Rent A NPC

Now thats pets zone with you would it be possible to rent a NPC hero to help you with your missions. Kind of like getting Faultline or Fusionette to team with you. There are a couple of things that should be done though.

1. The npc teammate should take a share of the exp and influence you earn.

2. The npc teammate should cost a set amount per unit of time to rent in addition to taking a normal team mates share of the exp.

3. The AI would have to be improved a little bit. Maybe from complete noob to recovering AE junkie. Example the npc teammate would want to leave toggled armors on unless endurance falls below x% at which point he would drop toggles if health was above x% to continue attacking.

4. If the npc teamate dies he respawns in approximately 1 minute 30 seconds. This simulates a trip from the hospital for someone who has a travel power and a resonable load time.

5. If the teammate has click buffs, the AI would use them under the condition that they were not in combat and their teammates were not buffed.

6. To simulate the need to rest and recover the npc should have an increased regenration and recovery rate if they have not attacked or been attacked for 20 seconds. The increase should be enough so that they could be back at full in 45 seconds from 10% health, 65 seconds for full recovery time sounds reasonable and should prevent abusing your npc teammate as cannon fodder.

7. There would need to be a way to alter the AI on the npc teammate to handle different situations. A system similar to wingman commands in flight sims could work: Attack my target - Obvious, Cover me - Attack who ever is attacking me but not neccessarily my target, Break Away - Attack as you please anything in your aggro range. Note that these are not commands, they are just like the tank in a regular team asking you to not aggro before him.

8. You would need to cover multiple archetypes on each side of the game. There are two ways to do this and I think they are not mutually exclusive. The first is to have several premade npc that you can select from. The second is to have an npc shop that will let you make a customized npc teammate for more influence.

9. The npc teammate should also increase the difficulty of the missions being done. Npc teammates should only be allowed to influence the risk vs reward less than a normal teammate.

10. Only 1 npc teammate should be allowed on any team. The team leader should have the option to disable npc teammates. The mission owner is the only person who can have an active npc teammate.

11. Npc teammates are either even con with the player or in the case of a larger team -1 con.

Hope this is detailed enough. Note that unlike controller and MM pets this npc acts like a full teammate with regards to the difficulty of the mission and the rewards gained for defeating enemies. Dont worry about flaming me. I can take aggressive criticism.

Why? Shivans are easy to get, infinitely renewable and deal more damage than well buffed blasters. And don't have restrictions like one per team, or cutting into your drops or XP.

and don't forget Vanguard HVAS that can be bought with Rikti Merits.

I like the idea but then again, I like playing MM's and used to solo of necessity a lot. Sometimes having a few extra bodies helps a lot.

I would simplefy the proposed system though. There are already NPC Pets in the game. Your rent a Thug (NPC) could simply be a temp power that is either timed of good for a couple of uses. Every time he dies, that's one charge and they stay with you if they don't die for say 15 minutes.

Then you could also have 3 different power levels.
The minion for little cost. Inf cost 10000, additional fee 10% of xp/inf.
The lieutenant for a more substantional cost. Say 100k, plus 25% of xp/inf.
The Boss, expensive but strong. Say 500k, plus 50% of xp/inf.

Why watse time on all that when it would probably be simpler to give us the ability to use the NPC's we unlock by earning our gladiator badges.

Luminara, I agree that shivans are awesome but I do have a problem with the idea that they are limitless. While they may be easy to get for you and me there are some people who do not like the pvp zones and wont go in because there is the slightest chance of encountering the lrn2play crowd or whatever their own reason is. My suggested npc teammate while not as powerful would require say a simple trip to Hero Corps and the variety of choices you get would in my opinion outweigh the bruiser that the shivan is.

je_saist, Not everyone likes to or wants to participate in Mothership Raids. On some servers it may not be a choice as a raid may be a once a week thing. More than that the HVAS, which is guilty of making assault bots cry tears of oil in jealousy, is very expensive and eventually it will go away and you will have to buy a new one. Lets not forget that you need to be 35+ in order to buy one as well. No such level limit on my suggestion.

GrinningSpade, I wouldn't simplify the system into rent a thug because the idea is that the npc teammate would have access to the same powersets as players get and would have access to similar powers to what we get our current level. The customizable npc would let you pick and choose the powers they have at the various levels. As a MM player I wouldnt mind having an npc Fire/Pain corruptor tagging along even if at times he acted like a complete noob.

Forbin_Project, why not do both? Make the gladiators into mutually exclusive summons that reset each others timers and limit them to being summoned every 30 minutes. I need to hire me some sheep and teach them to chant "New options good, More new options better."

Sharkbait, Thanks for the rep.

Techbot_Alpha, Sorry if I dredged up bad memories of Fusionette shooting at and aggroing everything on the map and then chasing them everywhere agrroing even more things before being defeated and letting you have all 16 enemies she aggroed. I used some bad examples there. Better examples are hard to come by and I just woke up so I'll think of some more later.

Thanks for the responses everyone. I appreciate the input even if I don't agree with it. I'll be adding and improving on this idea when I have time but probably not until much later today since I have been volunteered to build a doghouse. Never let anyone know you know how to use hand and power tools if you value your weekend. Argh

Edited to fix punctuation.

With the number of temp powers out there and already available for pets, I'm not really sure this is warranted.

Also, does this "bought" sidekick simply respawn at the end of the 90-120 second period after death? Or do they actually run back from the entrance to the map? And what happens if you're ghosting?

Sorry, but, even being almost untruthfully kind, most of the pet AI in the game is quite DUMB. All you'd see in such a situation is a bunch of "Your hench-hero was killed (again)" in the log.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.