Cleric - AI - optimize healing please

right now it seems the cleric AI doesn’t understand it has the AOE heal. it will often stand too far back while healing, and the AOE heal will not touch anyone. there are a few solutions i can see and suggest.

  1. you could decrease the default range healing distance to that of the radios of the AOE heal, insuring that at least the target of the ranged heal is included in the AOE.

  2. alternatively you could set a “preferred” distance. perhaps allowing the cleric to stand far enough back to catch archers and melee in the heal. allowing the Hearthling a bit of freedom in its decisions.

  3. the more complicated answer would be to include a calculation in the AI allowing it to try to include as many Hearthlings in the AOE heal as it can. i believe this will be the more work, but probably the best pay off. the AI would just need to run a check or two counting the Hearthlings in its AOE heal radius and compare that to the number of people in his squad. then its just setting a minimum number of squad members to include: more then one, quarter, or half. if the number is under, move up and recheck. continue until it meets the condition. if you go an extra step the Hearthling could try to predict a good spot to stand, just running the check in a proposed new location and moving after finding a suitable one. id allow a “give up” clause in the AI to allow for the odd bug or bad situation, which would let the AI opt out of the check until something preventing it had changed. maybe make the Hearthling use a emote of “frustration” to provide feedback to the player.

Thank you for reading my suggestion!

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Hey there @TheDonBug, welcome to the Discourse :smiley:!

Interesting thoughts. I believe the cleric tries to stand as far away as possible to decrease the chance of being damaged him/herself - but you bring up a good point that you lose some healing power from that. Curious to hear what @Brackhar thinks of this…

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The PBAoE heal doesn’t fire off too terribly often, which would actually make it perfect for the archers that should be closer to the cleric. The direct heals are more concentrated and more in-tune with healing the melee Hearthlings. It’s been my observation that the cleric likes to run up and take thwacks at the mobs him/herself, so that puts them in range for the PBAoE heal to hit the melee combatants.

This has been my observation in my game plays. It’s also the main reason I’ve asked the mighty Devs to give the healers some light robe armor over the circlets. My clerics are gutsy little so-n-sos.

Since clerics are considered a “combat” class, if no one is injured they will go and attack themselves.

And that, right there, is reason enough that they need more armor than just a headband. LOL