Wanted to bring this up becuase it's been irritating me for the longest time. As far as I've known for the last bunch of months, the AI for hostile NPCs have been programmed to target party members based on stats. If I'm not mistaken, they aim for the lowest level (Or at least lowest members AC-wise) before targeting the tougher formidable opponents. I think this needs to change, becuase it's more or less exploitive and bothersome over productive towards stopping players from bunnying their lowbie friends through dungeons.
The thing is: No one really ever bases their parties on how high/low level someone is, since our server (thankfully) doesn't limit players to "You must be within x levels of range to party together". Now, while some people will say "You shouldn't take someone who's level 5-6 in the were-wolf den or the alhoon lair", I can honestly say that there are advantages that some people have over others, stat-wise, regardless of levels. Also, there are classes, such as rogues, that become useless most of the time when they travel with higher levels, since they can't even do sneak attacks without pulling aggro from the NPCs, and then you have the 'tank' characters that are constantly bitching becuase they're like "Dude, I'm tanking, stop pulling aggro" and the poor rogues are going "I'm not, the AI's meta-gaming me."
Can we please have the AI's respond to actual 'threats' rather than "I'm going to meta-game and go for the lower levels first" ? The thing is, I like (and many others do as well) taking lowbies in dungeons, especially if IC takes them there, but in a lot of situations, the lowbies get buggered becuase if they keep drawing aggro, we have to cast invisbility on them and force them to not participate in the dungeon crawl, and then they get bored and force themselves to leech exp instead of participate. I'm pretty sure the Devs designed this AI to prevent exp-leechers, but this doesn't stop the problem, it only encourages leeching, becuase since the lower levels can't participate, you have to feed them invisbility spells and keep them out of the battle.