Originally Posted by Douglas
Again: not even if there are 40 people in the 5-man encounter -- just with 35 (or more!) of them being NPCs that are largely under the control of or influenced by the actual players?
Imagine this: you're at the head of a small army. You're a warrior (but not the MT). A task force is fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with you. Whenever you enter Defensive stance, they form a (literal) shield wall and hold their ground; when you're doing this, the NPC healers can reasonably top most of them off. Whenever you enter Battle stance, they use a mixed fighting style, doing more damage on average but also taking more, and moving forward slowly. Whenever you enter Berzerker stance, shield gets slung across their back and both hands go on the axe, and they rush forward in a mad zerg.
You're not controlling them exactly, but they're reacting to what you do. And in any event, you actually are in the thick of mass combat. There's tons of allies around you, doing stuff -- just as many performing "based on" your 4 teammates as are based on you.
(Like, we've all seen metrics from WWS regarding how much a healer spreads their heals out rather than focusing on individual heal targets; imagine if the behavior of the NPC healers roughly tracked your real healer with regard to that behavior. And imagine a squad of bowmen focusing their fire as well as your actual ranged DPS do, on average, or maybe approxiamately copying shot rotation.)
Does the mere fact that, for example, the extras don't engage in banter on Vent, does that actually prevent the epic feel that you claim you got by seeing more people?
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I think having NPC's take the place of actual players is a horrible idea. Rajaxx was a fight that could be done with or w/o the NPC help, if they survived you where rewarded if they didnt the fight became more difficult but not impossible. I would agree with you if the NPC's had a chance to fail the task that they where scripted to do. But at that point it hurts the RL group that is actually doing the encounter.
Lets look at HKM, if you had a certain number of NPC's assist you with all the adds and performed flawlessly it really becomes a tank and spank fight. The challenge of having 25 RL players is that if John forgets to steal the spell shield off the mage hes most likely going to die. Which results in the mage running around and throwing fireballs at everyone.
I personally dont see NPC's being the answer to the task proposed, unless some serious changes where made to the NPC's ai.