Guild Wars 2

Xia.3485:

The living story instances were like this, you can easily solo them. So is the personal story. So…

Yeah…..right up until the last step where you’re required to do the Story Mode of the Arah dungeon. 99% solo…..1% forced to group.

Oh….you actually want to finish your PERSONAL story…..too bad.

I agree with the addition of NPC allies for instanced content. ONLY in instanced content though.

My idea for this would be:

• Enter an instance
• Is your party comprised of less than 5 people?
  • Yes:
    • A dialog box pops up and you can select NPC Allies to fill in your party
  • No:
    • No dialog box pops up

Currently, when you enter a dungeon, a dialog message pops up if you have less than 5 people in your party. I doubt it would be easy, but this would be the perfect time to ask you if you’d like to fill in your party with NPC’s. If you select “No”, you should still be able to get to that dialog somehow though.

I don’t think the NPC Allies should be like Heros in GW1 though. They should be like Henchmen were. A list of available NPC’s with set skill bars. They’re not meant to replace other players, but to aid you on your quest. Heros were awesome in GW1….too awesome actually. I found them to be MUCH better than an average player. I rarely did any content with other people because it was more trouble than it was worth. I also found that there were some builds that a Hero could run better than ANY human player.

TL;DR
I feel that the addition of Henchmen for instanced content would be incredibly good for the game as a whole. Players could get comfortable with the encounters on their own before trying them with a real group and being berated for “not doing it right” and it would allow those players that just want to complete the content once and move on the opportunity to do so.

Personally I’d say no, thank you.

By the time I got into GW1 heroes were already stablished in the game, and PvE was practically an online solo game. People will always go to the path of least resistance, adding heroes to the game will end up with the dead of PuG dungeons IMHO, as soon as people start min-maxing the best hero setup for each one.

One alternative I could see, though, is to add a solo mode for each dungeon. When doing a dungeon in solo mode, add 4 appropiate NPCs following you (for example, in CoE you’d have 4 priory members, in HotW 4 kodan and so on), change champions to elite, elites to veterans, veterans to lower level veterans and the like, and adjust the mchanics to a single player.

Using CoF P1, for example, as it’s one of the most commonly run dungeons in the game, make it so you only need to kill 1 acolyte on each phase of releasing the charr engineer, so you have to carry only one flame in the puzzle, one brazier to open the gate and have an NPC ask you whether you want to unlock the brazier to go into the gate and so on.

Solo story should unlock only solo explorable, so that group story mode are still ran, and daily account based rewards would be reduced (for example, if group explorable gives you 60 tokens and 1 gold, solo should give you 25 silver and 15 tokens), and also make it so that if you run solo mode, the rewards are substracted from the group mode ones (for example running solo dungeon gives you 15 tokens, running group later should reward you 45 tokens instead of the full 60). This is to prevent the inevitable whining if the rewards are additive (you mean I’m now FORCED to run each dungeon twice every day?!?!?!?!?!)

yup the programming for these heroes would be a monumental task. Yah sure you can have heroes…. just give them 3 years to get the AI right for them.

Yeah I see no need at all for heroes in the open world. But I’d love to have them for dungeons/fractals so that I could actually run them without having to worry about going AFK for 10-15 minutes.

Admission: I did not read the entire thread so this suggestion may already be present.

Suggestion: Roll a Ranger.

I and my roomie liked heroes in GW1, specifically as an alternative to ’that’s what LFG is for’. Pugs are often toxic, and with the current ‘zerk or gtfo’ meta (even though I usually run zerk in dungeons, I don’t like how people who don’t are treated) attitude that a lot of folks have, it is more pleasant to dungeon with people you know.

This isn’t as much of a problem in WvW and open-world, where folks are usually a lot more friendly. But as soon as you get strangers into a dungeon, there’s always those folks who want to crap on the group. Heroes avoids this completely.

I and my roomie played healers in GW1, and soon got tired of people doing stupid stuff and expecting healers to save them; ‘I was watching TV, you should have been doing your job!’ was part of a rant thrown at me once, when dudebro just stood there while being mowed down by mobs. So we just started running stuff with heroes and henches. Dungeon players are the same no matter what game one goes to.

People say heroes ruined GW1, but they didn’t. Bad attitudes from other players did, and unlike WoW, ANet responded by allowing people who wanted to instance in peace to do so.

maddoctor.2738:

You are forgeting the GW1 example… once people learn how to use these “heroes” better (provided they are as good as GW1 heroes) there won’t be any need for human players anymore. Everyone will be running the dungeons on his own with his favorite npc allies, how is that any good?

How is it bad? It’s just options.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

yup the programming for these heroes would be a monumental task. Yah sure you can have heroes…. just give them 3 years to get the AI right for them.

As if they haven’t done it before?

