Rethink this Hunt system.

It's bad. Forget the weekly rewards. I've put claim or damage on 20 hunt mobs of varying ranks so far today and still have not gotten credit for killing a single one. You stand no chance alone. You stand no chance really at all unless you find it and hid its location away from everyone else on the server. As it sits now its a worse implementation than the original iterations of Odin and King Behe. These have gone from something That made the patch look interesting to content I'm about to ignore completely.

It's basically a form of RNG... you have to be lucky to a) be in the area when it spawns, b) be near enough to the Mark when it spawns and c) get enough damage off on the Mark to even make the damn attempt to get to it worthwhile...

I personally think the hunt system needs an overhaul. The HP of the these 'elite' monsters is less then that of even fate beasts! That's crazy, considering you've got a good 25-30 people or more in the area looking for the thing. If the thing is dead before a good percentage of the people can land enough damage, what good is it?

I'm not saying I dislike the system, I just think it needs a bit of tweaking to improve how the credit is given and the life of said marks.

Hunts are the only part of the new patch that I'm not loving or enjoying about the new patch. I've spent several hours searching for my gc marks. After 3hrs of wandering about needlessly, I managed to find a now full to capacity hunting linkshell. Every time a mob was called I would haul my butt to the area asap only to find that I'm a million years late. Apparently the mob died somewhere in between the time it took ls member to type out where the mob is because ppl are camping zones like zombies. Then I decided to camp my butt in coerthas as well and follow the crazed hoards. After 5 more hours of hauling my butt back and forth all over the map...I now sit on 5 Allied Seals....really? Really though? What is this? This is not remotely funny. I'm not a lazy player who shys away from a bit of grind. It's an mmo grinds are to be expected but this is completely nonsensical. It's also bringing out the worst in players. Players are being blacklisted, cursed out and vilified in shouts.

I'm also dissapointed with the hunts. They are just fates. Nothing more. The only thing different is the reward.

I was hoping they would be locked to the party like treasure hunt enemies and leves. I was curious also what kind of gameplay would differentiate hunts from treasure hunts, fates and dailys (like a tracking skill maybe where you could sense the distance and direction of a roaming enemy, perhaps even with decoy enemies, or easily startled enemies that the group must surround or use traps to capture. Perhaps you would receive clues and figure out the conditions to make an enemy appear, like clearing mobs in an area, using emotes, time / weather conditions etc). Sadly the implementation doesn't give any new kind of gameplay, just fates with new rewards. I'm confused why the hunt board itself actually exists since it seems people can claim the reward without the marks anyway? I'm a player that appreciates new gameplay mechanics over simply new rewards from the existing fates system, so this is a big disappointment to me. I'm dissapointed with the lack of creativity in the hunts design.

That said, there are many aspects of the new patch I'm enjoying including the moogle mail quests which give interesting backstory to some NPCs, and the dungeons which i feel are well designed and fun. I look forward to playing in frontlines when the queue works and seeing what the chocobo training is like.

Agree. Hunts are hugely disappointing. What's worse than the low HP is that the only challenge to them is getting to the location before they're zerged down in 10 seconds - even the S class mobs go down in less than a minute on Phoenix. Instead of challenging fights that take some skill and time to beat, these are just tedious zergfests.

Increase the difficulty of the mobs, add a lot of HP to every class, I mean like 10 times what they have now, and consider adding some interesting fight mechanics and this might have been a good idea. Svara takes longer to kill than any S class I've seen so far, as does Behemoth and Odin. That can't be as intended?

It has become even worse on a high population server like Balmung. There are currently at least 3 competing, full capacity LS's around for spawn calls and all say they exist to create a database but this seems to be veiled altruism because there is always toxicity in shout now. Cursing people out, giving wrong locations, people getting a defeatist attitude and giving up or raging at all hours of the day. What I am sure the dev team intended as a way to make the world seem more lively and interesting has turned into a monster where if you dont turn off shout channel all you see is hate and anger. This is just the social impact I've seen on my server.

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Originally Posted by CaptainKyu

The HP of the these 'elite' monsters is less then that of even fate beasts! That's crazy, considering you've got a good 25-30 people or more in the area looking for the thing. If the thing is dead before a good percentage of the people can land enough damage, what good is it?

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This, a million times Square Enix. These so-called "Elite" mobs are about as elite as a Karakul...

Isn't there a patch tonight. All they have to do is add a zero onto each mobs HP and a bunch of the hunt problems will be fixed.

