Animals, combat pathfinding and defence

[Naga]

Right, as we speak I'm afk fighting a boar, I don't need to worry because the boar really can't do much to me. Why am I mentioning this? Well five minutes ago said boar came at me, I clicked on it, he hit me through my defence instantly (due to not being faced at the exact angle he was approaching. Which resulted in what would normally be an easy slaughter thrashing me and shredding my beloved bear cape to critical hit points.

Now I don't mind the idea of defence dropping if you get caught unaware. The system as it is wouldn't be so bad if animals were effected by it as well. You can for instance do damage to them when they are running, but any attempt at attacking them from behind to initiate combat rarely bare any fruit and don't drop their defence metre to zero instantly in the same way it does for a player.

The system either needs to be somewhat more lenient with direction or somehow work out how to make hearthlings path around objects rather than stop in place and cancel all battle actions.

Oh I did try a search for previous threads on this subject but found none though that may be due to my poor search skills <_<

Anyway back to my now 10 hour walk/boat trip to the edge of the world.