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Why do group members run away from combat?
quotable
Member Posts: 29 Arc User
I just did Throne of Idris in a group. At one point, about ten or so rotters spawned and the entire group was right there. I shot them with an area attack. The rest of the group ran away and let me solo them. It took a fair bit of running around to not die, and while I was doing this, the rest of the group went and started a boss fight.
At a later point in the same run, another party member pulled a group of five or so Direhelms. That's readily handled by a group of five, but rather more problematic if you have to solo them. I went to help out, and the rest of the group ran away. We did kill them, but it was rather harder than it should have been.
Later on in still the same dungeon run, a different party member yet opened a mimic chest. Naturally, the rest of the party ran away again, apart from me and him. I helped him kill the chest, and he was downed shortly before we finished it off, so it was good that I was there to revive him. A dungeon mimic chest is easy to kill 5-man, but rather harder to solo, especially if you're melee as the party member who opened it was.
Why do people do this? One could dismiss it as just being a bad group, except that this differs from what most groups will do only in degree, not in type. It's common in most groups I've seen for a group of mobs to attack the party, and three or so party members kill the mobs, while the other two ignore them to run ahead and pull something else. Usually the "something else" is just another small group so it's not really that problematic. The group I just finished twice pulled a boss while part of the party was fighting other mobs that weren't even near the boss room.
I've played a lot of online games that involve PVE group combat. Sometimes there are issues where different party members will pull different groups at the same time, not realizing that someone else was also pulling. In some games, I'd occasionally stay out of a bad pull that was obviously going to be a wipe, so as to revive the party after they died rather than facing a full wipe that is far more troublesome to recover from.
Party members running from combat so as to go fight a different group entirely is basically unheard of in every other group combat MMORPG I've ever played. And yes, even in PUGs--and even really bad PUGs. Here it's routine. Why is that? Does it abruptly change when people hit level 60? Is it some sort of game design flaw that leads people to do this? Do people not realize that they're splitting the group up to fight two or three different groups of mobs in different rooms entirely at the same time?
Returning to the group that inspired this post, at one point, while I was off fighting mobs with one other party member far behind three who had run ahead, someone who was up ahead decided to explain how to follow the map path to catch up. As if the problem were getting lost, with nothing to do with combat that takes rather longer when most of the group has run away and you have to run around a lot to avoid dying. Was he trolling? Did he seriously not realize that he was abandoning party members who were in combat?
At a later point in the same run, another party member pulled a group of five or so Direhelms. That's readily handled by a group of five, but rather more problematic if you have to solo them. I went to help out, and the rest of the group ran away. We did kill them, but it was rather harder than it should have been.
Later on in still the same dungeon run, a different party member yet opened a mimic chest. Naturally, the rest of the party ran away again, apart from me and him. I helped him kill the chest, and he was downed shortly before we finished it off, so it was good that I was there to revive him. A dungeon mimic chest is easy to kill 5-man, but rather harder to solo, especially if you're melee as the party member who opened it was.
Why do people do this? One could dismiss it as just being a bad group, except that this differs from what most groups will do only in degree, not in type. It's common in most groups I've seen for a group of mobs to attack the party, and three or so party members kill the mobs, while the other two ignore them to run ahead and pull something else. Usually the "something else" is just another small group so it's not really that problematic. The group I just finished twice pulled a boss while part of the party was fighting other mobs that weren't even near the boss room.
I've played a lot of online games that involve PVE group combat. Sometimes there are issues where different party members will pull different groups at the same time, not realizing that someone else was also pulling. In some games, I'd occasionally stay out of a bad pull that was obviously going to be a wipe, so as to revive the party after they died rather than facing a full wipe that is far more troublesome to recover from.
Party members running from combat so as to go fight a different group entirely is basically unheard of in every other group combat MMORPG I've ever played. And yes, even in PUGs--and even really bad PUGs. Here it's routine. Why is that? Does it abruptly change when people hit level 60? Is it some sort of game design flaw that leads people to do this? Do people not realize that they're splitting the group up to fight two or three different groups of mobs in different rooms entirely at the same time?
Returning to the group that inspired this post, at one point, while I was off fighting mobs with one other party member far behind three who had run ahead, someone who was up ahead decided to explain how to follow the map path to catch up. As if the problem were getting lost, with nothing to do with combat that takes rather longer when most of the group has run away and you have to run around a lot to avoid dying. Was he trolling? Did he seriously not realize that he was abandoning party members who were in combat?