Yeah, today I tried for the first time an elite hunt to kill naul and there were so much parties thinking that he would be hard to kill and he was so weak that almost everyone couldn't reach him on time, including me

I think the weekly system needs to use the "Invisible" player-spawned FATE Mechanic for elite marks like with the Hildibrand Episode 3 did. This way, there would be no shortage of the elite marks, and everyone can do them.

the only solution to this problem is to add a cap on how much you can collect seals each week, like 450 each week.

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Originally Posted by coldreactive

I think the weekly system needs to use the "Invisible" player-spawned FATE Mechanic for elite marks like with the Hildibrand Episode 3 did. This way, there would be no shortage of the elite marks, and everyone can do them.

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You don't need to put them in a vacuum. You just need to increase the HP based on the number of players around - like FATEs and give them a similar reward threshold. There should be an amount of randomness in the system to make it fun and warrant the rewards it gives but as it is now, its unplayable content that I am ignoring until an adjustment is made.

I wont say it's completely disappointing. I just think it needs tweaking, such as giving the elite mobs more hp, or locking down rewards so you can't just keep farming for the seals without limits. Sure the 1x per week gives a bit more, but you can still farm all week long, that means there will be parties camping constantly and not allowing others to get any credit. Definitely increase hp of the elites to compensate for the dozens, possibly even hundreds of players that are camping each one, and possibly even limit how many times you can get seals per week.

Actually I've been thinking something like only getting credit for the first time you kill a specific mark in a week. Sure its a cap but its a very soft cap with 3 elite marks in every zone in the game. Some might find it lame but eventually it would slow the horribleness that has spawned out of hunt farming right now. All the marks need a 0 put behind their current HP during tonight maintenance. I would say have then scale like FATEs but that will only lead to Hunt Farm groups not sharing pop information with anyone and even fewer people will be getting rewards per server.

I'm guessing they are going to do something about the hunt system soon, and as much as I'd like to think it'd be done during this hotfix we're having now (At the time of this writing) I'm not holding out much hope that it'll be done this soon, they'll likely wait awhile longer to see if popularity dies down, or at least to decide on what to do about it.

I have more issues with the respawn times.

The B ranks apparently already take an hour to respawn. So something dies in 10 seconds, you miss it, and have to wait another hour for your next chance. Basicly you have 4 minutes out of every day in which you can battle the monster, if you happen to be at the exact spot at the exact time, and manage to land a hit before anyone else finishes it off.

I've heard the A ranks are a day (silly, since a day didnt pass yet), and they speculate the S ranks take a week.

I've thought quite a bit about the hunts while running them non stop these last days on a high population world. Honestly, I think that this is a mix of several issues and not just one, per why people spit and spat constantly over the spawn / are so aggressive about it.



-People are always going to notify eachother about each spawn, whether or not SquareEnix provides any mechanism to do so.

Since the only three semi-global (beyond party) means ingame right now are FC, LS, and shout, these are what's being used. FC's and LS's have limited player caps / are not true server-wide communication.

-As it's by word of mouth, and because players are copy-pasting word of mouth [*multiple times between LS / FC*] -- there's a relay delay before some people (of those that arrive late) even 'hear' about the existence of a Hunt.

-Those that don't notice a spawn / don't hear of a spawn, seem to get agitated even more so with eachother.. If someone arrives late by a single second and doesn't land a hit, they tend to blame the person sharing information (the messenger).

-As people are arriving, somebody is going to pull the mob early ... proximity the mob, run through it, etc. Doesn't matter if it's intentional or not, yet ... as soon as the mob 'moves' people are going to assume that's "it" and time to strike.


I see a few ways really that SquareEnix could attempt to address the time delay & communications issue while still keeping this similar to "invisible" FATE's / an actual hunt / looking for the enemy.

*Whenever a player LOS's a Hunt mob (it comes into view), show a marker on the map "OR" broadcast it server wide in a special "hunt" communications channel that the mob has been spotted.

(since players aren't communicating it, the necessity of hunt LS's are eliminated and people can't be singled out / blamed for being too slow with information)

*Add a global chat channel similar to many other MMORPG's with a long-delay (5+ minutes) between chat messages that users can send. Aka, Hunt-Chat.

----Unfortunately this will be abused for things other than hunts ... perhaps the chat channel can be limited with a 'special' macro that only broadcasts positions of a sighted mob.

