Editing How to setup bots Basically (section)

== Support Characters Concerns ==
There are a number of things that can massively impact the performance of an AI party member:

'''1. Chain Breaking'''

The most notorious parts of an AI partner, they are prone to using Photon Arts or Charge Shots at seemingly random intervals. AI chain-breaking is extremely bad for a variety of reasons: 

* AIs inherently have a damage reduction of 75%. 
* Chainbreaking is poor if the weapons utilized is poor, which is very common on [[Partner Characters]]. Special shoutout to [[Ursula Laurent|Ursula]] who uses [[Machine Guns]] to break while being a Newman ''Force'', and [[Nagisa]] who uses [[Sabarta]] to break while being a ''Deuman Hunter''.
* AI's timing for chainbreaking is terrible. They do not try to maintain a chain, or attempt to make a long chain. In fact, it's almost like they do not see chains at all. 
** This is terrible for bosses and more difficult enemies, who needs long chains to be defeated quickly.
** The issue is amplified for Rangers, as Charge Shots takes a bit of time to charge, and the chain may expire before the charge shot lands.
Using '''Follow Shift''' from [[Partner Characters|Quick Order]] can prevent the partners from breaking chains altogether, which can be used to prevent this problem. However, AIs also attacks significantly less while in Follow Shift, so it's not the ideal solution. 

'''2. Various Lags'''

The AI has brain freezes at various places:
* When the AIs encounter enemies, it takes them a few seconds to register the enemies exist, and actually run over.
* AIs will stand in place for a second or two when swapping weapons.
*When AIs are using a weapon that can Guard, they will hold Guard for multiple seconds at random intervals.
*If the player was a bit far away from the AI while running, the AI will run up to the player first before doing anything else. This can result in them running right past enemies, or run against a wall, or run against a fence despite having a Ranged weapon and there being an enemy on the other side.
* Even when AIs are using weapons with adequate range (such as a Ranged weapon or [[Slicers]]), sometimes they will still run up to enemies before firing.
* AIs does not fire off Ranged weapons as fast or as often as they could.
* While AIs are generally decent with triple-casting projectile-based TECHNICs, sometimes they have issues with other TECHNICs. This results in behaviours such as spamming [[Zalure]] (to no extra effect), or using [[Sazonde]] once and then standing still until it expires.
Of course, we need the AI to have as little downtime as possible.

'''3. Durability'''

Now, the problem with durability isn't that AI party members can't survive. AI party members, after dying, revive with full HP in around 10 seconds, so whether they are good at surviving isn't very important.

The problem is, when AI dips below a specific threshold of HP (usually 40%), they will stand still, swap to their healing weapon, and keep casting [[Resta]] until their HP goes above a specific threshold (usually around 60%).

Now, that sounds fairly reasonable, except that '''they stand still the moment they decide they want to heal, oftentimes''' '''right in front of the enemies.''' This usually results in the AI party members being locked into a loop of Resta -> getting hit -> Resta -> getting hit, until they eventually die, if the enemy's damage outpaces their healing. This happens especially often during boss fights, and especially one with massive hitboxes or one in a small room.

Even if the AI does not get damage looped by enemies, AI can need several casts to top themselves off, due to their inflated HP. Recall that it takes them several seconds of lag for weapon swaps, and several seconds per cast, resulting in them spending 20 to 30 seconds casting resta.

AIs also has the issue of not trying to cast Resta at all if there's no enemies present, even if they or you or both are in critical HP. And then they will scramble to heal themselves when they actually encounter enemies. I guess you really needed to see all those lags for yourself.

AIs are also prone to immediately swapping to [[Anti]] in order to remove any [[Status Effects]] inflicted to them or the player. This includes aliments that are completely inconsequential to them, such as Burn, Poison, and on occasion, Zalure and Jellen. Once again, this will cost several seconds for them to swap into the weapon, cast, swap back to their original weapon. Inefficiency go brrrrrr!

'''4. Targeting'''

Generally, an AI party member would focus on a single enemy at a time, and they won't attempt to line up enemies for either piercing or multi-targets. This makes their multi-lock weapons much less effective, especially ones that are sub-par against single targets, such as [[Whips]] or [[Grenade Launchers]]. The same issue applies to [[Photon Arts]] and Charge Shots as well.

'''5. Lack of ability to chain'''

To put simply, there aren't a whole lot of weapons in the game that can accumulate chains very quickly. Especially for AIs, to whom applying both [[Deband]] and [[Shifta]] at the same time is a foreign concept. We need to set one up especially for it to chain well, instead of having it flail around ineffectively.