What would you change about the Arathi Basin Comp Stomp Brawl?

Last week, World of Warcraft saw the premiere of its first-ever PVP battleground that pitted players against a team entirely comprised of AI. Sure, it used the same technology that we’ve seen in Island Expeditions since the start of Battle for Azeroth, but it was on an entirely different scale. Not only was it a team of 15, but it also took place in a pre-existing battleground operating under pretty much all the same rules as the PVP variant.

It’s an interesting foray into expanding “smart” enemies — but it wasn’t exactly perfect, either. For starters, the enemies were a bit easy to predict at times. They did appear to learn — or, y’know, get tuned higher — over the course of the week, but they still followed a few actions predictably. Namely, they always targeted the person trying to cap the flag. I know that’s the point, but they did it to the degree that they’d stop everything and immediately run to the person capping the flag. In some instances, this meant you could pull them off of a wounded ally just by hitting the flag once and drawing their attention. In actual PVP? Yeah, you’d toss an interrupt, but you wouldn’t abandon the chance to kill that wounded player. I’d like to see them become a little less predictable, personally.

In a kind-of-related way, I’d like to see them not interrupt spell casting so quickly either. Again, these are technically the right things to do — but the AI would interrupt casts the instant they started casting, without worrying about dropping their current target. In reality, players can do this with a focus macro, but those are limited to one person at a time, and you still need to see the cast occurring. The AI just know when you’re casting.

But you know what the biggest (and probably most controversial) change I’d like to see made is? I don’t want to be able to earn achievements in Comp Stomp. You’re currently able to earn a small selection of achievements — not all of them — but I still think that’s too many. The point of earning the achievement for 5-capping or for a 1500-to-o victory or for a 6-minute win is that you did it against players. It just doesn’t feel right to me being able to earn those against AI. If Blizz wanted to add different tiers of achievements like we have with Heroic/Mythic raids? Sure! Have at it! But I really hate the idea of earning PVP achievements versus things that aren’t players.

How about you, though? What would you change about the Arathi Basin Comp Stomp Brawl? Heck, what would you change about “smart” AI in general?

Oh, I almost forgot… Let us Mind Control and Thunder Shock the NPCs off the edge of Lumber Mill, Blizz!