I’ve been thinking about trash a lot. No not the packaging from my chicken sandwich, I mean the mobs that have the audacity to block your way to the dungeon bosses.

You generally get 2 different types; you get your random static groups who hang about (obviously coming up with naughty ideas) and then you get patrols.

You would normally kill all the static groups that block your way and may skip the odd patrol (regretting it later when the healer forgets and gets caught drinking, then once again when the first person back after a wipe forgets about it leading to yet another long drawn out wipe and 2 LFD rage quits).

Basically players will kill the absolute minimum they feel they need to to get the dungeon finished.

And developers know this

The one thing I have never understood is having mobs you don’t need to fight in a dungeon, and I’m convinced this is where the term trash mob will originally have come from i.e. it serves no purpose, and is there not for entertainment value, but to deliberately slow you down from completing the dungeon.

There have been times I think devs have done a good job with trash mobs. City of Heroes would usually have the stipulation along the lines of “clear out the warehouse of all bad guys” or when you kill the last boss the rest run away. ZG and ZA in wow also do a good job of the trash being less numerous and also mini versions of what the bosses throw at you.

Aion on the other hand would let you get through a dungeon with killing maybe 20% of the mobs and you could literally weave between packs avoiding the agro-circles. Wrath was also a horrible use of it, as is the current 1-80 dungeon content in wow

I’d like to see some more interesting things done with trash beyond granting you rep with faction X. The ZA Bear run idea was by far the best implementation I have seen with you having to rush against it but if you didn’t want to you could complete it in your own time, however this did encourage skipping packs as well.

I’m not sure what the solution would be, I would rather they take the random packs of mobs that nobody ever fights away and do something more productive with the time. Even putting a quest mob over in that direction like they did in the original stratholme would be better than the current implementation.