*Add a delay or massive 'buff' before a hunt mob can be attacked after it's "sighted". Probably would work best combined with a zone wide or server wide announcement that a hunt has been found.

(for example, "You've sighted xxx! xxx prepares for a fight!")



I won't really re-touch on things like increasing HP / damage of the hunt monsters as people have suggested this plenty.

While it's a good idea in that it'd provide more time to land hits ... I'd say that this is probably unfair for smaller groups depending time of day to simply make it a flat increase. It may make more sense to attempt to scale them based on player participation / proximity or otherwise reduce the delay of people arriving.

Edit 2: Oh, right, and to reiterate what others have also stated (especially console players). Even if you help people show up, it won't do them any good if they can't see the mob. Rendering of objects still needs to be prioritized / sorted up to the cap (for any of this to matter).

I have to agree with what has been said so far. I love the idea of the Hunt Marks. But when you finally see one, and there's a group of 30-40+ players, and one pulls and everyone "zergs" it, and you are left getting next to nothing, it really, REALLY takes away from any of the intended fun that was there. Meanwhile after, people that couldn't make it or didn't get enough hits in harass and verbally abuse each other over shout and point fingers. It's ridiculous. It turns something that was meant to be an entertaining new view into a childish "eff you" argument.

Maybe make it where people nearby increases its HP. The experience can feel more like it was intended. The elite marks are meant to be a huge challenge by the way the game explains them. Please, make it that way. I, for one, want to feel the rush of excitement when I'm about to fight a A or S class mark, not frantically rush in my instant cast abilities and hope I can get a shred of the meat while it pitifully dies in 3 seconds.

I know mistakes happen, and I think this is another "more than anticipated" error. But I definitely look forward tot he hotfix for the hunt marks. Thank you, SE. :)

I suggest that the hunts should be treated like treasure maps.

You would get your bill from the board as usual and then head to the zone that it is in. Instead of deciphering it, you would talk to the Hunt-Scholar that is in that zone to find out where it was last seen. The area to go to would be random for everyone so there wouldn't be a huge group of people all in one place. You would then head to the area where it was last seen and do a /lookout. You would then get a message saying that your prey is some distance away in a certain direction. You then head off in that direction. Once you think you are where you need to be, you do another /lookout. The number of times you need to do /lookout would be random up to maybe 5 times and then the mob will spawn. The mob could then be treated like a leve mob and only the person or group that spawned it would be able to fight it. If in a group, then the party leader would do the /lookout so you don't spawn more than one at the same time.

There is also rumblings of certain unscrupulous, hardcore types also using third party programs to track and alarm spawn locations to a set group of people. These are, of course, the greedy types who don't bother waiting or sharing information so the shout in Balmung zones continues to be laden with hate, cursing and threats on the lives of others.

I myself am getting deterred to bother participating in these hunts as well. People are farming them. A fellow guild member brought it to our attention that he is getting ridiculous amounts of myth and seals from them. Also he was in a party that knew exactly when and where the hunts were and they are camping them. It is making it hard for players to participate in this content. I expected marks on these hunts to be a lot harder almost like a mini boss. They need to up the HP or I am not bothering with it.

Also he said he gets so much myth and seals he doesn't have to bother with the roulette system. SO they need to tweak this Hunt system.

Pulled this from the "Letter from the Producer"

"Which reminds me, I know a lot of players have been concerned this will be like back in the day, where one player or party would claim an enemy, and lock everyone else out from getting a reward. You'll be happy to know that the Hunt was not designed with any such claiming system in mind. In fact, some of the elite marks are so powerful, it would be in your best interest to shout for help before trying to lay a hand on them."

Then I lol'd at it. Make them harder SE.

concerning this weak hp thing, ive done 2 S rank hunt marks and they were almost too much for the 50 people to handle. the "elite marks" of grand company are indeed just B rank naul. B rank is the lowest possible difficulty for huntsman so yea theyre weak. S rank marks are huge in size and difficulty. the S ranks only spawn ever so often and A/B ranks spawn quite a few times a day giving more chances to actually find one.

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Originally Posted by Nomad-phx

concerning this weak hp thing, ive done 2 S rank hunt marks and they were almost too much for the 50 people to handle. the "elite marks" of grand company are indeed just B rank naul. B rank is the lowest possible difficulty for huntsman so yea theyre weak. S rank marks are huge in size and difficulty. the S ranks only spawn ever so often and A/B ranks spawn quite a few times a day giving more chances to actually find one.

