Guild Wars 2

Greetings and salutations.

A brief glance over the Mesmer board will reveal just a wee bit of discontent. And rightly so. Promises for bug fixes have resulted in more bugs than ever. Attempts to buff playstyles have resulted in those playstyles falling flat in comparison to other professions. The Mesmer’s sphere of viability is diminishing day by day, and nothing gets done to fix it. In light of that discontent, however, I would like to offer the following hypothesis.

The Mesmer is a great concept with terrible formatting.

Emphasis on formatting. The Mesmer is full of great ideas; building resources to shatter them in multiple effects, crafting living hexes to plague the enemy, hiding among duplicates and punishing the enemy for striking them, and controlling the battlefield through numerous powers. An elegant enchanter indeed.

But the formatting is absolutely abysmal. If you want to be a Shatter Mesmer, you don’t get to choose whether you go condition or direct damage, and you’re forced to use bigger, expensive illusions with cooldowns designed around their long term use, despite the fact that you just want to turn them into nukes. If you’re a Phantasm Mesmer, you’re forced to bring four nigh-useless abilities on your bar just in case you want to blow up your main damage source. If you’re a Deceiver Mesmer, you don’t have illusions that actually fake out anyone and you have to rely on traits to get them to actually punish people. And to top it all off, we get the massive clustercluck that is out hen-pecked trait trees, with abilities slapped onto every available surface without rhyme or reason. Someone out there decided that torches and confusion-on-glamours should go in the Power line, that there should be six grandmasters that benefit interrupts but none for phantasms, and that the class mechanic line with a direct damage skill as its main attack should spec up the condition line to get any benefits. That someone made a royal mess of things, and it’s only keeping us down.

We need control.

Mesmers must gain the ability to choose which illusions they want on a case by case basis, to adjust their class mechanic as they see fit according to the builds they want. No more skills forced down our throats. No more cumbersome dance between weapons, utilities, and class mechanic skills just to accomplish something as basic as dealing damage. We need the ability to decide between shatters and phantasms, direct damage and condition builds, support and control, and have a class mechanic that caters to our choices.

It’s not even unprecedented. Several classes already have their mechanics customized directly or indirectly according to their builds, and mesmers deserve equal treatment. Our class mechanic is complicated, our builds intricate, and that depth requires the freedom to decide exactly which skills conform to our playstyle. Why should we get anything less than the love and care Arenanet devised giving the elementalist their 60 weapon skills, or crafting each engineer ability specifically to perform a different task?

It would require a lot of hard work, a royal ton of rebalancing, a whole new selection of potential bugs and pitfalls. But to make the Mesmer magnificent once more, we must have control. We must have the freedom to control our own class mechanic. That is how we escape a fate of mediocrity and marginalized scraps and become the magical masterminds of this world once again! Control. Nothing less.

Consider the example below.

Please note, it is far, far from perfect. But I hope it serves as a demonstration of what the Mesmer mechanic could be, and how it could easily make everyone happy while streamlining the way illusions are generated without compromising the intricacy and elegance of the profession. Feel free to point out any problems or possible improvements, but treat it as a thought experiment more than a final design draft.

But it represents what we could have. We could have a class mechanic that conforms to our desires, rather than shackles that demand we carry skills we don’t want and work ten times harder than any other profession for inferior results. We could have an illusion kitten nal that allows us to be unpredictable and deceptive, to cater to many different builds and equipment loadouts, to emphasize the classic notions of hexes, punishment, shattering, deceiving, or manipulating the battlefield to our whims. A mechanic worthy of the magnificent maestro of magic that is the Mesmer.

We could have absolute and total control of our illusions, and through it, our destiny.

Continued…

Learn To Tell Time
The current boss design has caused a lot of controversy over guesting, because people have been getting kicked out of their own server trying to participate in events. Some of suggested curtailing or limiting guesting in response, but I disagree. The fault lies somewhere else.

Servers need to synchronize. Implement an exact clock that indicates server time, and make elements conform to its timekeeping. Day and Night shouldn’t radically shift when changing districts or moving from overflow, and for that matter, neither should bosses. Being kicked to overflow will not be an irritation if everyone is fighting a boss at the same time, allowing everyone in every world an equal chance to get in on the action.

