Now, I know the AI in Guild Wars takes a lot of heat, and, for the most part I've learned to live with it... However, something that's just hilarious and at the same time depressing as all getout is the way high armor classes handle AoE and the "scatter" reflex.

Here's the thing, I was bored one day and had the Molotov Rocktail bounty so I decided to try something different. Rocktail's big threat is his siege attack, and I thought I had the perfect solution. I set Goren, Koss and Jora as my heroes, then I grabbed the two warrior hench, Devona and Talon. I figured that, with my imbagon, we should be able to just flatten him in hard mode since, as melee, they're cluster around him and not be vulnerable to the siege.

So, with all that in mind, I stepped out of Doomlore Shrine to go kill Molotov Rocktail. Sounded feasable, right?

Well, not exactly. In fact, I never even made it to Rocktail.

Here's what happened:

We encounter our first group of 4 Charr archers.

The warriors run in.

The archers use Ignite Arrows and start shooting the warriors, who really don't take all that much damage.

Because of the frequency of the AoE, the warriors wind up scattering, as the AI code instructs them to. Now, they won't attack. They won't do anything but run in and out of melee range of the archers. Nothing dies. Well, except us, because we're not putting any damage out, so they have free reign to do whatever. After about 3 minutes or so of me throwing spears at them (yes, I'm a paragon) and the h/h dying several times, accumulating a bunch of death penalty, the first group is finally finished off. Hurray. Ten more to go... yeah, right. I went back into Doomlore, grabbed the Discord necros, and went through everything like a hot knife through butter, which is pretty much always the case with Discord.

Is it just me, or does this seem backwards? Warriors taking almost no damage from AoE and still scattering? Aren't they around for that exact purpose - to soak up damage so the midline and backline don't have to? Sometimes I really just don't get what the devs were thinking. With the amount of AoE in the game, especially in hard mode, using warriors is pretty much impossible because of this. No one complains because no one uses warriors on a regular basis, it's all about the necros.

I want to be able to try something different, I want to break the monotony of nothing necros being the only way to do something without a full team of players that know what they're doing. But, hey, that'll never happen, right? Discord is there and the PvE/PvP skill split is in full effect, so the masses are happy and we can all avoid any issues that don't relate to doing things the easy way.

Is it so wrong that I want to actually use my warriors as warriors and slaughter things? I mean, three warriors can put out a massive amount of damage and can take a real beating. But you'd never know it because they're too afraid to stay in the fight like they're supposed to.

Oh well, I guess my warriors can just keep collecting dust along with everything else that's not a necro or, these days, a rit.

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