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S ranks die in 30 seconds on Balmung.

People getting sands like water is the driving force behind all of this.

Elite Hunts need to be spawned like the Treasure Maps system. Take an item given to you by The Hunts NPC, we'll call it a "warrant notice" and you only may receive one once per week for the Elite Notorious Monsters. Let it be a completely random warrant for a hunt NM whether this week you get a B rank, S rank, or A rank. Go to the location on the map where the warrant tells you the NM was last seen, and when you use the warrant on the location only people in your party can engage it. And nobody can cheat since it is YOUR hunt warrant. Much like treasure maps. Depending on the rank of the hunt NM you will need more people in your party. If it requires a lot more people then by golly just allow us to make alliances outside of dungeons so we can do this kind of thing.

Make Daily Hunts ONLY Fate monsters or Fate NMs. This makes it fair so that everyone has a chance to get credit and/or the kills they need. This way the Fates are still being utilized and not being forgotten.

Again....fastest way to reduce the zerg hunts has become:

1.- Lower the myth/sold rewards. Getting enough seals for an oil/sand is useless if you dont have Sold for said item. This will make ppl also do dungeons/roulettes/raids/frontlines.
2.- Since you can pretty much get unlimited oils/sands with hunts, remove them from the weekly lookout in ST/Coil. This will send ppl who enjoy raiding back to raids.
3.- Make frontline reward allied seals. This will send everyone who enjoys pvp back to frontlines.
4.- Increase the reward for dailies. Make them give something around 50 seals each day. 10 days to get an oil if you want to avoid the drama and do the daily only.

You want lots of ppl doing lots of different stuff. Not all the server doing just one.
If not, the other option would be putting a 750 weekly cap = 1 sand per week.

I would simply

A) reduce tome rewards per kill
B) increase seal rewards for daily kills
C) remove Sands and Oils from being obtainable

I'm hoping this suggestion i'm going to throw up will get some traction. I would think it would be very easy to code these elite marks so that when they spawn they are immune to damage for a set amount of time.

I think this would solve all the anguish players are having with hunts, because then word of mouth would go out, but people would actually have time to get to the elite mark.

My suggestions:

B rank - Immune for 5 minutes after spawning
A rank - Immune for 7 minutes after spawning
S rank - Immune for 10 minutes after spawning

Let me know what you guys think and maybe a Dev will read this and pass it along to the programmers.

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Originally Posted by AlexandryaMajeel

I'm hoping this suggestion i'm going to throw up will get some traction. I would think it would be very easy to code these elite marks so that when they spawn they are immune to damage for a set amount of time.

I think this would solve all the anguish players are having with hunts, because then word of mouth would go out, but people would actually have time to get to the elite mark.

My suggestions:

B rank - Immune for 5 minutes after spawning
A rank - Immune for 7 minutes after spawning
S rank - Immune for 10 minutes after spawning

Let me know what you guys think and maybe a Dev will read this and pass it along to the programmers.

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I think anything will be better than what we have now, but having more players present than is needed only makes it harder to get in enough damage for a reward. Imagine triple the amount of players hammering down on these pathetic monsters >_<

I actually don't agree that the players who find the monster first should wait for everyone else to get there, and then get 1 or 2 seals as a result - it's selfish of the players shouting "Wait!" to expect this.

The other suggestion in this thread which I really like is to put a cap on the seals / tomes per week. To be honest I have no idea why these elites even give seals / tomes when you don't have the bill. What's the point in even grabbing the elite bill each week??

Why not allow only players with the bill to receive a reward, and to always get the reward if a single hit is landed. However, there could then be players by the end of the week who are left hunting alone, and no one interesting in answering their call for help - so if you're in the party of someone with the unfinished bill you should get a small bonus reward. This will encourage people to join the player and assist them, but deter other groups swarming in to take over.

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Originally Posted by AlexandryaMajeel

I'm hoping this suggestion i'm going to throw up will get some traction. I would think it would be very easy to code these elite marks so that when they spawn they are immune to damage for a set amount of time.

I think this would solve all the anguish players are having with hunts, because then word of mouth would go out, but people would actually have time to get to the elite mark.

My suggestions:

B rank - Immune for 5 minutes after spawning
A rank - Immune for 7 minutes after spawning
S rank - Immune for 10 minutes after spawning

Let me know what you guys think and maybe a Dev will read this and pass it along to the programmers.

