AI interaction with weapons

[Chatv71e]

With the upcoming Equnox Prime, I'd really love to see some improvements of AI weapon interactions. This doesn't refers to equinox only (although she does use clones) but to specters in general, such as Umbra passive, craftable Tenno specters, to a lesser extent Mirage.

Previous thread - 

Big problems remaning:

- Weapon range limits.  Some weapons (like ogris, castanas) have range limits, making spectre unable to fire a shot if they don't get closer to enemy. It's unneeded on orgris, but much needed on beam weapons with limited range! Would love to see this fixed and my specters won't longer be stuck tryting to kill 300m away enemy with 20m range beam, unloading magazine after magazine into air.

- Pox. Pox 'bullets' still can be manually detonated by specters as if it is castanas, making the toxic cloud disappear instantly.

 

I don't expect following to be fixed but it would be nice to have

- Opticor Vandal does not benefit from fire rate mods for specters.

- Pyrana Prime special effect occurs on specters a visual (Spectral Pyrana appears) but doesn't do anything above that. No fire rate added, no extra ammo.

- Sicarus Prime also has a problem where after killing few enemies it fails to reload since there are some ammo leftovers in the magazine, trapping specter in confused state of not able to fire or reload. It's unable to fire the burst because there are not enough bullets for full burst, and unable to reload because there are still bullets.

- Minnor issues with specters of any form unable to target enemies that are already targeted by other specters. Such as inability for Duality to target enemy that is targeted by Nekros shadows, Nidus maggots, etc.

- Inability to target enemies that have status effect and/or are crowd controled. For example specter will ignore enemies frozen by frost.

- Double reload. If animation of gunfire is too fast (for example if you mod certain weapons for high fire rate) after reloading Specter will fire weapon faster than reload animation finishes. This will cause it to go on a second cycle of reload animation, doubling the reload time.

- Attempts to hit unexisting body parts. Specter will always make shots trying to hit upper and lower body parts that some enemies might not even have. Best seen whien using Quanta. On top of that the firing pattern will not be changed if target is knocked down, essentially making Specter unload their weapon into air.

This makes blast status really bad when using specters.

 

On a good side - Ferrox has been fixed and working as intended.

[Chatv71e]

In regards to melee reworks, they are affecting specters behavior too.

The auto blocking system makes it so specters use two blocks at once, being able to passively block with a weapon when facing an enemy, as well actively block rendering them unable to attack.

It would be nice if you could remove active blocking part from AI so they could actually use a melee weapon more often than once in  year. 

Some of the weapons special effect doesn't do anything in hands of specter. For example Redeemer/Sarpa charged and ground finisher attacks will cause a blast proc, but there will be no bullets comung out of it, resulting specter doing no damage at all.

Things that are probobly never gonna be done but would be nice to have:

- I could maybe go as far as suggest to add Kuva Guardian AI elements to Specters behaviour, letting them use slam attacks of the equiped melee. That would be nice.

- As with any other weapon, specters ignore weapon range and will have to run into 1m range of a selected target to attack. Would they be able to account a range stat of a weapon, it would make use of melees for AI much smoother.