Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback What's wrong with the combat AI?

Hi guys,
after about 50 hours of playing (it's a great game!) i still find the enemy combat AI very unpredictable, for all the wrong reasons. (I am using the "no psychic enemies mod" which lowers enemy Loremaster scores, if that makes any significant impact on my statements below)

Excuse my expression here, but the AI seems to have a lot of pants-on-head retarded moments, and i wonder why that is.
So lets see this as a discussion on the Combat AI behaviour which comes primarily from the decision making on who they attack.

Here a few of my Observations (all classic mode, 2 seperate parties):

-The AI seems to have an obsession with my Glass-Cannon Lizard enchanter (Focused on Air / Water / Fire), to a point where i had make her the party tank to have any justification for the characters exsistance. Enemies will chain stun the Mage for 4-6 rounds in a row, leading to very boring encounters since you just have to wait idly and observe.

-AI will focus other weird characters. If the AI isnt busy beating up the mage they will focus on other weird targets like Summons and ignore the rest. A very striking example for this is the Oil Blob the polymorph fighter summoned as a preemtive strike before the cave but i have seen this happen to Incarnates before. 4 of the Possessed Dwarfs would go to great lengths to beat up the not-so-impressive summon while ignoring the two mages and a ranger on high ground dealing massive amounts of damage or the Knight/Polymorph character near the summon.

-AI has no sense of self-presevation. This relates to their absolute willingness to take Attacks of Opportunities (at times 3 AoO's resulting in the instant death of the character who was trying to relocate.) i suspect this is coupled with the decision making on targets, as the other day when one of "Hammer's Pets" would eat 2 attacks of opportunity (1 from the fighter and 1 from an incarnate) to run to the other Fighter(Tempest Mod Class), punch the figther once (not killing the target), and then walk back to it's original position taking a 3rd AoO from the fighter they attacked. This was the moment when i felt the need to change "strange" to "pants-on-head retarded".

-(Minor Spoiler Ahead:) Allied NPCs have no sense for the goal of a fight. During the Lady Vengeance fight, while Maladay was sorrounded by 4 enemies, Gareth would go out of his way to cast ice shard on the cloaked figure, instead of helping to combat the threat to maladay (and thus his own safety in extension of the story). Additionally he seems to be a melee focused character (as suggested by equipment and skill books for trade) so using a lower powered spell on a lower priority target seems to suggest that combat AI likes to heavily prioritize spellcasters even though it doesn't make sense in the context.

and this for a small suggestion:

-AI for the most part seems to ignore knight type characters. This results in wild goose chases as the Fighter tries to hunt down enemies (especially melee enemies) that will just run away onwards to another character (eating more AaOs in the process). This results my knight character dealing most of his damage through said AoOs than through his basic attack. This makes running after enemies a real annoyance and tidium while negating the usefullness of the "tankiness" as the knight itself rarely gets attacked. This diminishes both roles of the character (damage dealing and damage tanking) making the charater seemingly a lot less useful than he should be. If melee combat AI would have a higher priority on the Knight and Similar classes this might eleviate some of the problems mentioned above.

Furthermore i find it hard to just wait with the melee characters close to the spellcasters since the Amount of Area of Effect spells and utilities the AI uses to Focus Fire Spellcasters would only damage both characters.

In short: it feels a bit wrong to me for the Mage to take the role as tank, and the Fighter having to chase around everything.

As stated in the beginning and apparent throughout the post, i play the game with several mods installed. I do not know if side effects of the mentioned mods might cause some of these issues. On the other hand i would like to see know if there are just some patterns of AI behaviour that i seem to miss or if someone could explain them to me in a way that makes more sense.

PS: Excuse my rampant capitalization and spelling errors, since english isn't my native language

This has nothing to do with mods - I had the Red Prince acting as an archer in one of my play throughs and he literally would die in almost every encounter because the AI focused him. Is there a stat somewhere that enemy aggro is taken from? Current play through, my fighter character almost takes no hits because the AI is too busy attacking our mage and rogue characters instead. I know there is a taunt in the game, but the fact that you have to remove armor before you use it kind of makes it useless for a group of higher level enemies.

AI goes for the squishiest and easiest target.

That doesn't seem to be entirely true. Like i stated, i started to use the Spellcaster as a tank (Highest Magic and second highest Physical Armor of all the Characters, with second highest HP in the group) and the AI still focuses the spellcaster with absurdly high priority.
I think it's mostly based on which kind of class it is. The Ranger on the other hand deals the most damage by far and usually gets left alone even though he's the squishiest character of the group.

As for the "easiest" thats also not true either since the spellcasters usually try to stay as far out of the way as possible.

You mage has Glass cannon, that is always the squishiest for the AI because always CCable. Glass cannon is catnip for the AI similar to being undead.