Crush Your Players, But Remember That They Are Mercenaries
Respect is earned. If you want your players to participate in an activity, you increase the reward. But if you want your players to enjoy the activity, you have to make them earn their victory. Players do not respect a piñata, no matter how beautiful it might be or how sweet the candy might taste. To make your boss battles epic, you must give them teeth.

At the same time, you have to make sure people have a reason to show up. Let’s face it. We are gold-grubbing, money-hoarding, cash-farming loot fiends. We’re adventurers, and greed comes the job description. If the activity isn’t worth our while, no one is going to care.

To account for these opposing ideals, I propose the following compromise…
-Boss Battles have an ambient effect, A Time For Heroes. While this ambient effect is active, defeat does not break armor and travel to the nearest waypoint is free.
-All boss battles are extremely lethal, and each one can be failed.
-The bonus chest reward is increased to three objects, and can also include rare materials such as lodestones.
-The bonus chest is account bound and resets weekly.

What are the benefits of these effects?

-They form a covenant between developer and players regarding difficulty. Bosses stop flailing like infants and begin slaughtering the unwary, unwise, and unfortunate, yet those deaths do not arbitrarily set players back or break their wallets. Death is the penalty, and there is no need for further punishment, but players must bring their A game if they expect to slay a boss. Each player knows they will probably die a horrible death of screaming agony, but they can throw caution to the wind and give it everything they’ve got.

-By making the reward even greater yet reset weekly, it is okay to fail. Right now, players are constantly trying to grab every daily objective on a shifting time table, and that leads to frustration when things go wrong. If the chest is daily and the boss is hard as hell, there is going to be rage. By easing up on the timetable, however, it is okay for players to not participate sometimes, or to walk away from failure and decide to do better tomorrow.q

When your players worry less about timetables and logistics, they can spend more time living in the moment. When they face difficult but rewarding content, they rise to the occasion. When they seek out and slay the mightiest of foes and bask in the well deserved rewards of the hunt, they will sing their praises of this glorious world.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to provide constructive criticism, or to describe some of your own favorite boss fights of the past and the ways and inner workings that made them wonderful.

While we are brainstorming (which is code for “please don’t bury this in the Suggestions forum”), we can also ponder future bosses and their twists on the mechanics. It’s rather important to ensure that new boss monsters present something mechanically new and different from the current selection.

To that end, I would suggest six additional types of bosses, expressed by the Corrupted Redwood Shepherd, the Kraken, the Auroch, an Ooze Oligarch, the Echo of Ascalon, and the dreaded Karkamari Dominancy. For insane rantings of a crazy man and/or details, please see the attached file.
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You may notice that the boss list described above is far from perfect, leaving out plenty of good possibilities for monstrous mayhem. There is a reason, however, and that is based upon boss variants. Creatures with similar body structures can use the skeletons and animations of the above bosses with alternate forms and new strategies or environments. Some variants will be extremely similar to the original, while others will appear wildly different yet still save the developers time and energy.

A Jungle Wurm becomes a Plains Wurm or Frost Wurm with a simple reskin. A Kraken’s tentacles can be replaced with carniverous plants to form the Mandragora, the earth elemental fortress can be reforged with guns and metal to create a Dredge Doom Device, or a pearly white statue can be redone as a Shadowed Colossus. Some variants are more exotic; the animations of a boss might be changed, but the underlying style might remain identical, making a new boss easier to design. By using this simple method, every zone can have its own world boss with less effort than designing them all from scratch.
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With the example section of the ramble done, let’s talk about a few general lessons when it comes to boss design and player psychology.

Building a great boss requires knowing your audience and what they enjoy. Unfortunately, MMO players are like a herd of cats, each with contradictory opinions on what direction they should be going. Despite this problem, there are a few general improvements that everyone can enjoy, which we can discuss forthwith…

Elaborate the Introduction
Several bosses have pre events, but these are generally quick affairs that end in a few minutes. Players rarely have any real warning about a world boss threat, relying on external applications and timers to track where to be and what to kill. The challenge should lie in the boss’s power, not remembering the appointment on your schedule.

To counteract this problem, pad the beginning of each fight. Add environmental effects (storms, blizzards, blights, etc) combined with unique events that occur during each boss’s window. More importantly, let participation in these events count towards overall participation against that boss for the reward chest (although the server still needs to win against the beastie before it is provided, of course). This will ensure that even in the worst circumstances (getting mauled in the beginning of the fight and unable to get in any whacks, disconnected, etc), a player putting in effort will still be counted as participating.

