Why are NPC parties so bad?

[TheMightyMollusk]

Trusts are like getting lunch at a big franchise restaurant. If you go to Applebee's or McDonald's, you know what you're getting. It's not the best food, but it'll fill your belly for a while. It's consistent and reliable for what it is.

Party Finder is like looking for smaller local places. There's a chance it'll be an absolute dumpster fire that'll make you want to rip your hair out, or it'll be a wonderful experience like no other. You won't know until you try it.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Idk what exactly blows up your Alphi/Urianger/any trust NPCs in one shot. But in my fairly limited memories of leveling trusts back in ShB days, they are just really bad at dealing with randomly generated AoEs in quick succession, and this tend to happen in bigger pulls (2-4 mobs casting their red carpet within 2 seconds). Sometimes they'll react to the first 1-2 AoE but the 3rd/4th red carpet aren't acknowledged, so they just stood there idly waiting for the first two resolves while they took the 3rd/4th. Worst, sometimes they will not cast -anything- while reacting to these AoEs or... they will but they'll took those red carpets to the face.

Other than that, I'm echoing the other who had mentioned how these NPC parties DPS performance works like a rubber band. If you play better, they will DPS worse. If you play badly, they will make up for your shortcoming. But it will NEVER be faster vs Duty Finder by average.

Trusts are like getting lunch at a big franchise restaurant. If you go to Applebee's or McDonald's, you know what you're getting. It's not the best food, but it'll fill your belly for a while. It's consistent and reliable for what it is.

Party Finder is like looking for smaller local places. There's a chance it'll be an absolute dumpster fire that'll make you want to rip your hair out, or it'll be a wonderful experience like no other. You won't know until you try it.

I'm stealing this metaphor.

[Thangil]

Trusts are like getting lunch at a big franchise restaurant. If you go to Applebee's or McDonald's, you know what you're getting. It's not the best food, but it'll fill your belly for a while. It's consistent and reliable for what it is.

Party Finder is like looking for smaller local places. There's a chance it'll be an absolute dumpster fire that'll make you want to rip your hair out, or it'll be a wonderful experience like no other. You won't know until you try it.

I have NEVER had a bad experience with party finder, other players are absolutely fantastic in this game. My issue with it over using NPCs is that you have to wait.

[1313]

30 minutes to run Sastasha with NPC party is extremely rude and disrespectful to the entire playerbase. Duty support is worse than squadrons. Hell, I went to run Copperbell and my tank ran all the way back to the start of the dungeon, chasing the mobs that had leashed back to the start. There's no option, like with squadrons, that you can use when this artificial "intelligence" does the dumbest shite imaginable. It's horrendous.

[follydragon]

30 minutes to run Sastasha with NPC party is extremely rude and disrespectful to the entire playerbase. Duty support is worse than squadrons. Hell, I went to run Copperbell and my tank ran all the way back to the start of the dungeon, chasing the mobs that had leashed back to the start. There's no option, like with squadrons, that you can use when this artificial "intelligence" does the dumbest shite imaginable. It's horrendous.

I mean no disrespect, but when its your first playthrough and you do not feel like waiting 30 minutes + for Duty Finder to get your style in a group, its rude not to have another option. A better option would have likely been to scale down to single player, but then folks would be mad because less groups would be doing content. I am not sure I would compare a person to AI, I have seen some players that well, the AI looks genius compared too, leaving it at that.

[SnowVix]

The main problem is, Aphinaud is the worst healer in gaming history! He doesn't heal me at all until I have less than 20% health. And the tank isn't much better.

Intended. If you didn't die, you were healed properly.

I've been trying to do the Grand Cosmos dungeon for the MSQ with NPCs, and everything went somewhat ok until the last boss, the flame-something dude. Alphinaud keeps getting one-shotted, and Tancred (tank) can't control the boss at all. It's completely un-doable with NPCs.

The boss moves for several of his mechanics regardless of the tank, and the Alphinaud one-shots are probably because you took the furniture he was heading to for Mortal Flame (or ran him over with the boss charges).

[1313]

Intended. If you didn't die, you were healed properly.



The boss moves for several of his mechanics regardless of the tank, and the Alphinaud one-shots are probably because you took the furniture he was heading to for Mortal Flame (or ran him over with the boss charges).

OR OP took the closest piece of thing to burn with his blue flame, and in typical Alphinaud fashion, he did something equally dumb to forming the crystal braves witha bunch of heretics, and tried to use a burnt piece of furniture to do mechanics and caused a wipe because he's dead weight.

[Iscah]

If your trust members are consistently dying, it's likely that you are doing something wrong and need to adapt, even if it's as simple as "don't take the position that the NPC has decided is theirs" because they do not adapt well.

[Kaurhz]

They are done so with the intention of still encouraging you to interact with other players, and to group up with other players. Having the NPCs also be flawed still puts some responsibility on the player to ensure they are playing correctly, versus playing "Follow the NPC" type groove to resolve the mechanic.

If NPCs executed mechanics perfectly and did AoE combinations for standard pulls, then there would actually be very little to encourage players to group up with other people, as in many cases the NPC would just then be better than your average player, which is a backwards way of putting it.