OctoWow - Forums

There was another post here that mentioned the issue of trash skips and how extreme they get. I wanted to make my own post to detail what I think would be a simple solution to this.

We can encourage people to go the extra mile and more "realistically" progress through a raid by allowing access to a special reward for having killed all the trash in the instance. Yes, every mob pack, even the ones that are off in the corner somewhere. It allows the gamespace to be fully utilized and would shake up the monotonous routine that each raid currently follows, with a "fastest path" being taken every time by every raid on every realm.

This reward could possibly come from a quest that you pick up in a capital city, which could be chosen by players who wish to invest the extra time after the raid is over to clear the extra trash for an additional reward.

This could of course also be applied to dungeons, with the same reasoning and benefits as mentioned.

You're not disincentivising players to take the fastest path, you're just splitting players down the middle between wanting the trash reward (which will need to be substantial in some instances to be worth the extra time clearing) and the boss loot, so now there's more internal friction in the raid because it's not just the preferred experience on the line it's now ALSO got rewards tied to it.

A 100% clear is also extremely monotonous and punitive and also requires all trash and most bosses be killed because even if you take bosses off the table you still have to kill most of them in order to reach all of the trash mobs, so no reward for partial clears because your boys didn't have anything they wanted from so-in-so boss over in the corner.

100% clear also means no deviation, there's still an optimal path, it's just longer.
60% - 70% is more realistic.

You could have your cake and eat it if after beating the final boss of the raid the trash mobs get considerably weaker so people who wanna go for the clear reward can stick around and take the easier fights for the extra boon whilst the people with less time/inclination to clearing head off to do other things, but I assume that's against the spirit of what you're after which is trying to experience the dungeons and raids in their intended directions at which point you kinda just gotta ask if you don't want to add a bunch of invisible walls so people can't make the skips which I think also harms part of the adventure aspect.

You've got examples like BRD where there's a lot of pretty significant skips both intentional and improvised that change the dungeon path but sometimes at the cost of making it far more difficult or even impossible to traverse around the newly blocked paths. That's the ideal design for a dungeon/raid imo, but that requires a lot more time and resources.

The other way to make trash worth clearing is to up droprates for stuff people want the chance at getting, be it crafting materials for profs or AH, or gear drops for alts/AH, but then you've also altered the economy and that's it's own kettle of landmines.

Ultimately I think the trash skipping problem is one where nobody is really happy to compromise and you're better off just hosting a raid intending to clear the trash for the folks who want that kind of experience.