The hunt solution: scaling HP (used in GW2 and WoW already...)

I'm surprised FF isn't using this...

The premise is simple: when a hunt mob is being attacked by 10 players, it has enough HP for those players to kill it in 2 minutes.

When the same mob is being attacked by 100 players, it gains enough HP that it will take those players 2 minutes to kill it.

For each additional player fighting the mob, it gains X HP (only the devs know what X should be).

That way, mobs don't melt in seconds because someone pulls early. This would be a VASTLY better way to regulate hunts, not only to prevent zergs from melting the critter, but also to ensure that a hunt mob could be handled by ~10 players (or less) on lower pop servers if need be.

Insert "WoW has this, so I don't want it even if it's a good idea" comments.

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Originally Posted by 314159265358979323846264338327

Insert "WoW has this, so I don't want it even if it's a good idea" comments.

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Heh, probably, but WoW stole it from GW2 since they used it first. ;)

Also, MMOs steal from each other all the time. I Yoshi-P was a WoW fan before he took the reigns and WoW has definitely stolen a few things from FFXIV already...

I feel like this is how it should be. FATE's already have something similar, albeit not as good. monsters hp is scaled depending on the size last group that killed it, so they at least have the means to measure how much HP to give a monster based on how many people beat it up lol.

WoW kind of stole the party finder from FFXIV but they improved it and made it cross server. Now if only SE could make a cross server party finder.

There is no such thing as early pull. Finders, keepers.

I think that sounds like a reasonable suggestion, not sure if SE would do it based on last number of participants (like in fates), or based on people within a certain radius, or people in the map prior to aggro - and perhaps it's best if, whatever version of "scale" they do use, they don't tell us. But indeed some form of scaling would be appreciated.

Single enemies in GW 2 have no scaling HP, if i remember it correct. The whole zones have level-sync.

This just seems like it would be way too easy for people to grief by running in, attacking the mark, and then leaving, thus making its HP skyrocket.

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Originally Posted by LunaHoshino

This just seems like it would be way too easy for people to grief by running in, attacking the mark, and then leaving, thus making its HP skyrocket.

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This happens in FATEs already. You are a lone levelling job and a level 50 jumps in and defeats the FATE mob with you. The next time you run into it you cannot get it down.

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Originally Posted by LunaHoshino

This just seems like it would be way too easy for people to grief by running in, attacking the mark, and then leaving, thus making its HP skyrocket.

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The extra HP from a single person will hardly do much with 100 others fighting the same mob.

There areee two reasons we cant have nice things

Ps3 limitation

"It can be abused if an fc with 20 lalafels walk into a bar and drinks 2x X-potion of vitality while the last lalafells goes /hildy and pulls the hunt"

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Originally Posted by 314159265358979323846264338327

The extra HP from a single person will hardly do much with 100 others fighting the same mob.

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Well if it were to follow the WoW version of it, it literally doubles the targets max and current HP (along with some minor attack boost) for each person to hit it. So by example, if the mob was currently at 500k/1000k HP while one person was attacking it, another person joining in would cause it to instantly jump to 1000k/2000k and so on until a certain cap... I think it was a little over 50mil in WoW.

Not exactly the best solution for FFXIV, but it really does slow down a kill noticeably in WoW (assuming number of players don't already double the capped increase). And I say not the best solution here because seeing the Hunt targets HP multiply up to 50+ times isn't exactly going to be an amount of time a lot of people are willing to spend here lol.

GW2 using pre-quest for big event that last for 2-3mins, meanwhile, ppl will gather at spot for the big event.

I'm pretty sure FATEs have a similar system where the mob health is related to the number of people attempted it the *last time* it popped.

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Originally Posted by Welsper59

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It's not quite doubling the HP, at least that it wasn't like that when I was farming in The Timeless Isle. What it does is increase the mob's max hp by an amount, but the percentage of their current hp remains the same. The result was that no matter how many players were attacking it (up to say, 25 or so for a typical one, 40 for a large-scale, long respawn timer), it'd take relatively the same amount of time to kill the mob with 10 players as it does with 3 players.

A ranks are always scaled to be taken down by a full party, and that doesn't change to accommodate for the massive swarm of players that are enticed by hunt rewards. Not even S ranks who are supposedly designed for alliances (?) which are three full parties...which again doesn't accommodate for the sheer amount of players. On top of that I'm still having rendering issues playing on my toaster (and possibly the PS3 players and even PS4 as well to this date)

Another thing to note was that while Timeless Isles was a way to catch up gear, it also wasn't overgearred throughout. That's the problem with our current hunts that it's unchanged when it was introduced in 2.3 (by which point it was already outgeared by players who had HA or unweathered).

