Yay! Milestone passed!

[klufas]

First, congratulations are in order on achieving that milestone.

Your bot sounds similar to how I am creating my "bot," I have navigation in there (a combination of very simple pathing and following a breadcrumb trail), but the main navigation is by a human, who does the majority of the running around, deciding what to pull next, etc. Once the "bot" engages, it is pretty much hands off until the conclusion of the battle.

I am curious though, currently I am reworking my healing routines (an order of paladins, or pride of druids or even a lodge of hunters backed up by a single priest, are my usual group makeups) and whilst these combinations work amazingly well, the decisions of who to heal and when (and why) is quite a challenge.

My current setup involves using moving averages for health and mana with a fuzzy evaluator but I am curious to know how (or if) you have solved this problem too.

Any thoughts?

I run a lot of my heal routines based off of players % of health (Current health / Total health). If they're below a certain variable, then I check my mana %, if my mana is lower, I tend to prefer lower ranked heals to conserve mana, especially if I have multiple healers. Just my .02.

[Xarg0]

As he said, he's paranoid and thus won't show us any screenshots. It's too easy to reveal criticial information about your character. Take for example the cast bars which are stored server side. How many players have duo'd Utgarde Keep with the exact same cast bar configuration recently? I bet it's not that many.

That said, congratulations and good luck for your further efforts, dude!

alt+y? filler

[audible83]

Congratulations

Do you use SendAddonMessage for target selection?

[snigelmannen]

I tend to prefer lower ranked heals to conserve mana.

This was removed with 3.X.X spells uses a % of your total base mana. that means all ranks.

[amadmonk]

First, congratulations are in order on achieving that milestone.

Your bot sounds similar to how I am creating my "bot," I have navigation in there (a combination of very simple pathing and following a breadcrumb trail), but the main navigation is by a human, who does the majority of the running around, deciding what to pull next, etc. Once the "bot" engages, it is pretty much hands off until the conclusion of the battle.

I am curious though, currently I am reworking my healing routines (an order of paladins, or pride of druids or even a lodge of hunters backed up by a single priest, are my usual group makeups) and whilst these combinations work amazingly well, the decisions of who to heal and when (and why) is quite a challenge.

My current setup involves using moving averages for health and mana with a fuzzy evaluator but I am curious to know how (or if) you have solved this problem too.

Any thoughts?

Interestingly, I didn't need anything fancy. My heal routine just does the following:

1) Keep a list of friendly units (this includes pets, which is super-important since for now my pet is tanking )
2) Sort them in reverse percentage health order (I use percentage health rather than total health because it's slightly more accurate for determining how much danger the unit is in)
3) Based upon the amount of health deficit and total health remaining, decide which spell to cast. <2000 total health, cast Holy Shock (the healadin's expensive but insta-cast heal). Deficit < 5000 but > 1000, cast Flash of Light. Deficit > 5000, cast Holy Light
4) Keep Sacred Shield (I think it's called, can't look at WoW right now because of patch day) up on the tank (pet) to mitigate damage
5) Keep Beacon of Light up on the tank (pet) so that heals to anyone in the party also heal the tank
6) Keep Blessing of Kings on everyone (I could have been "smart" about which blessing to use, but BoK is an easy choice)
7) Keep Seal of Wisdom on self, and Judgement of Light on main tank's target (when in combat), so that attacks on the MT target cause trickle heals to the attacker; every little bit helps. In a future, smarter bot I might alternate with Judgement of Wisdom when appropriate, etc.

That's really it; there's no real complex logic there. I agonized about "what do I do if I'm halfway through a heal and someone goes critical on health" but in practice that turned out to just be over-engineering. Things might (will) be different in heroics and raids, but at least in the standard 5-man all i needed was this simple algorithm. Nobody's health ever dipped below 80% except one time in a huge pack when the pet lost aggro (which points to the only big flaw in the group, which is that pets aren't really tanks, although they can play one on TV). Nobody died.

TLDR: don't over-engineer your bot. Try the simple solution first; you might be surprised... it might just work

Edit: I should add that my healadin is Naxx-25 geared. I'm sure that that didn't hurt when overpowering a non-heroic level 70 instance But still...

Edit2: I want to point out that a well written bot will always play better in most respects than a human. There are some things (notably, navigation) that are really hard for bots, but at the core, things like target selection, spell selection, etc., are purely algorithmic. There's no special "human magic" there, just a better selection of algorithms. And ultimately, once you get your algorithms down, a bot can do them *much, much faster* than any human can, giving even mediocre bots like mine the ability to do things that normal groups can't manage. Ultimately, with a decently-geared and -coded group of bot, I'd guess that you could 4-man most heroics (except for the few cases where game mechanics literally prevent it).

[amadmonk]

Congratulations

Do you use SendAddonMessage for target selection?

No, I use something sneaky. I used to use the usual SelectUnit method, but it was too slow and spammy.

I can't really post more because I know blizz people troll this forum and I don't want to give away the farm. I might post my "targetless targeting" method on the Elite forum though if anyone's curious.

[amadmonk]

alt+y? filler

Even just giving away race combos might be enough to extrapolate back to me (you already know the classes). I suppose I could zoom in to first person, but still...

I know I'm being overly paranoid, but after having numerous accounts banned in numerous games, I have two simple rules: I don't share my main code base, and I don't publish brag shots/clips.

[amadmonk]

I run a lot of my heal routines based off of players % of health (Current health / Total health). If they're below a certain variable, then I check my mana %, if my mana is lower, I tend to prefer lower ranked heals to conserve mana, especially if I have multiple healers. Just my .02.

Since my healadin is fairly well geared, I had the luxury of not worrying too much about mana; even in boss fights, it never dipped below about 70-80%, and it regenned quickly between fights.

Still, I had him use Divine Plea for mana regen if he dipped below 80% (forgot to add that to my algorithm above). It worked amazingly well.

[klufas]

This was removed with 3.X.X spells uses a % of your total base mana. that means all ranks.

Sorry, I did not mean lower ranks, I should have said "lower costing heal spells". I would have thought the same thing if I had read it, sorry bout that.

[Krillere]

GJ, and GL with the future versions, hopefully we'll see a product released someday :-)

[WannaBeProgrammer]

What does Milestone mean?
Anyway F'''ing great job mate

[lanman92]

Lol. (filler)

[Nesox]

awesome work, i was really tempted to write a bot for running instances and HC a while ago, also love ure Quadra posting !

[amadmonk]

Yeah, after I posted that I kvetched that Apoc was gonna ban me, but I still contribute here once in a while, so what the hey...

So I'm happy with my bot's logic, but the performance isn't what I'd hoped. I'm losing 30fps due to overhead of all the behavior loops I run every frame. Today at work, I came up with a new architecture that, I think, should reduce my fps drop to near zero if I can make it work (a mostly event-driven scheduler, rather than recalculating everything every frame; it SHOULD work as long as the events give me enough data, and good enough quality data...)

[miceiken]

Even just giving away race combos might be enough to extrapolate back to me (you already know the classes). I suppose I could zoom in to first person, but still...

I know I'm being overly paranoid, but after having numerous accounts banned in numerous games, I have two simple rules: I don't share my main code base, and I don't publish brag shots/clips.

but brag posts with no proof is better?