This doesn’t even take into consideration to what means Blizzard would have to rebalance areas to accomidate what gamers will do to tweak their builds to take advantage of now having a henchie in their group. Think what it would do to farmers, or what farmers could do now that they have additional help.

What also really makes me against this henchie system is this game will become a single player game, as someone else kind of stated.

I do however think Brooks was right on the money about the actual NPC behavior though. I’ve been in WoW for ~5months, and this game is buggy. Its NPC’s are beyond dumb, theres a horendous amount of bugs for a game that is 3 years old now, that Blizz easily has the income level to put ppl in place to clean it up. I think if anything, Blizz implements something more along the lines of what Brooks said and also cleans their bugs up.

That said, the double/multi-boxing community is already running full-steam with a makeshift henchman system, and the class combinations one can choose from makes for interesting discussion. Granted, to make use of these homegrown henchman, one needs to run a second WoW account, but doing so opens up a number of possibilities that a solo character cannot involve themselves in without finding a PUG. Oftentimes, especially for group quests outside instances, PUGing is impossible on lower-populated realms, but dual-boxing overcomes most two and three-person quests with relative ease.

1. I want them to follow ME for a change. That turtle in Tanaris does this.
2. I want them to accept my heals/buffs. I’m a paladin. I can do these things. The Defias Traitor can be healed, but that Blood Elf in Northwatch can’t. If he’s going to run headlong into three Theramore Marines, I’m sure he’d like a Holy Light.
3. I want them to appear on my screen as a party member/pet. I’d love to be able to watch their health without a mouseover. If you already have a pet this would necessitate some supplementary pet slot. I’m not upset by this.
4. (Entirely Optional) I want them to buff me. I freed a NElf in Terokkar Forest the other day. In addition to her brain-dead behavior (more on that later) she’s a druid. She casts moonfire, roots, etc. Why can’t I get Gift of the Wild or Thorns?

The aforementioned elf escort thing: I break her out of the cage she’s in. She walks out of the room and then proceeds to follow the road out of town. Let me let that sink in. She’s supposed to be a recently freed prisoner, and she WALKS DOWN THE HEAVILY PATROLLED PATH! The one that goes RIGHT BY THE WARLOCKS!! Is this supposed to simulate Stockholm Syndrome? The tower she was held in is the Southeast corner of the settlement. Going southwest between two buildings would be the best way out.

Getting away from the escort thing and back to the Henchman thing: How about rolling the two together? Say the escort followed you around for a while until you turned the quest in, helping you out with stuff you need doing and accomplishing this intelligently (putting you on Follow, stopping when you Sit, UI like a warlock pet etc) then non-pet classes would have a hint of what it is like being a pet class. Pet classes would be playing Warcraft (The RTS), what with having two “pets” but hey this won’t be happening in the Arenas or AV or anything so I don’t see how it would do anything other than making all those “Group [2]” quests solo-able. Now as soon as you enter the Allerian Stronghold or Shattrath I imagine they would say “Cool, I’ll take a griff to where I need to go” and leave.

This is way too long. I’d put it on my own webpage (and still might in the future) but the dang webhost appears to be down.

The other part comes in the effect is that how bad would this change the game play as it currently stands.

I was looking foward to Gods and Heroes until I got in the beta just for the henchman concept but after playing it I found out I didn’t care for it in that game.

It is a good topic to ponder though.

I’m pretty happy with the balance of the different kinds of gameplay that WoW has. I don’t think henchmen are needed.