In-Game AI Manipulation: Keeping Your Squishier Heroes Alive
By Marunon // Philipp.
This is a guide which helped me conquer vault stage 45 by AI manipulation. Keep in mind, the AI basically does what it wants these are just some very simple tweaks to push it more on the direction that we want / need.
Those are not game breaking or hard to do, but it helped me multiple times to ensure my mage / rogue don’t get aggro and survive longer.
First thing you can do is place stuns from the warrior and rogue into different slots so they don’t use them at the same time. And put heal in slot 1 for heal mages.
Second, the rogue ALWAYS uses his poison bomb when it’s ready no matter the slot, because it’s ranged.
This is good and bad, good – > you create distance to help the warrior get in front, bad – > because you now only have 1 skill in front of your stun so chances are higher you double stun with the warrior together.
Third, you can use ultimates to create distance as well.
As you can see in the pictures rogue and mage are up front, I then used the mage ult, when there are no enemies nearby ( surprisingly the ult still hit some, lol) so the Ai is forced to stop shortly which makes the warrior and rogue the top position. (in vault situations you want to do the same with the rogue).
It’s better to keep squishies alive then deal some dmg with the ult.
- CD manipulation – > what you should look for is your CDs.
What I did was, when I saw I don’t have anything important up like heal or a stun, I would stop clicking on enemies and don’t use any ults to keep the 1 enemy which is left alive longer.
This might sound counter intuitive but it’s easier to tank and survive 1 almost dead enemy then 2 to 4 new ones.
By delaying his death, you waste time so your skills are back up and a few seconds before they are up, make sure to click fast to kill him, so no skill is used on him.
Click to enlarge…