Quaternion from the previous forum
Post edited by quotable on
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Better yet, join a guild. People tend to behave a little better when they have to deal with you on a regular basis.
When I am in a group like this, I'll go ahead and let them run ahead and do all the work for me. That's fine! I'll stay behind and loot all of the chests and skill nodes. They might kick me if they have to wait a long time for me to catch up for the final boss fight, but - eh - it's not the only group that ever goes in that dungeon.
The group may well have contained players who have played enough MMOs to know that you don't need to engage every single pack of mobs that you encounter. It can be really tedious when you get a team mate who is pathologically incapable of not pulling packs of idle monsters- ones that were minding their own beeswax, and no threat to anyone.
Such people are a pain to group with, and after a few such overly-exuberant and naive pulls, the group tends to just leave them to their own devices, to see if that player becomes educated. Meanwhile, the group usually continues to play the dungeon as normal.
Pulling everything in a dungeon is not generally considered a virtue, once the initial novelty of MMO dungeon crawling wears off.
Basically, communication is key. If you don't want to do a speed run, state it at the outset. If people in the group are going to blast through the dungeon anyway then just leave.
don't blame me, blame the game.
and as for the "They are not interested in team play", you will understand if you ever manage to make a 22k CW. no challenge means no fun, so killing groups of five trashmobs becomes insanely boring when you know you could take on so many more at once.
and if that involves running through half of the dungeon then so be it.
The more you run a dungeon the less desired you are to take your time when running it the next time, it not their fault, they are probably just going through their daily grinds and want to put in as many runs in the least amount of time as possible.
The group did finish the dungeon successfully. When we got to the last room I stopped to say, please don't pull multiple groups at once because this room is harder. No one replied to that, but people did comply. And we breezed through the last room--easily the hardest part of the dungeon--after struggling with and taking multiple deaths on earlier stuff.
I don't think that the speed run theory has much explanatory power here. You'll level past the loot you get soon enough; remember that the level cap to queue for for Throne of Idris is 41. In this case, the group average level was about 39 or so. If the goal is to level up fast, soloing outside quests will level you much faster than dungeon runs. While there could conceivably be people who like doing speed runs anyway for about the same reason that people do speed runs of Super Mario World, I strongly doubt that's half of the playerbase here, or even half of the portion willing to do dungeons.
In order to provide a satisfactory explanation, you'd have to explain why this running away from group combat is ubiquitous in Neverwinter but not in most (all?) other MMORPGs with group combat. If you want to argue that it's speed runs here, you'd have to explain why people in this game want speed runs, but people in other games don't.
Quaternion from the previous forum
Once mobs are aggroed, there are two options:
1) kill the mobs
2) let the player(s) fighting the mobs die and run back
Constantly deciding to die and run back is not an effective way to do speed runs. Especially when the mobs are blocking the path so even if you do die and run back, you'll have to kill them after running back anyway to catch up to the group.
There is some merit to the observation that some mobs don't need to be aggroed to clear the dungeon, and that was the case with both the direhelms and the mimic chest of the original post, though not the rotters. But that doesn't justify running from mobs that aggro on someone else and would have aggroed on you if they hadn't gone after a different party member first--which is precisely the behavior that I want an explanation for.
Quaternion from the previous forum
I'd like to suggest that you'll level past dungeons before you do them 1000 times. For that matter, I'm tending to level past dungeons before I do them once, and having to change my tactics to do a dungeon from a higher level area before doing lower level quests in order to get to do the dungeons at all.
Quaternion from the previous forum
Not true.
Also not true.
Just because your notions of what fun should be and how the game should be played don't match up with those of other people, that doesn't mean one group is automatically right or wrong. I frequently speed run BECAUSE I find it fun, not in spite of the fun I'm allegedly missing out on.
For a new player, this is rather off putting and takes away from the feel of the game and honestly a tank and healer isn't even necessary. One reason why people run off and do whatever. While GF and DC can be very helpful, they are not required to finish a dungeon or skirmish. At one point in time, I wanted to stop and smell the roses and check out everything but not anymore. Sad to say, that is what this game has become when you've played it for a while. It's all too easy with the power creep.
When you do speed runs and your other group members are fighting something, do you commonly run away to go grab something else? If not, then your speed runs are irrelevant to the original question. And if so, could you please explain why?
