Pay for henchmen, get their drops

With the coming addition of all of the new henchmen, I think it would make sense for people to have to pay for henchmen but now receive all of the drops. Pricing should scale as the difficulty increases and could even be market-based so that the most demanded henchy (healer) costs the most.

Benefits:

1. Gold sink - Although you'll probably be making as much back by selling all of the drops, there will be many an occasion where the team gets wiped and the sink will work.

2. Strategy and Thought - If henchies are free, why not take them all if you're just using them to get from point A to point B? Now people would have to weigh the costs versus the rewards and possibly take risks with fewer bodies or play it safe but pay the price.

3. More drops - People play PvE in large part for the drops and and one of the biggest complaints with henchmen is that they take too much. People would probably pay more than what the sum total of the drops were worth (at the merchant) just so they at least get to see what falls.

Problems:

1. Henchy AI - People have to feel like they're getting some value from what they're paying for. Currently, when Alesia falls due to her own stupidity, it's a mild annoyance. If I'm paying for her to heal, she better take her job more seriously. The archer and the enchanter better step up their game too if they ever want to get off of the bench.

2. Decreased player grouping - This is probably due to a number of factors and may not happen under a "mercenary" system but I tend to think it would. It's a chore anyway to put together a competent group and adding the "who's going to pay for the henchmen" complaint to the mix might only add to the grief. Receiving all of the drops though goes a long way in pacifying the crowd.


What benefits/problems am I not seeing? How hard do you think this would be to implement?

let me pay for them and i will say shov it to all real people who want a share.

problem is someone will come up with a build guaranteed to survive the quest/mission and sacrifice the henchies and then reviving them for the next cannon fodder mob.

hell no as this would keep real groups from ever forming and be farmer loot dropped to death.

this has been shot down so many times there are patches on the patches.

Henchmen are a nice way for people to play who can't get into a group.

I myself played on a wireless connection for the first three months of GW. That means Err=7 was frequent for me. Unless I wanted a large part of the community angry at me for quitting halfway through missions all the time, I HAD to use henchmen. I did experience people who told me to "STFU don't play guild wars if you keep getting kicked." Henchmen allowed me to completely ignore all pick-up groups and head right into the mission.

I also think finding groups for such easy quests is just silly, but I can't solo them. So I grab henchmen and get them done. Its much easier than spending 40minutes LFG for this quest.

I hope ANet never changes henchmen in any way like this, because then they take a large part of the game away for people who just don't have the time to spam LFG everytime they want to do anything. They can improve the hench AI though...I would not be opposed to that.

Vilaptca

How does that make sense? You can still only take a maximum of 8.

Henchmen are an integral part of the game, when you can't find a party. If a person's dirt broke, he won't be able to progress. That is NOT going to happen.

Why not? Some people just want to do the mission. And if you want to give people incentive for strategy and thought, what about getting a bigger share of the drops with less henchies? After all, it HAS given people so much incentive to solo places...

To the contrary, your suggestion does the opposite. People who pay for henchies' drops will just take all the henchies with them anyway.

I don't know about you, but I play the game for the fun, story, and social aspects, and I could care less about the drops. I haven't finished one RP character yet and I'm already playing a second one. I'm willing to bet there are plenty of people who do this, and it would simply be unfair to force these people to pay for drops when it's not the drops that we want. If you want more drops, then go farm. No one's stopping you. Oh, and each henchman takes the same amount of drops as everyone else.

Well, I'd say hency AI needs to be improved regardless.

Forcing people to pay for henchies would encourage people to form groups. (Which is not a bad thing at all.) Hell, why would you pay for henchies to get through a mission when you can do it with human players for free? You will, however, be exacerbating the problem of finding competent groups, so this is not a wise idea.

In short, you can't force people to pay gold just to advance in the game, especially since you're also denying their method of making money. And frankly, it's not that difficult to set up a solo build to farm. If you want to go farm drops, go farm drops, but don't drag the rest of us in by forcing us to pay for henchies and their drops.

This can be solved in 2 ways:

Increase Gold drops in all areas that can be played with henches.
Decrease the % of drops that get negated from the henches.