Bullshit. There is a
great RDM on Odin who has soloed many Abyssea NMs without cruor buffs or atma, this is a RDM soloing. Your telling me you think partys of people couldn't kill them because of this? Just a few examples are him soloing
Hedjedjet that way, and
Azdaja. If he can kill these, which are some of the harder NMs in Abyssea, solo, without cruor buffs or atma, then just how hard would it be with a proper party?
Your 1st post said...Are you talking about new content that would be this way? Or some setting that just removed the ability to gain a bonus from these effects? If its the latter thanAnd with that, you have exactly what you asked for, because you now do not have those. If things are so easy then make it harder on yourself. If you had a difficulty setting then it would be no different at all, you would still have the choice, use buffs, make things easier, or leave them out of the picture, and you can try to fight without them, and make it harder as you wish.
The idea of having better rewards is stupid, that just makes it sound like you want to have some "pro" gear so you can show it off and gloat about it. Rewards should be equal, if you simply want the game harder, so be it, you have the ability to make it harder, rewards should not be different because you choose to do so. You want the game to be more fun for those of which want it harder, thats exactly what you can do, but if its only for fun then the rewards should not make much difference in the end, your enjoyment is what should matter, thus it is what you should get.
As for this argument...Not really, thats exactly what the OP made the idea sound like for the "hardcore" difficulty, that cruor buffs, atma, atmacite, Abyssite, and temp items, would be unavailable to the player. This simply means, don't use them, and ta da, you got what you asked for. As I said and pointed out earlier this post, people can solo Abyssea NMs, thats not to bad. People have soloed VWNMs as well, such as the Bastok T4, is it a T6 Jeuno? No, but thats where your lovely idea to come up with new strats comes in, work it, improvise! People solo what is talked about being uber hard in these threads without buffs, the simple thing is if people are soloing this, you can do it with a party and probably win if you get a good strat for it, but no one tries, because no one really wants it. You want them to weaken the NMs as well I suppose? Well that doesn't help because then your getting weaker NMs, and it becomes easier.
Short version:People solo what is supposedly to hard for a party to kill without super buffs, suck it up, you can have hard mode all you want already, its right there, just stop acting like it isn't an option.