And FATEs do use a similar scaling, although I feel that it's a pretty terrible one; it scales the FATE based on how many players cleared it before hand. It works for FATE farming in CCH and NT...sure (maybe, some of these really overextend their welcome at times). Not so much for Animoose books or Atma farming in certain regions.

As I've been saying quite a lot already. Just need to have a stacking buff on the boss. For every (alive) person in the close proximity or attacking the boss, it gets a stack of HP up or Vulnerability down buff. Problem solved. And just scale the power of that buff stack so that it always stays alive for something like 2-4 minutes. Seems a straight forward dynamic solution in my opinion. So if you leave proximity of the hunt the boss looses stack, if you die he looses stack etc.... so that it is always possible to kill it but never to zerg it in 10s.

Sounds like a great idea. It would certainly allow for more participation in hunts given that early pulling especially with S ranks seems to be the menu du jour. Hopefully SE will implement something like this soon. It doesn't sound like it would that hard to code although I might be wrong.

It looks clear that Square has zero intention of altering how hunts are being done. If they didn't do anything in 2.3, what makes you think they were going to do anything for 2.5? The fact that they made the hunts even more rewarding while making the grind for the new book take twice as long shows that this is how the hunts are going to be. People only want an HP/buffer to the marks so that they don't be the last hunter to come in and see the mark's already dead and they want the rewards right now.

I support this idea. If we could scale it, think about how many fewer people will complain about early starts. If there's still a chance someone late can still get a shot, I'm all for it. That hunt mob is still going to die eventually anyway. Besides, I don't think the devs ever liked how players zerged hunts in the first place anyway.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

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Such a lie.

They made a change a three weeks after 2.3 so that we wouldn't get the same B rank as our weekly bill twice in a row.

But in the end, I never liked how hunts were introduced; it seems incredibly short sighted that they designed it to be something for a full party/alliance when they make the rewards so overpowered (esp on release) that it would earn the attention of entire servers (going by their response on that they weren't expecting it, but I don't recall this fully so take it with a grain of salt.) Hope they'll have a little bit more foresight for future content and not run into the same problems.

People have been recommending this since hunts were first released, but SE hasn't done anything but increase their base stats so that S and A ranks last 5 seconds longer. I honestly don't think they know how to scale stats properly based on players because that's the most obvious solution to this issue, yet they haven't done it yet.

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Originally Posted by LunaHoshino

This just seems like it would be way too easy for people to grief by running in, attacking the mark, and then leaving, thus making its HP skyrocket.

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lol during first week of Ninja in Coeurl, probably more than 30 ninjas did the Dodo fate boss in Western La Noscea. Next time round there was only 10. It was impossible to complete LOL.

Who cares who had it first or will have it last. Simple problems need simple fixes. this doesn't need over thinking. If x players are attacking a Hunt mark. buff the Hunt mark by x. Why is that so hard? increase its defense, increase the HP ANYTHING AT ALL. Why the players have to constantly ask for such a simple fix to problem that has been around since hunts have been introduced is starting to reflect how little they pay attention to what we are actually doing with our time in game.

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Originally Posted by Sove92

There is no such thing as early pull. Finders, keepers.

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Of course there's a such thing: it's pulling before the majority of the people hunting arrive, and there's absolutely NO point in doing it, aside from wanting to be a douchebag.

You gain NOTHING from pulling early. One tank in your party and you'll get full credit (I can get full credit on A ranks with just Titan-Egi...).

And LOL: "finders keepers"?! These assclowns that are pulling early aren't finding ANYTHING for themselves but waiting until someone else announces the mob, then pulling on arrival, not granting the same courtesy to others that was granted to them.

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Originally Posted by LunaHoshino

This just seems like it would be way too easy for people to grief by running in, attacking the mark, and then leaving, thus making its HP skyrocket.

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I wouldn't worry about that for hunts because the vast majority of people will be there to actually hunt.

Also, it's far easier to grief people right now by pulling ASAP and then laughing at people who didn't make it in time.

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Originally Posted by Welsper59

Not exactly the best solution for FFXIV, but it really does slow down a kill noticeably in WoW (assuming number of players don't already double the capped increase). And I say not the best solution here because seeing the Hunt targets HP multiply up to 50+ times isn't exactly going to be an amount of time a lot of people are willing to spend here lol.

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It doesn't need to literally double the mob's HP every time, just increase the HP so that the time to kill it stays consistent.

And I hate to say it, but scaling HP is the BEST solution: we need hunt mobs to not melt in seconds and a flat HP increase would only mean that the mob would be impossible to kill if there was a small number of people there to kill it.

Scaling is the best option.

The only true solution to hunts is to make them work like leves, locked to party content, damn, they could even be that much needed FC content.

This constant spawn of monsters that just die in seconds is nowhere near what Hunts were supposed to be and devs themselves accepted that. This dissastrous system needs to be redone or gone. Increasing or reducing HP won`t do a thing.

