Four Kinds of Trash Skipping

My flashpoint pugging over the last couple of months has provided me with a lot of food for thought. One of the things I've been thinking about has been the practice of always skipping as many trash mobs as possible.

I used to say that I just hated doing that. I like running flashpoints because I enjoy the gameplay of killing baddies with a group of people. If my pug actually avoids killing as many enemies as possible, I feel short-changed - and in game terms, I do miss out on rewards such as XP for mob killing and bonus missions.

That said, I do get that not everyone runs random flashpoints for the same reasons as me, and I've certainly been there too: when you run several randoms a week (or even day) and keep getting into the same one, sometimes you just want to get it over with so you can do something else next.

Leaving aside the issue of bonuses and tangible rewards though, I still have mixed feelings about trash skipping. After thinking about it some more, I can split the "types" of trash skips that people engage in into roughly four groups:

Walking Past

This is the type I mind the least, and it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Most flashpoints don't require you to kill every single mob in them, and there are "spare" groups that you can obviously walk past without engaging them if you only stay far enough away from them.

It's straightforward and doesn't require any kind of explanation. Every player has basic experience with aggro range and can probably spot opportunities where it's safe to walk past a pull without aggroing it. However, even if you have absolutely no clue on the subject it's enough for one person to know what to do, walk ahead, and the others can follow in their steps. The worst thing that can happen is that someone gets too close, you pull anyway and have to kill the mobs after all.

Climbing/Jumping

The difference between this type and the first one is that the safe route is 1) probably not obvious and 2) requires a certain amount of skill at precise character movement. I'm not counting things like walking up some of the rocks in Legacy of the Rakata here, because while you "climb" those in the sense of engaging in some vertical movement in that flashpoint, it's basically just running up a slope and doesn't require any special skill. What I am thinking of are things like the weird ledge run in the room with the first boss in Athiss, jumping up that rock in Assault on Tython to avoid a mob spawn on the road to the temple, and the multitude of weird and wacky moves that people like to try in Directive 7.

I hate these with a passion, mainly because it's so easy for them to go wrong in spectacular ways, meaning that instead of shaving a few seconds off your run you actually end up wasting several minutes or even incurring repair bills. Since a successful skip doesn't save you more than a minute of mob-killing time, tops, one guy in the group struggling to make the jump and having to re-do it three times is already enough for you to have effectively "wasted" time instead of saving it - and that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, people get stuck in the terrain and die, forcing them to make a long run back from the last spawn point or even the start of the instance, or you eventually just have to give up and kill the mobs anyway after wasting several minutes on trying to bypass them.

It's also the most likely type to create friction in the group as it pits those with jumping skills vs. those without them. Nobody enjoys holding up their party because they fail at jumping, and being the one person who just keeps bouncing off the rock can quickly turn something that was meant to be fun into a stressful experience. Plus I've seen sufficiently blasé players literally run off and abandon people who were struggling with a jump skip... it never leads to anything good.

Stealth-Assist

These are the types of skips that require a stealther in the group, either to crowd control a mob that would usually aggro in order to allow everyone else to walk past unharmed, or to sneak up to a console and click it without engaging any of the enemies around it.

These I don't generally mind too much, as it usually just comes down to walking past things once the CC has been applied, and the risk/reward ratio is similar to that of walking past other pulls, with the added fun of skilled stealthers getting to show off a bit. There are two downsides however.

The first is that if you are the stealther and you're inexperienced with what people "usually" expect a stealther to do in this particular flashpoint, things can get awkward as everyone just stands around staring at you, expecting you to do your thing. Of course nobody is actually going to explain what to do - after all the point is to save time, not to spend it typing out instructions. Instead they might just get annoyed with you for not magically knowing how to do it right from the get-go. Fortunately most groups aren't too fussed about this kind of thing though and will happily default to killing things if the stealther doesn't appear to know what to do.

The other potential problem arises if you bypass a lot of trash via stealth use, and then someone who doesn't have stealth dies and gets sent back to an earlier respawn point, for example by falling down a chasm in Red Reaper. Then everyone needs to backtrack and either re-CC or clear the trash to be able to reunite the group, as the respawned person will otherwise be separated from the rest of the party by a wall of mobs. Again, fortunately this isn't too common an occurrence, but when it does happen it's super annoying.

Timed Run

This is another variation of simply walking past things, but dependent on timing because the mobs move. Examples of this exist in the Foundry, Directive 7 and Depths of Manaan. These trash groups are scripted to enter the scene once a group member passes a certain threshold but don't aggro while moving in, so if everyone rushes past them in sync you can avoid fighting them before they start to take notice of you.

This can be fun to do with a group of friends that all know what to do but can be hard to get right even then, so don't expect a pug to succeed, ever. Again, you'd pretty much have to make sure to type out detailed instructions beforehand, and in that time you could've simply killed the mobs anyway so it's not really worth the bother. I don't really see many pugs care about these, fortunately.

Ultimately it's a simple equation of risk vs. reward. The reward is always to shave a few seconds of time off your run. Admittedly that's not much, but I understand that it adds up over the course of a flashpoint and that's why people consider it worthwhile. However - if your "skip" also runs the risk of actually prolonging the run by several minutes, it's not a good tactic to push on random people whose skill levels you don't know. In fact it's rarely worth it. I just wish I could explain that to more pugs who waste so much time on trying to jump over pipes and tents and other such nonsense, just to have someone fail at it anyway.