I'm not trying to make this thread an argument for or against speed runs. I'm trying to understand player behavior that I find bizarre--and that doesn't happen in other games that one might think would be similar. The only thing that comes to mind that is unique about this game is that the default field of view is so narrow that you can barely see anything, and people who don't know to change it might well not see what is going on well enough to know that there is even combat going on.
Quaternion from the previous forum
That doesn't explain why people would run off ahead, pull extra mobs, scream for help, and then die and have to run back, as happened in the group that lead to this post. Though admittedly, that's not an especially common occurrence.
Quaternion from the previous forum
And if you don't see that in other games that means other games' dungeons are too challenging to pull multiple groups at once, or everyone you play with is inexperienced and doesn't dare to move ahead before they clear the area first.
edit
Another explanation is that many (most?) other mmo's feature more spells and in turn a mana system, while in NW you only have three encounters, four if you're a cw. That means when you put all three of them on cooldown and your daily is expended, you can do nothing but spam atwills, which may not exactly be a lot of fun (or time/dps effective) depending on your class. So unless the group has like no AoE at all, it's better to move on to the next group, often combined with using your encounters while on the move.
Didn't see that in the original post, it was a novel. The people that ran ahead were probably expecting the group to follow and back them up.
I don't really know where you're going with this post either. People have given you the possibilities of why people run ahead but then you shoot them down. The best thing is to ask the original players their intentions.
Often, yes. But I wouldn't exactly call it "running away". Most commonly, my group (or the members that are plowing through everything) leave enemies behind when the ones left will either die from DoTs without any more damage needed or they are not threatening enough that they need to be dealt with immediately.
Why would people assume that, while in the middle of combat, if they leave a room entirely in spite of active combat going on to move on to a different room and grab an entirely different set of mobs, the entire rest of the group will do likewise, presumably with other mobs following them? That strikes me as very strange.
Quaternion from the previous forum
I could understand intentionally grabbing multiple groups of mobs and mixing them together to let AoE attacks hit more mobs at a time. But that's not the issue here. The issue here is instead of five people in one room hitting one set of mobs, you end up with two people in one room and three people in a different room entirely, attacking entirely disjoint sets of mobs. And even if the entire group does run ahead all at once, you're still going to have to go back to pick up loot, which makes the run slower. Or, I suppose, you could leave all loot laying on the floor and never bother to pick anything up, but that strikes me as a very strange thing to do.
Quaternion from the previous forum
Players with an army of lvl 60 toons don't care for low level loot/junk. They just want to complete the dungeon for the achievement, quest or whatever other reason they are there.
This unfortunately happens on occasion. Sometimes from people feeling a need to take things one group at a time. Sometimes from people that straight up leave people behind. And I feel str8 has a point to an extent. It can be in the straggler's (for lack of a better term) best interest to keep up with those that run ahead. Those are the ones that are killing everything, so it can be a good idea to stay near the person killing the things that are killing you. But I won't begin to justify the few that are legitimately in it for themselves and don't consider the group's needs at all. I rarely see that happen, though.
This is what I like about some of the people I choose to run with. A good number of speed runners I know pull up into a physical barrier so all the loot is right there anyway for the people who want it. However, that comes with the territory of people that don't need the greens or Rank 4 enchantments and will not think twice about passing them by.
^^ This.
I just ran into this in the CTA. A pair of SW speed-runners decided to leave the HR with half-a-dozen deathpledged. They didn't know Thia very well
(the sad part is, if they really wanted to speed-run, they could have simply waited long enough to let me tell them to bunch everything up so Thia could use the Token of Chromatic Storm on them...)
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
This is one reason why I wish the server was a little smarter. Think back to PnP: splitting the party is an invitation to DM mischief like wandering monsters!
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
umm, false equivalence is false. last I checked, it isn't selfish behavior to play group content at a pace that is most comfortable for the ENTIRE GROUP, not just for the speedrunners. if you don't want people slowing you down, then only group with like-minded speedrunners, and don't pug. but what I see here in this discussion are people regarding pug team members as just disposable trash who aren't worthy of consideration or respect and who should just suck it up and speedrun with the rest of the group even if that is not within their intention or desire or even ability to do so.
If you want to speedrun, only join speedrunning groups.
If you choose to pug, then proceed together at a pace that is most comfortable for the ENTIRE GROUP, not just for YOU. Even if that means going SLOWER than you want to go. Because you had your chance to do a speedrun by grouping up with only speedrunners, but you chose not to.
You are not entitled to have random group members obey your will for the pace of the dungeon crawl.