Everyone Believes They Are The Hero
Certain boss fights attempt to provide multiple things to do within the battle, creating a larger conflict. The problem, however, is that these optional jobs tend to be…..dull. You cannot expect people to be interested in protecting NPCs halfway across the battlefield when they could be attacking a giant dragon. One job is heroic and unique, the other is peon duty.

Multiple tasks are okay, so long as each is equally epic. Several distinct objectives might be necessary to survive an initial onslaught of a flying dragon, but the eventual rumble with the creature itself should feel heroic for everyone. Also, remember a crucial point: the NPCs should never be more important than the player. Escort quests are reviled for a reason, and watching someone else slay a boss is never as fun as sinking your blade into the heart of the beast.

Look Up More
This game is beautiful and magnificent, but the combat system relies too much on staring at the floor. To raise your player’s enjoyment, lift their vision upwards. Make sure that cues and telegraphs pull your player’s vision to the boss itself, relying far less on red circles on the ground. Supplement your animations with audio cues which trigger if a player is in range, close to, or away from a given attack (this is already in the game; the trebuchets in pvp trigger a warning shout if you’re about to be pulverized). Try to make these cues seamless and immersive (an incoming breath attack is marked by a loud inhaling sound, rather than someone yelling it is about to breath twelve times a fight). Make players embrace the sights and sounds of your bosses in order to fight more effectively, and they’ll soak up the beauty of the battlefield in the process.

But the undead aren’t the only ones laying siege. Players need to have fun as well. Developing that content shouldn’t be particularly difficult compared to creating a siege. When the undead control a structure, they should set up a reasonable defense.

-A boss monster and company should patrol a capture ring, much like lords in WvW.
-Towers should have bone walls constructed around the perimeter to block passage.
-These bone walls should have ranged defenders overhead and melee defenders milling about.
-An attack event will trigger a few defender waves with an obscenely high aggro radius.
-Certain special NPCs can be developed to hunt down player siege equipment.

Otherwise, taking an undead fort is much like the current claiming objectives, albeit with more structure. Special bosses like the various priests apply as normal, and certain structures can have objectives (like the Lyssan altar only being accessible when all three seals are claimed).

Speaking of siege weapons, players should gain access to certain pact weaponry via karma. Likewise, the events scattered around the map that are currently just for show could provide bonuses to siege. Help repair the crashed chopper, and the next siege will have aerial bombardment. Assist with gathering a special relic, and it can provide a shield against the next undead siege. These events shouldn’t be scrapped, but they can be easily reconfigured to assist the server’s overall mission.

This will make players the leaders of the war effort, not the followers. No more sitting around passively waiting for an event to start up and let us slay a boss. We take to the field, we determine the time and the place, and we lead the charge to slay every risen abomination on the continent. The NPCs are OUR backup this time, not the other way around. Let nothing stand between us, the enemy, and their shiny objects.

Speaking of shinies (yeah, that was a crude segueway, sue me)….

The loot situation in Orr is toxic. Players currently compete for drops in a way that isn’t remotely healthy for the community. The mantra of PvE in this game is that players should always be a benefit, people you are happy to see. If the loot system is destroying that, the loot system must be changed. To counter this problem, I propose a rather radical solution.

Eliminate loot drops in Orr.

This may sound a tad extreme, but let me allay any negative reactions to the above comment. Loot drops from standard mobs can be completely eliminated in Orr, as long as there is another route: Karma. If Karma in Orr falls like rain, players have a special incentive to play there that is based around overall participation. By providing heavy karma bonuses for Orrian war events along with a proper set of pact vendors, Orr can mimic a fully functional drop system while circumventing the need to tag mobs.

Meanwhile, provide karma with purpose, and lots of it. Give pact vendors a nice selection of karma supplies, including 1) Tier 1-6 loot bags, 2) Supply Crates organized by general equipment type (Artificer, Huntsman, Leather, etc) that contain five random items of that category, 3) Bulk commodities for cooking supplies, especially lower level elements that go into high level recipes, and 4) Salvage stocks, which unpack into several trash items for breakdown. This will cover pretty much everything under the sun, as long as the odds of getting rare equipment from the Crates use the standard loot probabilities. One more thing will seal the deal.

