Single Player Cores
I dont know if anyone gives a shit about this post, but for about a year now im kinda obsessed with Single Player WoW cores.
It started with me paying some guy on Fiverr to set up an AzerothCore server for me because i wanted to understand how all of this actually works. Cost me around 50€ and honestly he was a really chilled guy, i could just ask him stuff while he was setting it up and learned quite a bit from that.
After that i started tweaking my own things. Custom legendaries, mounts, backpacks, items and all that stuff. But what really got me hooked was Playerbots.
My dream was basically to simulate a whole WotLK progression like you would have on a normal server. Leveling, Dungeons, Naxx, OS, Maly, Ulduar, ToC, ICC etc. I didnt want bots that just have insane gear and nuke everything either. For me it was important that they actually play good, do mechanics, have proper DPS rotations, heal correctly and generally feel like you are playing with decent players.
My base was a Playerbot module from a private server which was kinda similar to Warstorm.
After around a month i had Ulduar working surprisingly well. Hardmodes work, positioning works and even Algalon is playable right now.
And then things got a little out of hand lol.
I started changing basically every class and spec in the game.
Just some examples:
BM Hunter pets now cleave 2 targets with their auto attacks, have better stat scaling and BM has a custom 5 minute CD which summons 3 copies of your current pet for a short time.
Living Bomb from Fire Mage leaves a burning fire patch on the ground after exploding.
Chaos Bolt leaves a DoT which deals another 100% of the Chaos Bolt damage over 8 seconds.
Paladin got a baseline Whirling Hammer ability, kinda like the spinning hammers from Diablo. It deals damage and healing but the scaling changes depending on your spec. Holy does a shit ton of healing with it, Prot is a mix of healing/damage and Ret basically turns it into a pure damage CD.
Elemental Shaman has a chance while Flame Shock is ticking to make Lava Burst instant, and Chain Lightning has a 19% chance on the first target to spawn an Earthquake under it.
And pretty much every spec got stuff like this. Some are just small quality of life changes, others completely change how the spec plays.
Then i added M+ and later made my own little event module. It teleports you into Gurubashi Arena together with 10 Playerbots standing in a circle. Then its basically last man standing and the winner gets a Satchel of Gear. You can also trigger another version with mobs instead of bots and at the end it turns into a boss fight.
There were basically only two raid encounters where i never got the bots to behave as smooth as i wanted.
At some point i got really curious how far you could actually push this idea, so i started doing the same thing with Legion.
I found a decent Legion core on Github, got the server running and started building the Playerbot AI from there. For older/simple content its already working pretty smooth but holy shit Legion is another level.
There are so many movement mechanics, interrupts, target switches, ground effects, personal responsibilities etc. Even stuff that is easy for a normal player suddenly becomes a huge AI problem when you want 4, 9 or 19 bots to understand it without basically hardcoding every single step of the encounter.
So thats where im currently at.
Has anyone here actually made Playerbots work properly in Legion? Not just bots that follow you around and cast spells, but bots that can realistically do Legion dungeons/raids and react to mechanics?
Would be really interested to hear if somebody already went down that rabbit hole.