Me And Attempting To Design A Necromancer Class (oh, Boy)

Recently, I asked myself a simple question: What's so bad about a Necromancer Class, and how could we (purely theoretically) make it work in Wynncraft?

I've already identified a few major problems with the idea of a Necromancer Class so far, and I've theory-crafted solutions to these, to boot:

Problem #1 - Stupid AI
While the Content/Mob Teams are great at their job, I'm pretty sure that algorithms for Artificial Intelligence are still something only really big companies really have access to. When you throw in the idea of a Necromancer who spawns units which aren't controlled by the player...Well. Things get messy rather quickly, don't they?
And here is my solution to this problem: Have the summoned units act in a specific way, instead of relying on AI. We already do this with the current Mobs and Bosses in the game: They always act in a set behavior, minus what AI Mojang has already supplied for every single Mob in Vanilla. Melee Mobs walk at you and hit you, Ranged Mobs basically stand still while shooting you, and Bosses always have specific actions which are a mix of these two or have specific behaviors.

Problem #2 - Getting Summoned Units Stuck
The obvious problem of 'help I'm in a corner and my AI says spiiiiiiiiiiinnnnn.' I already have a solution for this: Instead of having a Necromancer summon Zombies or Skeletons or whatever, they can summon souls, spirits, or ghosts. All three of them can phase through stuff quite easily while retaining the 'undead' aspect of your typical Necromancer.

Problem #3 - Combat
This singular issue has been the biggest roadblock yet. This is the singular issue I have yet to theorycraft a solution for. It's the simple question of 'How do you make the specific behavior work with multiple enemies?' After all, there's more often than not just going to be more Mobs than Necromancer-summoned units, resulting in the issue of spreading out forces between multiple enemies.

Players can obviously handle the threat of fighting more than one Mob at a time - if there's a Skeleton and a Zombie, prioritize killing the Skeleton - he has a bow, and he'll ruin the fight between you and the Zombie. The problem is...AI don't know anything.

Put a Necromancer's summoned unit in the same situation, and it'll just go for the Zombie, because that's currently all our current Melee Mobs' specific behavior patterns can really do (while not lagging the server with more complex AI) - run up to the enemy, and then hit the guy in front of them. I mean, the Zombie will just hit them if they go for the Skeleton, so kill the Zombie first, right? But then what if the Skeleton shoots them as they're fighting? What if, heaven forbid, they then run into another Zombie who gets between them and the Skeleton? AI Mobs don't know how to dodge attacks, and that puts them at a HUGE disadvantage which players never run into because of their simple ability to be aware of things around themselves.

So, currently, I have a single hypothetical (and potentially not-going-to-work) solution: Making the summoned unit strong enough to tank or plow through multiple Mobs. But if they're hard-hitting, then what do you do to balance them in a setting such as PVP, where Assassins and Warriors can't take care of these summoned units due to their Health or damage output? Heck, how would you balance them for Bosses or Raids? I might have to go back to the drawing board yet again on this one...

I've been trying to balance a behavior which remedies these issues for days, now. Honestly, the Necromancer seems to be too tough of a cookie even for me to crack, but I'll do my best to crack it anyways, as I'm not about to give up on this!

 

Uh, so basically AI?
Also, I'm pretty sure machine learning is relatively accessible to the public, and there are service providers that can let you run machine learning programs on their servers for some fee or something if your computer is a hot steaming mess of a potato.

 

Depends. Mob AI is technically not AI, but rather just an algorithm that decides what the best thing to do is, which usually doesn't need anything more than a predefined algorithm to follow. Actual AI would be terrible for this since there's no good way to make the AI stupid (which is actually extremely important). Actual AI would probably in this case be q learning or neural networks, both of which would be hard to tune and take time to train, all to do something that would be better dome by something like A* or another pathfinding algorithm.

 

Actually, artificial intelligence, machine/deep learning are pretty muvh available to anyone.
The thing is, you need quite a big amount of data (e.g. images of 3s/bees) to make the ai good.

 

any class that relies on AI to function generally won't work well. mage already suffers from this since meteor targeting loves to just suck. unless the AI is super smart, a class like necromancer/summoner that is thematically based around AI-based units is simply bad.