Make claiming temples provide a server-wide karma discount to Orrian vendors. The better your server does at stemming the undead tide, the cheaper it is to buy supplies, get special armor, and deck out your character with all manner of karmarific loot. And since everything is communal, the spirit of camaraderie will always be present.

To allow lone players to have their fun, scatter more daily chests throughout the nooks, crannies, crevices, and crypts of the Orrian countryside. As long as there are a few out-of-the-way areas with a veteran boss and chest, players can still have fun. Likewise, position the majority of the gathering nodes in these areas, thus ensuring that people work a bit for their effort.

TL:DR?

Turn Orr into a WvW warzone, players versus the undead horde. Make us fight for defined objectives in a proactive manner, allowing players to lead the fight rather than wait around for events to spawn. Use destructible terrain and spontaneous capture/control events to make Orr an all out Server Versus Dragonspawn war. Get rid of distractions such as mob tagging and let players focus on achieving victory together, and Orr will be a continent upon which legends are forged.

But what is a warzone without a proper army? The enemies in Orr are simply not suited to the level of play it needs. Your average rotting corpse may not be the brightest bulb in the bunch, but the overall onslaught needs to be far more crafty and nefarious. The AI for this zone would have to work differently than standard timed events. Instead of kicking things off based on the clock, the undead would periodically launch assaults on the nearest Pact strongholds. Some randomization should likely be included, so if there are three targets available the risen will decide on one or two rather than have a guaranteed progression. With a simple AI in place, the game can commence attacking the living.

So, let’s talk about how to make an undead siege. A good battle against the risen should be a wide affair, with a large number of players scrambling to stave off the horde. It should divide the playerbase between several objectives; clearing the walls, slaying infiltrators, launching assaults against siege equipment, and maintaining the fortifications. To do that, we define four general formations of monsters.

The Frontline attacks the objective directly. The Perimeter plants itself outside the objective and establishes a zone of control. The Siege sets up within the zone established by the Perimeter and starts laying down artillery fire on the objective. And finally, the Sappers are composed of units that can circumvent standard barriers and attack the fort from the inside.

Each siege should randomly decide on a number of forces (scaling upward and outward based on player response) and each type of unit from the above pools. As the event scales upward, it can start drawing from multiple sets for variety.

Finally, I suggest four world bosses running around Orr, capable of attacking any keep or tower during an Escalation.

-Tequatl Twins. A quick look to the sky shows at least three draconic champions of Zaitan, thus allowing for a fight against multiple Tequatl-like creatures at once.

-The Ghost Ship. A spectral version of the sailing pirate ship (which can move, as demonstrated by it sailing away when it wins the shore event) which coasts across land or sea, firing cannons, unleashing pirate raiders, and keel-hauling anyone foolish enough to get in front of it.

-The Soul Well. Retexture the Fire Elemental boss as a rising column of wailing souls and kitten spirits for hexual harassment (NEVER forget to practice safe hex, especially around undead).

-Release the Kraken. Create a world boss made of world bosses, a risen giant squid composed of several individual parts. One shell-encased body (invulnerable, and for show), four attacking tentacles (using the giant wurm model), four siege tentacles (similar to the large claws that fling objects), and two support tentacles (mostly for show), and you’ll have a malevolent monstrosity ready to feed.

The Art of Escalation

Under normal circumstances, a siege is a fairly simple affair. Undead try to break down the gates and walls, enter the keep, and capture the zones. Players attempt to drive them away, break their perimeter and siege, and protect NPC repair crews. The key, however, is to avoid stagnation. Should the players win everything and seize the map, something needs to turn the tide.

And that is Horde Mode.

If the entire zone is controlled by players and a certain amount of time passes, it unlocks Horde Mode. The temples will be besieged with ever-escalating, endless waves of undead, allowing the players to fight truly intense wars until they eventually fall. Not that eventual failure can’t be fun as hell, mind you, since Horde Mode should feature some of the most intense dynamic events in the game. To do so, it should go something like this…

-The battle begins scaling upward above the current player population, eventually becoming a fight meant for 2-3 times the current playerbase.
-Veterans and extra siege equipment are introduced over time.
-World bosses begin stirring, performing strafing runs.
-Champion mobs enter the battlefield.
-A World Boss enters the fray.
-Normal Undead are replaced by veterans.
-Double world bosses attack.
-Keep scaling. The programming should find a way to ensure that the match becomes absolutely unwinnable by the best of teams and almost never occur, but provide for the one in a million possibility with a fun and engaging battle. Break the players or break the server. Either way, crush them!

