[lonnarin]

Agreed on all parts there. Another aspect of luring that can be developed on is how much it's reliant on line-of-sight and listening checks of the monsters. It should be logically easier to sneak around a monster's back than its front, but NWN hardcoding makes the difference hard to tell, and adept rogues walk right up to them unseen without using cover. What might also help realism in luring would be a "proximity alarm" for monsters who alert their allies nearby whenever they hear something or get hit. Gothic 3 handled this pretty well; when you sneak up on a band of orcs, they chase you as a group and most of them break pursuit as a group, returning to their old posts. So when you try to draw off one orc, 3 or 5 show up... and you run like the dickens. After half a mile or so, most of them break off their pursuit, though the ones you stuck a few arrows in followed a little further and you could murder them off in the woods. You have to use cover and line of sight to your advantge to pick things off, kill or steal when nobody's looking, etc. To some extent this improves the thieving and mugging system, where you can lure people into allyways and beat them down while the guard sits out on the street twiddling his thumbs.

But the main thing I'd like to see is realistic AI for all things, and I agree that the carnivorous deer and anger management badger need a revamp. Hopefully we'll not only get a new version of the mass-animal empathy skill, but also smarter animals that react a little better. To those with no animal empathy, a deer would sprint away on sight or the first twig snap, though a ranger or druid could plausibly walk up and pet it, handfeeding it berries and such. Maybe if there was a walk-only toggle to animal empathy? It makes sense that you have to move calmly in order to calm animals, even druids wouldn't sprint up to a bear. We also need to divide the animals into factions a bit better, so that you don't see wargs standing next to deer or cute fluffy bunnies without eating them. We shouldn't see however, gate guards breaking their posts to chase bunnies on a murderous rampage, though one would surely get involved if a warg or bear was near the gates.

Another idea I had for animal empathy was for some form of "Nature's Ally XP" wherein druids could go out to the woods and instead of hunting, they tamed and fed animals and planted trees and such. Then they could serve a more peaceful and nurturing role to some extent, and one would have to use the right food for a success, lettuce and carrots for bunnies, muttons and corpses for the predators, etc.

In all, the animals should mostly be at odds with enemy factions, unless the particular spawn has good reason to have mixed numbers. Dwarven mercenaries shouldn't have an immediate truce with every skunk they see, and clever druids could steer a stampede of rhinos through an enemy camp. I'm a big fan of enemy factions that fight eachother.