What if you could change the AI difficulty so that the mobs actually acted like players, or at least close to anyways?
Could it work? Would you want it?
More coin, higher drop rate on greens/items you want/need whatever.
I would try it. With a BM hunter first to make sure I don’t end up dead.
Peace out Tupac
EDIT: Speaking mostly from a leveling pov 
I thought Island AI was going to be the start of better mobs. Minus the jumping and the running away at low HP, because those were just annoying behaviours.
But Blizz have binned it off along with all the other good ideas that they failed to iterate on.
On topic; where would you want to turn it on? M+ already has scaling difficulty. Raids already have multiple difficulties. Open world? I wouldn’t choose to turn it on here, because I’m usually dodging mobs rather than trying to engage them. I avoid WQs that have me fighting anything because they’re slow and inefficient.
Basically, I’d be all for better mobs in general, but the whole world has to change, and it’s not really a thing players could be given a choice over. It’d just be a change/upgrade to the game.
Positioning and patrol routes need adjusting so players have some chance of finding safe routes without having to engage absolutely everything between them and a herb. Different mobs need different of AI; beasts would have simpler attacks, and probably should come in small groups to compensate. Humanoids would be smarter, more often solo, and perhaps able to call for help (interruptible). Some mobs should stalk players, slowly approaching, while others (on guard) should let you walk right up to them as long as you’re not crossing their line.
No. Second day there would be an article on WoWhead, about the most efficient tuning which yields the best time/reward ratio.
Everyone would set the difficulty based on that, and never changing it again.
I forgot to add that. I ment leveling mostly. 1-60
The pvp brawl against AI (comp-stomp) shows that the tech for that isn’t really ready yet. The AI in its current form proposes no challenge at all.
So open world.
I’d turn it on if it was balanced such that questing was now roughly on par with running dungeons. If it gave me a more challenging single player experience that also dropped some decent gear and kept me up to date as much as LFD would… then sure, I’d try it with an alt.
But at 60, I’d hate it. Mobs get in my way, they’re never the target of what I want to do, they’re always between me and the thing I want. As above, mob pathing and grouping would have to be adjusted along with behaviour so we don’t end up pulling 10 things that snare us to death.
The problem with difficulty isn’t the AI, it’s the amount of damage mobs do versus your health, and the player’s ability to evade that damage. A mob’s AI doesn’t matter when it dies in 2 hits.
Leveling has to be more difficult, and the way Blizz balances is so that it is appropriately difficult for new players who do not have looms/last expansion best gear, but that means veterans will blast through all the content.
Here’s how I’d change the leveling/difficulty - cut player health in half. It’s too much health. That’s all. Done. Then make first aid a separate skill again, so everyone can take bandages.
It’s easy because you take no damage. Not because the enemies are stupid. Enemies in Dark Souls are absolute morons, they’re literally brainless in the lore, and they still beat you because one hit means losing 20% of your health.
I would love if WoW updated the combat a bit to be closer to an action game. It clearly wants to be an action game, so go all out - give us dodges, manual parrying, countering, manual blocking for warriors. The engine can support a full-on action combat, the network responsiveness is there.
I do not think there is technology for that, They tested Such ai in Comp stomp, AI ncs i love them and i support it but all they were doing is decent dmg, some small cc here and there and that is about it, Island Npcs we much better, more evolved, maybe we are getting there slowly, as theese Island Npc when you did not overgear them were actualy a threat and were kinda working together. Would be fun to have bosses in dugeon or Raid with this kind of technology. I have great memories of champions in Trial of the crusader, in my opinion one of the most enjoyable raid encounter.
I immediately thought of the Fire Mage jumping around instead of casting.
My hunch at the time was the jumping was an attempt to create an AI that players couldn’t tell from other players.
Which would lead to propping up BG teams if they start imbalanced; just throw in a few AIs and swap them out as players arrive.
Other applications were use that AI to have teams of bots compete in PvP, M+ and raids, and help with class balance by running scenarios at super speed, thousands of times per day.
But Blizz binned it off and didn’t use any of that potential 
Given the amount of mobs you have to kill I think it would get very tiresome for most people if they had the intelligence level of players and faught as hard. The game engine does have the tech though - we’ve seen it with Arathi Basin Comp Stomp.
There used to be this game, I forget the name, where you could travel around a vast world and level up and stuff, and depending on where you went and how daring you felt, you could take on quests that were like… red, orange, yellow, green - right? And if you picked a red quest you were gonna have a really hard time and yellow was pretty well tuned. Green were pretty easy.
This way everyone could join in the fun and progress through these lands at their own difficulty levels - and if you played really well you’d get these better items a little bit sooner and at lower levels so you’d get to be stronger than those at the same level.
And then you could like group up with players who were on the same quest and stuff, and you could work together to make it a little easier.
In addition, while these enemies weren’t exactly intelligent, they all their own little thing to watch out for. Some would heal, some would slow you, some could charge, some could TP behind you, some were in stealth and had backstab, some would enrage, some would walk over to nearly camps and pull them, some would completely disappear then appear behind you after a while. There was all sorts of crazy shenanigans.
This could really keep you on your toes and you got to set how hard you wanted it to be. It was a pretty great game, honestly.
I know games function very differently. But I would like to commend the AI in the ARMA games.
In my mind, I think it SHOULD be possible to improve the AI in Wow 
When I played my alt Orc Warrior in Vanilla I had to sit and eat after fighting 1 yellow mob. At the time I didn’t knew I would be better with shield and buckler.
You could use bandage, but they were expensive and had a cooldown.
You want those times back ?
I sure as hell don’t.
If I want something that can kill me in 2 hits I go try to solo a dungeon in Mithic difficulty.
Cheers.
Oh I remember the struggle, believe you me 
No, not quite like that thank you very much.
Just a bit more difficult AND rewarding than it is right now. Like someone mentioned earlier, greens/blues/purple rewards would be nice.
= update quest rewards pretty much
It really is, but Blizz have to plan it right from the start as they’re designing a zone/instance. It has to be built with that AI in mind, else it becomes overwhelming because the world is currently packed with mobs that use numbers to make up for their stupidity.
And say you have a world quest; you probably don’t want to have to kill 12 advanced AI mobs, you probably just want 3-4. Maybe they are named, unique mobs, or maybe you’re killing a mage, warrior and priest mob from a nearby camp.
I’d love to see it done, I just don’t think they can retrofit it into existing zones without ripping out every mob spawn starting over.
You read books IRL, I can tell.
Very nice. 
nah, sounds awful. theres so much clutter around that mobs would get pinned and evade all the time. Thered be so many exploits too. their servers can barely manage the current game, could you imagine the lag and resource drain it would cause.
nah, no way
I would prefer tougher mobs but fewer of them. Currently there are mobs every 20 yards and with how the terrain is configured you can avoid few if any so you end up fighting lots and lots of easy mobs.
The world should have much more open free teraain but with choke points (bridges, towers or caves) where you have to fight a tougher mob to get past / into.
Fewer fights that are more meaningful.
They could have tougher AIs in certain areas, as long as those areas are optional areas with cosmetic type rewards. The mage tower was a good example, a reasonable challenge but with a cosmetic rewards so those who are less capable weren’t road-blocked on the main story or flying etc.
Im pretty sure the AI for the brawl were nerfed into the ground during the original PTR testing. Although, i didn’t test it out myself. I just recall a lot of people complaining that they were too hard.
On a second thought, it could have been a gear thing. But i don’t think so.