Fine-tuned, the results should be a battle that is ultimately impossible to win, but fun and rewarding to play. Horde Mode should provide greater rewards the longer players can hold the line, allowing the entire server to come together and give it their all. As long as the rewards match the amount of effort, players will have a strong incentive to hold out as long as possible against the endless undead onslaught.

Note: this is a tad long. For the TL:DR, consult the uploaded infographics designed for your convenience.

Orr has problems. Between the past horde of bots mindlessly shuffling about slaying mindless shufflers, the severe annoyance of trying to walk any distance without every necrotic abomination within three leagues trying to chew your ankles off, and the absurd competition between players over getting loot tags, there’s nothing remotely resembling a proper war on the entire continent. Orr is lifeless, and despite the poetic irony, that isn’t particularly fitting for this game. I would thus like to discuss a way to add the spark of life to this husk of a continent, and reanimate it into the spectacular warzone it deserves to be.

Fortunately, all the mechanics already exist in WvW. All Orr needs is a little bit of loving from the mechanisms used in WvW design: destructible fortifications, spontaneous and sustained events, and flexibile AI. Reforging Orr with these systems will allow it to become something unique, a Player Versus Environment persistent warzone. This will require a few basic principles.

All Orrian zones should be level 80. All of them should be proactive, player-driven attack/defend warzones. All of them will require time, coordination, and teamwork to accomplish anything significant, although some content for the lone player will still exist in the form of out-of-the-way delves. The majority of Orr should be essentially empty (none of this undead-every-five-feet tediousness), allowing players to move freely, but the battlezones themselves should be up to our ears in undead foes fighting masses of players, along with all manner of siege equipment for both sides. It will also have world bosses and a way to escalate conflict to break stalemates, thus ensuring that the content should remain fresh. With these principles, Orr can become a truly unique zone, unlike any other area in the game.

This will require four things: revising the map, rethinking siege events, reworking player-led assaults, and redistributing the loot.

The Map

Orr is actually well structured and lovingly rendered, when you aren’t being knawed upon every five feet and have the time to enjoy the view. With a handful of tweaks, the maps can become an excellent warzone. The primary change will be turning current camps and structures into destructible terrain. Rather than have camps with functional gates that get “captured” by undead just shuffling in, these zones can be redone so that the walls and gates can be destroyed, just like in WvW. This will allow the undead to actually lay siege to certain areas.

In turn, the undead controlled areas can get structures of their own. Bone walls and guard towers are already in the game, and it wouldn’t be difficult to allow the undead to claim terrain via their insidious architecture. The goal here is to take existing features of the map (pact bases, major trouble spots, and the temples) and turn them into WvW style objectives. For your convenience, I’ve cobbled together a set of map examples. They’re a tad crude, but hopefully they convey the overall idea.

The Straits of Devastation forms a very simple, intuitive map. Each of the three landings presents a clear chain of conquest, with each area being contested like a MOBA lane. Malchor’s Leap will be a little stranger due to its structure, but should form a decent attack/defend setup. Players must defend the eastern sections in order to launch attacks across the canyon and seize the two temples. Finally, Cursed Shore will form a decent twin pairing, with the north and eastern side of the map independent from the south and west.

One of the original premises of the Dynamic Event system was the way they would scale to the number of people. However, in practice this isn’t working, since the game isn’t accounting for the way fighting twenty people is completely different from fighting two. Rather than altering the event, DEs are just throwing more enemies at the players or increasing the boss’s stats Instead of just scaling the numbers, events need to start treating larger groups differently than smaller teams.

To phrase that better, right now an event goes like this…
Few Players) five centaurs attack per wave
Some Players) eight centaurs attack per wave
Lots of Players) twelve centaurs attack per wave
Horde of Players) eighteen centaurs attack per wave
Convention of Players) twenty-five centaurs attack per wave

….This doesn’t work. It just means that players start throwing down nuclear strikes on the centaurs to chew them up the instant they arrive. Conventional tactics don’t beat the zerg. Instead, the event needs to be clever.

