Is it possible for NPCs to drown?
 

Two separate instances.

1. Was hunting Aliezasuar in OOT. My method was to engage, debuff, get hit once on my enchanter the fear-kite him with an enchanter pet. He quite often runs out into the water, but it hadn't caused real problems before. On this occasion the mob died. My assumption was the pet had killed him. A corpse was there, but it was unlootable. At a distance it said I was too far away, when I got closer to it the message changed to "you may not loot this corpse at this time". Corpse rotted, certainly not worthy of a petition, just scratched my head and went back to it.

2. SK epic fight in OT. Items handed in, mob respawns in to the one to be killed for the quest. This time playing my warrior I tagged him with an arrow and headed a bit down the hill towards the water. He did not path well on the hill (different issue I suppose) and began hopping up and down on the vertical axis. Still we manage to do enough damage until he ran. He headed straight for the water and continued popping up and down in and out of the water. At this point he was impossible to hit, though down to about 5% health. Apparently he also has no regen. Not being able to cast spells or melee him we waited, hoping he would regen enough to re-aggro but it didn't seem as if it would happen. Further experimentation showed that I could hit him with arrows, so we levitated out over the water and bombarded him until he was dead. We encountered the exact same corpse conditions mentioned above. At the surface you were too far away, but as you dived down and got closer "connot loot corpse at this time." Corpse eventually expired (reimbursed on a petition).

The obvious similarity is that the mob dies, in water, produces a corpse but it can't be looted. While the first incident was a couple of months back and I don't really recall, I do know when the mob died in the second incident there was no xp message, and no faction message, but no other external factor seemed to be involved in killing it. Just a corpse no one in the group could loot as if the mob died of some other cause.

Can mobs really drown? And if so would it cause the corpse conditions I describe?

This has happened to me on land. One specific instance I remember the corpse looked like it was flying up in the air, then slamming to the ground over and over. I petitioned it and Sirken showed up like 30 secs later and summoned it down (I assume) and it let me loot it.

There is a lot of buggy stuff that can happen with mobs in water, but mobs wont drown.

sometimes they die "on top" of the water and you cant loot unless you are levitating on top of the water

npcs dont drown

I did come across a newsgroup article or two talking about how some mobs would suicide. In classic if they did, then the mob would just poof (no corpse).

They mentioned that aviaks supposedly could down but other npcs didn't.

Lots of urban legends, could have been some coding fail safes that were built in to prevent exploits but activated under weird pathing conditions.

Perhaps the same thing happened to you? (Npc suicide)

FYI I just stumbled across this from June of 2001. Thread is about a major guild called Conquest that got banned for exploiting a mob (according to GMs) in Sleepers Tomb, when GM showed up about people were angry they were getting banned for what they felt was an unclear exploit, someone in guild chat said this:

So maybe some mobs could drown but it was exploit territory

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!se...g/XqWeph-hqUAJ

Thread is titled 'Someone from Conquest emailed this to me (loooong) (1/3)'