Quote:hires only check every X seconds whether to heal you or not
You'd think so, even from an AI development point of view. But that also assumes a modicum or competence during development. Turdbine never had anyone decent working on this or lotro, let alone anyone competent!
You'd also think that in later years after several sales and flag changes they'd actually hire someone competent to fix their mistakes? But of course not, they have basically been caught recycling the same people over and over.
(It's also probably why Fatsovan still has a job after all this time of doing jack shit and pestering the forums with trash...)
The hirelings rely on a navmesh to work. Most of the time the navmesh in the game is as basic as it gets. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. The way the hirelings *use* said mesh - their movement algorhytm is what's completely fucked up.
It's just lacking basic rules to obviate issues.
For one, the hires know there's traps. Instead of running after you, if they know there's a trap they should probably stop and not dash through it - mind you that most of that is in place.
Telling a hireling to open a chest or pull a lever that they know is trapped usually had (in past times, not sure now?) them flat out refusing to.
For 2, their heal/combat algorhythm is all over the place. You have them falling below 50% health in guard mode and not heal themselves.
You have them resurrect with 10% hp and not heal them self at all, let alone immidiately.
You have them in active mode and they won't even bother healing anything (which sort of makes sense, they should still heal themselves if below 50% though).
You have them unable to find same level EE traps - their search skill is 0 or something.
You have the fighter healing himself more than FVS/Paladin. Which is rediculous considering in reaper mode they have to chug 2 inventories of pots to keep up (And I do think they run out).
On the cool side of things, you
can could kill them over and over to the point they end up naked (Not sure they still can).
Basically they have a setup and functionality that seems to mirror players - which makes perfect sense on a developer standpoint.
You don't need special classes, you can just instantiate a "character" with specific stats/values, same as everyone else.
The bad part of this is that turdbine was incapable of leveling their own toons properly, obviously, so I'm sure that most of the hires end up with massive penalties and issues. Come think of it, it's probably why rouges have no search...
Another thing worth bringing up is the fact that the hires have as many spells as the equivalent classes would - you just don't have direct access to them.
Some times, they appear to throw some extra spells around. Like nimbus of light, or even the occasional mass cure.
If they actually standardized all their spells and let them actually use them, there would almost never be a moment in which they have a healing spell on cooldown by level 11.
But again. You would need half competent developers instead of brain dead fuckwads who tell you the math of the new shiradi nerf and can't be bothered trying to acrually solve it to notice the fact its a lot lower than they claim.
The only hope is that SSG declares bankruptcy and someone who actually fires the whole fucking staff buys up the IP/source/servers.
We aren't that far off from this