Some missions are designed to rely on having NPC backup. In these missions the encounters are balanced around you having one, two, sometimes ten or more NPC buddies running around with you to draw agro and chip in on damage. Without these NPCs around, the encounters are practically impossible for most builds. This is great, _when it works. _
The problem is that sometimes things go wrong and this stops working. Most often, the NPCs die or get lost to you somehow, and suddenly you have to face down a Champion boss or swarm of enemies with no back-up. There needs to be better redundancy on these sorts of things. I think most importantly, if you die and revive at a checkpoint, all your NPC buddies should revive with you, or at least have their corpses transported to the checkpoint so you can revive them. Also, any time a cutscene plays, your NPC buddies should be teleported to predetermined “safe zones” within the room, to ensure that they’re never locked out of an area.
My specific case here involves some minor non-story spoilers to the high level mission “Ossuary of Unquiet Dead,” so I’m spoiler tagging it:
Basically, the mission involved you being followed by about a dozen NPC buddies through a series of events. This lead into the “ossuary”, a vertical element with a spiral ramp, then some encounters at the bottom. Now, when you do this mission right (as I did. . . the second time through), you spiral down the stairs, fighting the enemies as they come and into the basement, which was faceroll easy. No threat at all. If you do it wrong, on the other hand, such as not paying attention and falling through a hole in the floor and dying in the basement, things do not go well.
Ok, my fault, I died, I respawned, I’ll pay the repair bill, but that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that when I fell to my death, the rest of the team went in after me. By the time I got back, they were all dead or inevitably dying on the bottom tier, with two giant veteran monsters and a dozen or so regular tier ones. I could not even pick at the edges and work my way carefully in, as I would in an open world encounter, because the enemies respawned far too fast, and were too closely packed for that sort of thing.
At this point I had no choice but to restart the mission, redoing about fifteen minutes or more of content prior to this point, which was hardly the worst punishment a game’s ever given, but was still frustrating. The second time through I avoided falling to my death and the rest of the mission was almost effortless.
I’d like to add that combat should stop or all npc’s become invulnerable to any damage source during a cut scene. Nothing like entering a cut scene with your own npc army, only for the cut scene to end and you’re the only one on your side still standing.
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