UO Second Age

Did npc's like dragons inadvertently get healing and curing themselves with spells back again?

A just saw a dragon cure and heal itself when it was at very low hitpoints.

Funny, I saw a Balron heal himself the other day too, when he was redlined. I just assumed it was a random spell choice, but it sounds like it may be a pattern.

Balrons always healed, dragons had but not so much . Actually it was very rare they did.

Monsters didn't start healing or curing until the UOR publish when they received a huge AI boost.

Renaissance Publish Apr 28 2000 10:28AM CST - http://update.uo.com/design_196.html wrote: Monster AI
Monsters will “path-find” better and will react to combat situations more intelligently. The net effect of monster AI will be that monsters will be more difficult and challenging to fight. The exact reactions monsters can have will not be detailed. Players will need to learn monsters’ behavior through fighting them and watching their reactions.

Log of the forty-ninth UO Open House March 2, 2000 - http://uohoc.stratics.com/logs/2000-03-02-pub.shtml wrote: Glamdring - *JP* Can you expand on any of the new monster AI?
Firedog - I'll give out a few tidbits.
Firedog - Some creatures will heal and cure themselves.
Firedog - Some monsters will understand hiding and invisibility.
Firedog - There will certainly be some slightly better tactics.
Firedog - The rest is a mystery for now.
Firedog - Oh.. and pathfinding that will make you live in terror for the rest of your lives...

Log of the fifty-first UO Open House April 6, 2000 - http://uohoc.stratics.com/logs/2000-04-07-pub.shtml wrote: Glamdring - *Al_Bundy* will dragons/wyrms/nightmares/drakes heal/cure themselves when they're tamed?
tOAD - Yes.
Jalek - yup
SunSword - Firedog says "Yes." All hail Firedog.
tOAD - Can you dig it?

These features are out of era and need to be fixed again.

Era or not do we want dumbed down spawn that can't heal themselves?

We had dumbed down monsters for half a year until it was inadvertently removed sometime recently.

Also, it doesn't matter if it's good or bad in all honesty. It's era accurate and like so many other issues that is not an excuse to keep it. We take the bad with the good because that is part of the way this server works.

I believe monsters healed just fine before the "smart" patch. They just did it randomly - as randomly as a flamestrike, a fireball, or a curse spell. So you'd whack at a lich lord, and he'd fireball you, greater heal himself from 60% health to 75%, then ebolt and curse you as you struck him down more and killed him.

After the "smart" patch, monsters seemed to use exclusively offensive spells until you got them below 15% health, at which point they would only cast greater heal until they got back up over 20% or so (numbers not exact). And if they were poisoned, their next spell was always a cure, whether they were at 5% health or 95%.

Defensive spells are not a part of the spell pool of npc's in the demo, only offensive. This is exactly the way that I remember it always being and the UOHOC logs discussing the upcoming UOR changes with the Smart AI patch confirms that in my opinion. I have not seen one shred of evidence to suggest that they did in fact heal and cure in era. We know they did not in '98 for a fact meaning a change had to have been made between July '98 and November '99 making it very likely the UOR patch in April '00 was when creatures started casting defensive spells.

Going on memory here... but I definitely remember seeing monsters heal themselves *differently* when the smart AI came out. I remember them healing themselves mid-battle at some point on the UO timeline, and then I remember a patch that made them heal almost exclusively when they were low on health.

Does the demo have Dispel in the monster spellbook? Can you list the spells in the demo spellbook?

We've been down this road before, and I continue to believe and recall that there was an AI improvement mid-99. I know there are other threads on this, and there was evidence found to this effect although I am unable to cite it specifically. We made adjustments to the heal cure rate of mob AI on UOSA long ago and it has not changed since then. The increase in dragons healing and curing is related to their slight magery boost in the last patch.

There was never anything found to prove this theory that I am aware of Derrick.

Here is some more information from sources that I just gathered to show this wasn't possible until the UOR AI patch in April 2000... Combine this information with the rest of my sources above how can this even be questionable...

Oct 28 1999, 2:00AM wrote: Sunsword, forget about "fixing" boats and item labels, and think about
making monster AI what it should be. We all want monsters to be smarter fighters. Heck, smarter monsters might even give the PKs something entertaining to do again. Here are some proposed suggestions that might make monster-bashing more enjoyable for all of us.

Full use of spells. How many times have I done Eval Int on a being that is "beyond comprehension," but that is too stupid to teleport over barriers or heal itself. Monsters above certain levels should have the full use of their spells. They should attempt to cure poison (with
success or failure comparing against the caster's ability like normal).
They should In Vas Mani themselves. They should try to teleport over
objects that stand between them and their prey (Lich Lords in Deceit
should definitely teleport onto the landing, as should the Balrons in
the Terathon dungeon).

Reference

Jan 2 2000, 3:00AM wrote: Poisoning a monster is not an exploit, although some may consider it to be cheesy because the monster can't cure himself. Monsters can't heal themselves either though, so by this measure _ANY_ attack is a cheesy exploit of inferior AI. In the end, poison is another weapon to use for killing monsters, and that's all it is.

Reference

Jan 2 2000, 3:00AM wrote: If OSI did not want players to be able to poison monsters they could give them the ability to cure the same way they gave them the ability to dispel. If they did not want players to be able to stand on a cleft and cast spells or shoot arrows at monsters they could program in the message "you cant see that target" or "too far away" or something like that.

Reference

Mar 4 2000, 3:00AM wrote: They are also 'supposed' to be juicing monster AI such that they heal and cure. I hope they don't do it too much as my favorite way of killing Orc mages is to stand around collecting MR until the mage MCs and all his buddy Orcs gang bang him. I know it is quicker to just kill them, but I kind of like it when they get killed from a MC since I have probably died 50 times that way to my dragons.

Reference

Do we really have to list anymore sources regarding this issue?

The time frame runs from October '99 up to March, a month before the AI change with the UOR publish...

Wow, I was way off apparently. I could have sworn I remember liches healing themselves sporadically, and then later healing themselves as practically their only spell they cast when they got below 15 or 20%. Maybe this was in later eras.

When a monster cures or heals themselves it seems well beyond weird to me and bleeds UOR everytime it happens. I don't ever recall a monster or npc period for that matter healing or curing before the UOR publish. I researched this topic in the past and was positive this was fixed on here already... The evidence is simply overwhelming in support of this reduced AI feature for spell casting npc's. Monsters definitely only casted offensive spells during this era, except for the dispel spell that was the first defensive spell added to their pool in mid-late '98.

One of the major tactics used after the dispel addition to the npc mana pool on large targets like Balrons, Wyrms, etc.. was to simply get one stuck behind an obstacle and poison the mob letting it slowly die. This isn't a valid option really since they appear to be curing on here. The only reason this even popped up was because my nephew is literally a brand new Ultima Online player and I told him to use this tactic. When the Dragon cured and continued to cure it was simply a "wtf" moment for me...

Balrons have been self heal/curing since at least the end of October. Ive also seen Dragons cure well before their recent magery boost, around early December I witnessed this. No idea if its accurate or not but it has been in their behaviour for sometime.

I noticed it when I first got to this shard and was under the impression that my last find on the matter was suitable for a correction to be made. I must not have noticed it after that back when I used to farm a lot. However, now there is even more mounting evidence and in my opinion there should be no doubt to anyone that the current behavior is inaccurate and should be fixed.