Few Players) centaurs charge them
Some Players) melee centaurs charge them, ranged centaurs fan out and snipe
Lots of Players) melee centaurs, ranged centaurs, and a miniboss shaman with AoE earth magic
Horde of Players) melee centaurs, ranged centaurs, two minibosses, and a catapult
Convention of Players) melee, ranged, three minibosses, two catapults, and a partridge in a pear tree

Siege us. Nuke us. Blast our groups, break our formations, bleed our lines. Make players split up to take down multiple objectives in a massive fight, and force teamwork by giving the opposition their own strategic cohesion. The zerg won’t be defeated by more zerging by the NPCs. The zerg will be broken when the opposition steps up its game, and forces players to do the same.

The result will be better for everyone. It will teach proper tactics, encourage situational awareness, and require cooperation. It will make players feel special even in a mob of players (lead the charge to take down the left trebuchet, and you’ll feel like you saved a hundred lives), and make us actually respect the opposition. And most of all, it will make a massive battle feel like a proper war, rather than just a farming run.

Good evening. There’s been quite a bit of muttering during both the beta and present day about the state of the mesmer. Some people hate it, some love it, but I would like to put forth a simple premise: the current illusion/shatter system is innately flawed. Regardless of your opinion of the mesmer’s current playstyle, I hope this ramble will help convince you of this statement, for the following reasons.

1) Shatter cannot balance its checkbook.

Here’s an arithmetic problem for you. Is seven copper pieces equal to three silver, and are both equal to five gold? Of course not. That would be absurd, since one is clearly more valuable than the other, and it would be foolish to think that all three should be exchanged for something of equal value.

Unless, of course, you’re the shatter system. To shatter, a phantasm that deals hundreds of damage per shot is worth exactly as much as a scepter clone that deals single digit damage at level 80, which is in turn equal to a sword clone that inflicts vulnerability with each hit, which is supposedly equal to a staff clone that inflicts condition damage. Every single one of those illusions have different amounts of power and different cooldowns, but shatter exchanges them for the exact same amount of burst damage. All illusions are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Basic game theory says this is stupid. If a used car salesman offered you a thousand bucks for a beat up old truck, then offered you that same thousand dollars for a luxury car in good condition, no one in their right mind would take him seriously. But shatter makes that exact uneven exchange, resulting in a class mechanic that only caters to a few builds. This is not good design.

2) The Mesmer has learned nothing from other professions.

We’ve seen other professions grow and change over the development cycle as they learned to cope with the game and improve their design. Each time they adjusted major features, Anet would describe the new elements and detail their reasoning, most of which was quite wise. Yet apparently, the Mesmer never got the memo, because it still makes the same mistakes other professions made far earlier and inherits the flaws of multiple designs.

Consider several cases…
*Early Warrior designs had a passive damage buff for higher adrenaline. It was removed because Anet realized players stacked damage in a boring manner rather than exchanging it for bursts.
*Ranger pets used to be all melee. This was changed because they realized that sometimes NPCs cannot survive in close proximity to enemies and AI pathing wasn’t always reliable, thus certain pets became ranged.
*Likewise, the Ranger interface was redone over and over again to ensure that players had control over their NPCs, because leaving anything up to AI behavior wasn’t acceptable.
*The Necromancer’s Death Shroud used to feature a Spectral Walk mechanic specifically designed to cater to minion masters. It was changed because the class feature needed to benefit all builds, not just one or two.

The Mesmer has inherited all of their baggage.

*Like the obsolete Warrior, it has passive damage (phantasms) and bursts (shatters). Low and behold, we have phantasm builds and shatter builds, and the two loathe each other.
*Like the old Ranger, the Mesmer has one particular design (minion bombing) and everyone is told to put up with it even when it doesn’t work. They’ve inherited all the requirements to babysit AI, but have been given none of the tools to control the behavior of their illusions, nor the customization to choose ones relevant to the situation.
*And finally, like the Necromancer, the Mesmer is handed a class mechanic that only caters toward one overall playstyle. Classes are supposed to be more than that: a banner/rifle warrior is not remotely the same as berserker axe wielder, nor does a flamethrower juggernaut engie play like a turret builder. But every single Mesmer is expected to be a minion bomber, regardless of whether or not creating fragile NPCs and sending them to snuggle a target is viable.