Suggestion: Duty Henchman

[LalaRu]

What about when your queue reach a given amount (15min? 30 min?), duty starts and missing roles filled by henchmen?

[Bixby]

Depends on the duty. For guildhests or your average dungeon, maybe.

For anything significantly challenging, I don't think it's a good idea. The entire challenge of these is getting people who know what to do and how to coordinate. For them to work, the NPCs would have to have AI good enough to handle every fight mechanic (and in a way that players can adapt to; which sister(s) is your NPC off-tank going to grab in Garuda, and where's he going to take them?). Which means every time you get an NPC filling a slot, you basically have an off switch for that 1/8th of the encounter's difficulty.

Either that or the AI sucks and you might as well give up as soon as you see you've got an NPC filling a spot. A brain-dead aggro-bot tank is next to useless in quite a few encounters.

There's also the development time involved in making sure NPCs have all that AI for every single boss in every single dungeon. Not sure the development time would be worth the end result.

[Lollie]

Eventually you will be able to queue dungeons with chocobos. When "eventually" is another matter.

[Warlyx]

What about when your queue reach a given amount (15min? 30 min?), duty starts and missing roles filled by henchmen?

i will love a system like trust for FFXI (in Eq/eq2 is called mercenarys)

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/guide/trust/