Yeah, I know, it's probably a bad idea to raise a question like this but I figure with Funcom's history of stealth changes that it's better to get folks thinking about it *before* it happens. Picture the following...
You pull a solo mission and head out to it. You enter the mission and in the main room are the requisite 3 mobs. These three mobs are all metaphysicists. Not unusual. However, all three mobs each have 3 MP pets. Suddenly, instead of 3 mobs to fight you now have 12, just to get into the main room of the mission.
Now, let's make it a team mission. This time the main room has 5 MP's with their 3 pets each. That's 20 mobs to face all at once. Add in the current agro mechanics and you could pull another 1-10 mobs and any pets they have from surrounding rooms simply by stepping into the main room. Can we say instant death for the whole team?
I bring this up because I think that NPC's with pets could add a very interesting dynamic to the game if done *correctly* (i.e., not as described above). It seems very strange to me that there should be MP's, engineers and bureaucrats as NPC's but without the requisite pets that define those professions. In other MMORPGs NPC's have pets with all the same abilities that player pets have. This then requires a bit of variable strategy to overcome the NPC's depending on what profession they are and what the team make up is (or what profession the solo player is). For example, do you go for the pet(s) first or it's owner? Do you root one while leading the other(s) out of range? Do you charm one to have it kill the other(s)? Those who PvP a lot are likely very familiar with thinking about proper strategy for dealing with an opponent that has one or more pets.
However, as mentioned above, there are some serious potential problems that would need to be worked out to keep the game playable both by teams and solo. In solo missions for example, there would need to be limits on the number of pet class mobs possible in a give room as well as restrictions placed on mobs regarding the recasting of killed pets. Remember the chain casting problems of a couple patches ago? Imagine mobs that insta-casted new pets the second a pet is killed. Or MP healing pets with infinite nano's that constantly complete heal their masters. These kinds of things would definitely cause major problems.
So have at it folks. Share your thoughts and opinions on this and feel free to flame me for even bringing it up if it makes you happy. And I'd really be interested in some kind of official comment on this topic as well.
