Curse

Darth Marth · Dec 29, 2006, 05:57 PM // 17:57

I doubt I'm the only one who frequently finds missions, quests, or areas that force you to guard NPCs whose lives the mission/quest/area depends on extremely annoying. The concept of protecting NPCs is fine, but ANet's way of doing it is filled with logical gaps that can make these parts of the game frustrating, unnecessarily difficult, and counterintuitive. Examples:

-If your whole party's success depends on the survival of an NPC, that NPC should NOT be risking his/her life by running into battle. A button below the minimap to control NPCs traveling with you as you can already control henchmen/heroes would solve this problem handily. If you think the NPC can help and survive in battle, so be it; let him/her fight; if not, the NPC can stay well behind you in relative safety. Having no control over critical NPCs as it is is ridiculous.

-Not letting resurrection spells affect non-party members seems like an extremely contrived way to increase the difficulty of depending NPCs. ANet has never given any logical reason that you shouldn't be able to do this. Why can you revive party members easily in seconds, yet get an artificial failure message when trying to do the same to NPCs whose only difference is not being "official" party members? I'm aware that defending NPCs would become almost absurdly easy if you could resurrect them, but there has to be a better way to make these tasks challenging and fun. For example, your party could be penalized somehow for each time the NPC dies, like by all getting 15% death penalty as if they'd died, having skills briefly disabled, losing energy, etc. This way, players would be motivated to defend NPCs, but doing so would not be a contrived matter of survival.

I think that "defend the NPC" quests/missions/areas need some serious work. The logical gaps mentioned above make them unnecessarily difficult when some changes could make them much more fun and less competitive. Does anyone else agree?

(Sorry if this isn't the first topic addressing this issue; I couldn't search for more and it didn't appear in the stickied list)

Curse You · Dec 29, 2006, 06:15 PM // 18:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darth Marth

-Not letting resurrection spells affect non-party members seems like an extremely contrived way to increase the difficulty of depending NPCs. ANet has never given any logical reason that you shouldn't be able to do this. Why can you revive party members easily in seconds, yet get an artificial failure message when trying to do the same to NPCs whose only difference is not being "official" party members? I'm aware that defending NPCs would become almost absurdly easy if you could resurrect them, but there has to be a better way to make these tasks challenging and fun. For example, your party could be penalized somehow for each time the NPC dies, like by all getting 15% death penalty as if they'd died, having skills briefly disabled, losing energy, etc. This way, players would be motivated to defend NPCs, but doing so would not be a contrived matter of survival.

Read the description of a ressurection skill. They all say "target party member" (the exceptions being Flesh of My Flesh and SUnspear Rebirth Signet, which have incorrect descriptions).

It has always been that you cannot ressurect allies. This mans that instead you just need to have human players watching their health the whole time. Some missions/quests are designed to be extremely hard for people using heroes & henchmen.

Darth Marth · Dec 29, 2006, 08:03 PM // 20:03

I'm aware that the skills only work on party members. I'm questioning why this is so. I don't believe any other Monk skills have this restriction. If you can heal and protect allies, why not resurrect them as well?

Tide to Go · Dec 29, 2006, 09:06 PM // 21:06

one word will fix this problem its not a spell not a weapon, but to save those NPCs its called team work.

Frazzy · Dec 29, 2006, 10:00 PM // 22:00

this game is not hard so i stopped reading after the first or second line. so aute /notsigned

Darth Marth · Dec 29, 2006, 11:02 PM // 23:02

I never said defending NPCs was too difficult; I said it was artificially difficult; ANet has used contrived and somewhat ridiculous means to make them challenging, means that don't make logical sense. What if computer and human characters had these same restrictions; they couldn't revive or (with humans) command each other? I might not expect them to change how resurrection skills work, but there is no reason not to be able to command critical NPCs when you can command heroes and henchmen. This control would be extremely easy to implement and add much-needed realism to these quests.

Perynne · Dec 30, 2006, 08:04 AM // 08:04

I agree that it would be nice to be able to at least partially command the NPC's. This would be useful in any situations where the NPC gets stuck or starts running off in the completely wrong direction.

As for resurrecting them, there I disagree. It would make most NPC quests ridiculously easy as you really wouldn't need to watch the NPC at all. Even with some kind of penalties (unless these penalties affected your skills, or caused some kind of major degeneration) you could just get him killed, go by yourself and clear the area and then come back to rez him. It's a challenge to keep the dumb NPC's alive and having rez would just make the quests easier.

Bankai · Dec 30, 2006, 08:21 AM // 08:21

Yeah.

Also, it's for lore issues. I believe only the chosen ones, like you and I, can get ressed hundreds of times. It'd be kind of odd for people to actually die if everybody could get resurrected all the time.

Not A Fifty Five · Dec 30, 2006, 08:23 AM // 08:23

hehe, flag Npcs

lets amry games!