Ability to progress bot gear or to set bot gear level

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Hyde
Posts: 4

Ability to progress bot gear or to set bot gear level

Post by Hyde »

Hello,
A feature that I would find neat is the ability to set the lvl of bots' gear. Ideally, the experience I would love to be able to have would be this:
-At lvl 60, I am able to define a set of bots that are "static" (and that I can spawn/despawn at will like now) and that start at pre-raid BiS gear, probably with configuration stored on the client-side.
-I can order my bots to loot specfied items when in free-for-all looting mode.
-I can order my bots to equip specified items if they have them in their bags.
These 3 features would effectively allow us to gear our own bots while raiding, giving us a wider sense of progression than just gearing ourselves. It would also allow a feeling of progression in the raid power level, since full BiS raids seem to make early raids look like a "piece of cake". No issue to storing all config on the client-side since the default behavior is BiS gear for bots anyway.

I'm aware that such a feature would necessitate a high amount of work. Therefore, I also want to suggest an intermediate alternative that I think would be rather easy to implement and would also allow for some sense of progression without changing the current philosophy a bit:
-At lvl 60, I am able via an additional command line option to set the level of gear that I want to spawn a bot with. By default the behavior would stay the same as today (BiS in raid, pre-BiS outside), but there would be like 3-5 presets of gear that I could define when spawning a bot. While browsing for such examples I stumbled upon this list for example: https://www.wowisclassic.com/en/best-in ... e=pre-raid , but I'm sure others can be found.

example: .partybot add paladin tank 3 would spawn a palatank with preset gear 3.

I ask for this feature because for example, I'd like to run dungeons just for fun at lvl 60 without crushing every encounter so easily, and even the same for early raids. (BTW I currently have the VIP status and am not yet lvl 60, I saw that the VIP status came with BiS bots at lvl 60 even outside raids, I don't yet know if that's toggable or not, but if possible I would like to be able to "revert" this when I want to run dungeons for the same reason :) ).
User avatar
Hyde
Posts: 4

Re: Ability to progress bot gear or to set bot gear level

Post by Hyde »

And to answer to myself:
-Maybe a simpler alternative to code for the first suggestion would be to store gear-config files (in yaml form or something like that) associated with bot names and that are editable (either via the add-on GUI but that would be hard to implement, or just via a text editor outside of the game) and that can be passed as arguments.
E.g.: I have a command ".partybot create <class> <spec> <name>" that creates an entry stored client-side which would probably be a simple yaml or json file containing:
name
class
spec
gear: {
1hweapon: XXX
etc...
}

Then I would have an alternative like .partybot recruit and would have the choice either to use .partybot add like currently for generically geared bots, and .partybot recruit <name> that would transmit the information stored in the local file to the server to spawn the correct bot (possibly with a random seed added in the name to avoid duplicate names).

Then, anyone could have their own policy as to how they would gear their bot. In my case, my personal policy would be that when an item drops in a raid that I don't use, I would allow myself to change the configuration of one of my bots to include it in their gear preset if it improves it. The flexibility would also allow people to stuff their bots with gear that are not simply lootable (such as benediction, thunderfury etc...).

I think this approach, in addition to not changing the overall philosophy that you have put in place, has multiple advantages:
-doesn't put too much load on the server (since everything is stored client-side), apart from requiring it to use on-the-fly generated gear rather than a preset on your side. I'm guessing most people would still use presets anyway to avoid the hassle.
-isn't a "cheat" over the current because it's litterally a downgrade in all cases compared to BiS
-is extensible if you want to extense it one day (for example for talents or anything else)
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