Competition in Abyssea is starting to regress this game back to the bad old days of HNM camping. Here's a scoop. For most players, the old HNM camping was not FUN and neither is this.

This applies to ANY mob that is involved in the KI chain that leads to an NM that drops upgrade items for empyrean weapons. SE actually did a great thing to add 3 ??? spawn points for the final boss but the net effect of this is to increase competition for the prerequisite NMs. The forced pop NMs all need 3 ??? and something also needs to be done about the timed spawn NMs (this one in particular IMO).

The timed spawn NMs are a double whammy when it comes to competition. First, you must compete to get the pull. That's bad enough. BUT, because the KI will only go to the person that got initial hate, you usually need to move initial hate to the right person. That can only be done by having the claimer die and then the person that needs it, claim the mob when it goes yellow. The problem is, we're back to the bad old days of NM stealing. Everyone knows that most claims must get the hate transferred so crowd around the claim ready to voke / flash and steal the claim as soon as the puller dies.

This is not fun.

This could be improved by doing any number of things. Reduce the spawn timer down to 3 minutes. Keep the timed NM but also introduce force pop versions (remember the 3 ???). Make the KI drop not to the person with initial hate but to the party leader (or alliance leader for an alliance).

Just changing how the KI drops will at least reduce it to a compete for claim scenario without the steal claims.