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Maybe 2 for B. 4 for A. 5 for S. Too much time and the whole entire server will be at the higher ranked mobs and probably crash the server.
As it is when an S pops and 1000 people are fighting it you cannot see the mob and only ground/circle AOE can hit the mob. Or spam heals. (Unless they fix the mob's to appear on screen always like Behemoth/Odin)

The way hunts were intended originally was to be an optional soloable experience with varying difficulties. B marks were meant to be soloable by an i90 player, A marks meant for a party of 4, and S marks meant to be an 8 man raid. At no point was it ever meant to be server wide content. So raising the hp was catering to the masses of whiners. These were never meant to be Odin scale fights. The mistake square enix made was ever including those damnable books in the reward system. Not only have they broken any kind of balance in the item level scene, they have pretty much condemned hunts to be a Zerg fest because of it. Why run coil, when you can farm hunts all night and hit i110 in less than a week? So the first fix I can see is removing those books.

Be nice if someone from SE would chime in and engage with us in discussion of the Hunts. I do feel sorry for those of you that want to do other end game stuff but can't because of long cues or lack of players.

I feel like all of the people wanting a cap on seals and/or elimination of books are people who have a hard time getting seals. I worked my butt off and pulled several all-nighters to get my seals; I earned them fair and square, and missed as many hunts as I got full credit for. I don't want some defeatists raining on the parades of the people who are putting in the time and effort by complaining enough to get a cap put on seals.

I've gotten around 2000 seals so far while taking several multiple-day breaks from the game and hunting. Now that they've raised the hp of them the only suggestion I agree with is the mandatory invulnerable time (1-2minutes max) as there is a significant relay delay depending on who is on at the time and there are players who will pull early just to spite others.

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Originally Posted by NozomiKei

I feel like all of the people wanting a cap on seals and/or elimination of books are people who have a hard time getting seals. I worked my butt off and pulled several all-nighters to get my seals; I earned them fair and square, and missed as many hunts as I got full credit for. I don't want some defeatists raining on the parades of the people who are putting in the time and effort by complaining enough to get a cap put on seals.

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It's interesting to note that someone who grinds these hardcore already misses half of them. Makes you see how many are missed by regular players. Heck, it's gotten so bad that i just decided that i'm giving up. I'm not waiting around for anyone anymore now. If i find it, i kill it, because i have every much right to do so as the next person who pulls ahead of time or zergs it down in seconds with 100 men. People who try and reset it get reported. People who go along and hit it are more than welcome to.

I only miss them because people like you pull early or it was discovered and relayed to several large groups I'm not a part of before someone in my party caught wind. If people wouldn't cause panic by pulling early more people could arrive and calmly organize themselves before signalling the pull. As it isn't a rushed ordeal everyone has time to get in a party and everyone gets full credit. I know this because during my "hardcore" grinding the hunters went through phases (really interesting from a psychology pov actually) and during the phases where most people cooperated with holds, resets, and communication between party networks I made it to 85-90% of hunts. I attribute the missed % there to early pullers (we noted who they were and bl'ed them) and my own derpiness on map coordinates(damn those split zones!).

How are you not noticing your faulty reasoning? "I miss them because someone pulled early so I'm going to pull early/as soon as I see it (and perpetuate the problem)."

Well, as the saying goes, if you cant beat them, join them.

I tried being nice, infact, i'm probably one of the nicest people you'll ever meet normally. But i've had enough. If even 10% of the things i found (yes, i'm actively looking for things, finding things and waiting on people to show up) gave me full contribution, i'd be surprised. Always some zerg showing up and taking it out in 5 seconds regardless of B, A or even S.

If me and my group cant even get enough hits in for more than 2-3 seals, then why bother. I want my points just as much as the next guy. And obviously playing nice isnt working.

As I read your post I was immediately hit with déjà vu of peoples' attitudes towards the radar thing. Everyone was /shout-ing about how they should just give up because they couldn't get anything and clearly the only ones getting seals were the radar users(I was quite offended by that as I neared my third day in a row with no sleep).

People who QQ'd seemed to either actually give up or adopt the radar (adding to the problem). It's the can't beat them attitude.

I haven't been actively hunting for a week or so (just picking up stuff I hear in an ls while working on books) but since the hp adjust I've noticed a large increase in how long it takes to down a hunt. Someone pulled Melt early yesterday and because there were so few people we fought it for 3-5 minutes and got hit with a lot of the attacks you used to didn't see because it died too quick. Perhaps the situation is a bit worse on Behemoth or something.