Flying Lab has posted anew developer diary which reveals new and improved NPC combat tactics which were made possible with the game's new avatar combat system.

The avatar combat revision gave ConCo a really good opportunity to give a bit of a makeover to what NPCs could do. In the previous version of avatar combat, much of the strategy came from reducing your enemies’ balance to the point where you could damage their health. With that aspect gone, we wanted to figure out a way to keep avatar combat tactically interesting to players. What we ended up doing was grouping NPCs into different “archetypes”, each with their own unique moveset.

In the previous avatar combat system, most NPCs didn’t really do anything interesting. They just attacked you with a basic strike skill over and over. That was something we really wanted to change with the new system; now, NPCs will debuff you, combo you, set up big finishers, support their allies, and do a lot of other cool stuff as well. However, we also didn’t want to go overboard and make each NPC in the game have his own unique set of moves. Not only would that be an insane amount of work for us, but it would be confusing to players as well because you’d never have any clue what an NPC might throw at you. And most likely, by the time you did the NPC would be dead anyway.

So, all NPCs in the game (except for a few very special ones) belong to a specific “archetype” group. Two NPCs who are two different archetypes have different stats, different abilities, and different weapons; they fight completely differently from one another. To add further depth, within each archetype group there are several sub-archetypes. Different sub-archetypes within the same archetype have very similar or identical stats, but their signature ability might be different. They both fulfill the general role that their archetype is designed to fill, but they do it in different ways.

Read more here.