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Nat.4029:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Xia.3485:

To the extreme of wanting NPC allies instead of talking to others in game? That’s kind of sad really.

It’s not necessarily that they don’t desire to talk to others. Some of us just prefer playing with NPCs. They don’t kitten at you, they don’t treat you like trash, they don’t randomly go afk, they don’t argue about how things should or shouldn’t be done, etc etc.

Some people just like to play solo. Doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t social though. Although I’m sure there are plenty of people that are shy or have a hard time reaching out to other socially (ie socially awkward). That’s no reason to judge them so harshly.

I consider myself very social, but I have a 2 month old son. If I get time to play, I may still have to get up at any point if he needs some attention. I’d love to be able to run dungeons, but right now I just can’t even commit 1 hour of constant game time. Having NPC allies would be nice for someone like me, as I could stop at any point and be afk, and my team wouldn’t give a flying kitten whether I was afk for 5 minutes or 30 minutes. THAT would be very nice. But like I said earlier… Anet more than likely would never commit development time to something like this. I would love to see it though.

That is an excellent example.

I know I personally would love to have heroes for instanced content like dungeons or fractals so I could get familiar with the paths before attempting to pug it. Especially considering I haven’t been doing them since the very beginning and most people seem to have no patience with those unfamiliar with the routes.

Anet may eventually devote the time to it. With all the existing models, all it would really take is some coding to follow a leader. Shouldn’t really be much different than coding new monsters.

Dungeon Mentors are here to help people new to dungeons and fractals. NPCs won’t teach you all that need to know as well as they cannot do coordination tasks like the wisp puzzles in Swamp fractals, or many more.

Eh, I agree with what someone said about Heroes kind of undermining what Guild Wars was about.

I don’t think they would work in GW2, especially with the map caps being what they are. I would guess there would be some technical hiccups there.

Aside from that, do you really want the GW2 NPC AI being your team? Think Hodgins, Magg, Spire, etc… I think it would cause more grief than help.

I would bet steeply against them being able to run the Wisps in Swamp

I’d just like to have my characters feel like a team. Even if they only Auto-attacked, I would deeply LOVE to have the ability to take 4 of my alts with me as a group.

No kidding, I love guild stuff but I would buy £100 worth of gems JUST for this functionality.

Iris Ng.9845:

Dungeon Mentors are here to help people new to dungeons and fractals. NPCs won’t teach you all that need to know as well as they cannot do coordination tasks like the wisp puzzles in Swamp fractals, or many more.

I don’t expect an NPC to lead my around by my nose. I expect to be able to explore. To die. To learn. Without someone treating like I am less than the dirt under their shoe. Sadly, there are people that claim to be ‘mentors’ and are willing to patiently teach those that don’t know, but turn into condescending pricks at the first opportunity. No thanks, I’ve never had to take that from a hero or hench when I screw up.

As someone that did play GW1 for years with heroes, I’m on the side of those that don’t feel they ruined the game. They enabled me to get my survivor title. Allowed me to do missions with my husband that were beyond dead. Enabled us to learn FoW and even UW without being talked down to. Allowed us to complete missions like Eternal Grove Vizunah Square, and Unwaking Waters with the masters reward because every pug we tried failed, repeatedly. So yeah, pro hero here.

Raine.1394:

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

yup the programming for these heroes would be a monumental task. Yah sure you can have heroes…. just give them 3 years to get the AI right for them.

As if they haven’t done it before?

No they haven’t. Here is why.

GW1 heroes have the same AI as PvE mobs in GW1…. GW2 heroes cannot have the same AI as GW2 mobs because the mobs do not have player skills.

Furthermore. The combat in GW2 is way different from GW1. Good luck taking an autonomous GW2 hero into a dungeon or fractal. That hero will die many times, unless the hero can learn to stack, pull, retreat, and dodge at the right times. On top of that they have to use the correct skills at the right time.

The addition of heroes would also make an addition of more UI so you can have better control of them for combat reasons. This means even more micro and the player base already can’t handle micromanagement of their skills as evidence of marionette , teq, wurm fails.

I have never bought the idea that heroes “ruined” GW1.

Grouping with players was never removed. Seems that it just became the less popular option.

Heroes never “forced” players to use them.

If GW1 was somehow “ruined” it was players who did it. When not forced to group with players, many, and perhaps the majority, chose not to. It was player choice that destroyed " pug grouping" in GW1.

I’ll never accept that “pugging” is the preferred option when it has to be forced by game mechanics.

Yeah, heroes are amazing in GW1. Also, I remember during one of the Flame & Frost updates a year ago, we got to two-man a couple of instances with Rox or Braham, and I had a blast. Braham was pretty useless but I remember Rox’s attacks were pretty good. I think this could be pulled off if the devs really wanted to.

Also Rox and Braham kind of helped you a little bit in the Scarlet’s Playhouse instance too IIRC.