Guild Wars 2

Whether it’s NPCs in renown missions, dynamic events, or the personal story, they’re… quite weak and useless. They’re frequently one-shotted, and what I tend to see all the time is dead NPCs everywhere. You revive them, they get one-shotted, then you revive them again. Their only use at the moment seems to be a corpse-related flavour.

I don’t genuinely think that that’s supposed to be their function, though. However, they’re just not powerful enough to cope with the content they’re in, regardless of the content. In the Diessa Plateau, for example, the Blood Legion fire/swing too slowly, and do too little damage, and have very little health. This means that they may get one attack off before being one-shotted.

I think this really impacts negatively upon the polish of the game. Ironically, it doesn’t show a living world, as ArenaNet might desire, but a dead one. There are just… NPC corpses everywhere. And having the NPCs live a little longer really wouldn’t be so bad. Again, in the Diessa Plateau, I’ll rez someone, they’ll do a three second ‘patrol,’ and then get one-shotted.

This can’t be the ‘living world’ that you envisioned, ArenaNet. And like I said, NPCs seem peculiarly weak across the board, even in the personal storyline. I’m leaning towards saying that this is a bug, and someone tweaked a core template for how NPC powers work, and didn’t take everything into account, and has now made NPCs far too slow and weak across the board. I can’t prove that, but that’s what it feels like.

So here’s a suggestion: Even if you didn’t want them attacking much, you could increase their health a thousandfold without making them overpowered. Their attacks can then still be weak, but they’ll add to the ‘living world’ flavour that Guild Wars 2 is supposed to have.

If they simply weren’t as easy to knock over in one hit, they’d function much better.