Having been involved in a few of the group events lately that involve combat, I've had the chance to see some of the bigger pain points of the current system. Obviously, staffing is an issue and I'm sure an overhaul of group combat is super low on the list of things to do...

BUT, I think there are a couple of improvements that might be relatively easy to implement that would eliminate some of the biggest issues with trying to run large groups.

* If the group leader moves, group members who are engaged will retreat automatically and move with the leader if they would have been capable of retreating with no roundtime. I'm not asking for any bonuses here, or any special impact from the group leader. Just auto-retreat them if they would otherwise have been able to.

* If the group leader moves, group members who are in roundtime will move with the leader while under roundtime if otherwise unengaged. If they are engaged, they don't move. An additional flat number of seconds could be added to the roundtime as a penalty to prevent any shenanigans. If the same person attempts another action that provokes roundtime and is attempted to be moved again, there are a number of ways to handle this - either they could then be dumped from the group if it happens that second time, or an escalating roundtime penalty could be applied each time. The point isn't to be able to do things while moving, the point is to catch that guy who was still buffing but failed to tell anyone.

These suggestions could either be added automatically to the system, or possibly gated behind Tactics ranks (Based on your skill at Tactics, you believe that you could effectively lead 11 people.) Additionally, if abuse is feared, an additional level of consent could be added to the picture... after joining the group, the leader would have to enter in an additional message to the group (Saragos is now attempting to lead you.) Or someone might have to affirmatively accept this leadership if we're really worried about abuse.

Obviously there are LOTS of things that I might suggest for group combat, but I'm going to stop myself here. Just these couple of things, I think, would make a big quality of life improvement when attempting to run group events, with hopefully not much work. The one other thing I'd ask is if PvP flexing makes it to Prime, if it might be possible for a group of people to enter into a pool to all be flexed to the same level. I think that the players could run some fun, really epic events with such a tool.

Thanks for your time.

- Saragos

I too would love these kinds of changes, so much so that I pray at least a small bit of Dev is redirected to some QOL. As a Bard in particular, a big part of the reason I chose the guild was for group support, so I'd give my last zills just for some of these to make that easier.

A couple of other changes that I think would be good and, you know, might be easy to implement (it can be hard to tell as a player):

REGROUP verb. Attempts to grab anyone in the room with you who was in your group within the past minute, who didn't leave voluntarily. That way at least I could backtrack and spam this verb trying to scoop up stragglers.

WARHORN RALLY. Some kind of special Tactics ability (possibly guild gated) that offers people in nearby rooms the option to teleport (in a HUNT-like way) to you and instantly be part of your group. For gathering a war party during invasions.

WARHORN RETREAT. Again, a Tactics/guild ability. Would perform a special kind of "freeze" on the area, much like WHISTLE PIERCING, that would prevent all creatures from acting/advancing for a short period. The idea is to allow people to retreat out and move on. Wouldn't be like a stun in that critters would not be penalized defensively. Alternatively, could just effectively teleport everyone to missile range, maybe with a small protection from engagement.

Finally, it'd be awesome if I didn't have to write a script to handle keeping baddies from joining me. Petition to make people I've set COLD on my befriend list unable to join.


- Navesi

You sure about that with group swimming? My characters have run younger chars through gobs brook, none of them were engaged & if the younger had low or no swimming so stuck in rt the "older" character has left them behind. This is not just a one time issue either, I've had it happened repeatedly, different characters, different circles, different ranks in whatever is now swimming.. um outdoorsmanship?

Course its very possible I'm wrong :)

I would love to see extra functionality added to warhorns. With my Barbarian, I am quite content using LURE to up spawn rate, as I always need a few extra critters for weapon exp.

It's purely a roleplay tool on my Bard, and it's sitting in my vault. Decreasing spawn is never something I'd want to do when hunting, and for invasion scenarios, it's never going to replace Sanctuary.

P.S. To the GMs though, please note that Bards are super group combat oriented, Tactics primary, and already have warhorn abilities!


- Navesi

These are great suggestions.

Some other ones:

* Drop non-lodged ammo into "at your feet" slot like throwing weapons. This would make group hunting infinitely easier because nobody has to worry about trying/failing to pick up someone else's ammo.

* Automatically stow ammo on a movement attempt when it's "at your feet," and also that would be a nice QOL upgrade for throwing weapons as well. (It's easily handled via trigger for throwing weapons but I think we should all desire to see less need for triggers and scripting.)

* Some way to quickly identify whether there are players in the room who are NOT grouped with you. Important for area-cast abilities.

* An update to the GROUP LIST command that identifies the character's profession. Again, easily handled with substitutions, but removing the need for extraneous tools should be a development goal. I would say "if they've set it to be visible" but honestly as long as Thieves show up as their pretend guild and Necromancers show up as something other than Necromancer it would be a far more useful tool than toggling it to "if they've set it to be visible." It also avoids the inevitable whispered "set prof please."

Those are my quick thoughts as someone who has group hunted in the past.