not spawn.
Empire in Flames: Fixed some spots where bots could get stuck when trying to retrieve a Tome, and a couple of other locations where bots had trouble traversing, including a ladder or two.
Garden of Morr: Fixed a particularly troublesome spot where bots could and often would cliff-dive.
Screaming Bell: Added some blockers to prevent dashing into places where you shouldn’t.
Screaming Bell: Bots should find grabbing the second Grimoire considerably easier now.
The Blightreaper: Fixed a spot where Sienna’s could Firewalk and find themselves beneath the map.
Social Wheel
It should no longer be possible to Tag/Ping players.
Pings while the ‘social wheel is opening’ should now work better (We have 3 different ping states: Direct ping (single keydown), when the social wheel’s opening animation is running, and when the social wheel’s animation is finished).
Units should no longer be pinged if you try to tell a bot with a tome to pickup another tome (crossed out) through the social wheel.
Been hoping for an update like this for a long time, and I gotta say, it feels great to read those patch notes.
Only had the chance to do one run with bots since this patch (legend into the nest) any UC + WHC bot both felt more consistent, less dumb, and made better use of their ranged weapons.
Only wonky behaviour I saw was WHC bot going down very quickly to a rat ogre with absolutely nothing else around. Struck me as strange since bots have generally handle rat ogres well in my experience. Poor bot just copped basically every hit from the thing.
Probably a few more tweaks that could help but overall feeling real happy with this patch. Will see how they cope with Cata now when I get the chance. In theory just having them not run off and separate under pressure ought to be a big deal for consistency on its own so excited to see how they go.
I don’t see any fix to Sienna bot being stuck in charged conflag state and walking incredibly slow or the infinite hanging on a ledge on the ramps in Skittergate after 2nd grim location.
Ping issues are way worse for me compared to last patch. Game freezes for 10-30secs then it goes fast forward to current state. Also when I try to host all players get kicked out of lobby 90% of the time when first horde triggers. Anyone else dealing with the same problem?
Also it needs more rule. When bot is wounded status, bot has to heal itself regardless of bots current hp (including temp hp).
[ * wounded status : The status which has no more chance to be downed before death ]
After patch 4.2, I played with bots in Cataclysm. Current bots don’t heal themselves even though they’re wounded status. Wounded bots keep waiting till their hp(including temp hp) lower than 40%.
Because of this, wounded bot easily get died by elite’s critical or overhead attacks. In Cataclysm, healing is very important, especially when player or bot is wounded status regardless of hp.
So, my suggestion is
Bots now use healing potion if they are wounded or at 40% health rather than 50%.
Bots will still use charged attacks on horde with many of the weapons (I barely did one match with the bot mod yesterday so i would like to test it a bit more), bots use light attacks on horde with the bot mod enabled.
Bots will still stray away from the party, but it looks like they will stay closer to a player much more often than before.
I did convocation of decay yesterday on cata with 2 players and a foot knight bot, and the bot werent being frustrating or stupid in the end event (probably due to not chasing specials). The bots still deal very little damage like before (due to often not attacking enemies), but they have better survivability.