Might be easier to code a persistent Damage Taken trait that scales in relation to the number of people on it's hate list. It could be a sliding scale that is calculated proportionally against the number of players (perhaps a number of players over 8, so it only kicks in if the group is larger than the intended design), or it could simply be bracketed to kick in a boost periodically as the player numbers increase.

They are already tracking this data to calculate the rewards when it dies--the enmity tables are what determines how many seals/tomes you get. Would just be applying that same data to another mechanic during the fight, and it should be a simple enough mod to put into the damage calculation. There may already be some sort of Alpha or Delta already in use that they could just modify based on the level of this trait.

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Originally Posted by Alexander_Dragonfang

This constant spawn of monsters that just die in seconds is nowhere near what Hunts were supposed to be and devs themselves accepted that. This dissastrous system needs to be redone or gone. Increasing or reducing HP won`t do a thing.

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If you want to say that the system in general is just an odd one, I won't argue with that.

However, scaling HP works, as evidenced in WoW on TI.

If every hunt mob took ~2 minutes to kill (which is how long they take to kill with fewer people), then it wouldn't be a problem. Everyone will have had an ample window in which they could've reached the mob, got invited to the party and earned their seals.

The problem with the current system is that it allows a miniscule portion of a server's population to ruin the fun for the majority of the population, especially when hunts are SUPPOSED to be a more casual method of earning seals/tomes.

They have already boosted hunt hp as much as they are going to since they were implemented. Its not something they expected the whole server to zerg at once so if you miss it oh well move on to the next.

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Originally Posted by Set-Abominae

They have already boosted hunt hp as much as they are going to since they were implemented. Its not something they expected the whole server to zerg at once so if you miss it oh well move on to the next.

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They didn`t expect it. But one will thought they will have learned what happens to Hunts when reward is too convinient.

We had the same troubles months ago. Now SE is setting a really bad trend of "low" and "high" hunt seasons between patches, where hunts will mostly dissapear and hunts will again overload the PF... If hunts were a properly made system and not a sorry excuse to bring players to area maps, this could be evaded altogether.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

WoW kind of stole the party finder from FFXIV but they improved it and made it cross server. Now if only SE could make a cross server party finder.

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They'd have to make zones cross-realm/server first.

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Originally Posted by RichardButte

I'm surprised FF isn't using this...

The premise is simple: when a hunt mob is being attacked by 10 players, it has enough HP for those players to kill it in 2 minutes.

When the same mob is being attacked by 100 players, it gains enough HP that it will take those players 2 minutes to kill it.

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Final Fantasy 14 already uses a similar system with FATEs... If ten people go to a FATE the next time it will spawn it will have increased HP, even if you're solo.

The hunt marks HP should probably be boosted one way or another, at least to account for the fact that hunters are typically 20+ item levels higher than the last time hunts were being zerged like this.

Doesnt this happen in fates already? Like more people = more mobs or something.
The difference is fates have a set "area" so its was probably easier to programme based on the the amount of people within the small fate area.
Whereas regular mobs do not have this luxury to work with. (stab in the dark, im not technical at all)

My honest advice for Hunt is:
Go do life for a month.
When you come back people will be crying about something else and hunt will be irrelevant.
You do not NEED the 130 gear NOW, and it will be much easier to get soon.

you say that as if i didn't experience hunts the first time around i know but the lesson you think they should have learned isn't relevant since this is their standard operating procedure and is working as intended

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Originally Posted by Set-Abominae

you say that as if i didn't experience hunts the first time around i know but the lesson you think they should have learned isn't relevant since this is their standard operating procedure and is working as intended

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Sometimes developers don't take action until enough people complain over a long enough period of time.

In fact, that's usually how change happens in MMOs...

"It's a year later and people are still complaining? I guess we'd better look into it after all..."

The devs already had spoken up about it back when 2.3 launched. Yoshida said they don't want to just resort to beefing up marks' HP because then they become something like Odin/Behemoth that requires that many players to kill and he doesn't want to make hunts become just that. Again, it don't seem likely that there will be any change and any temporary changes now is going to be wasted efforts once people stop hunting. Perhaps hunts are done differently on non English servers, I dunno.

the Hunt solution is selling Carbontwine and Carboncoat with Wolf Marks.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

The devs already had spoken up about it back when 2.3 launched. Yoshida said they don't want to just resort to beefing up marks' HP because then they become something like Odin/Behemoth that requires that many players to kill and he doesn't want to make hunts become just that. Again, it don't seem likely that there will be any change and any temporary changes now is going to be wasted efforts once people stop hunting. Perhaps hunts are done differently on non English servers, I dunno.

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Scaling ≠ beefing up HP

Scaling makes the mob have an appropriate amount of HP for the number of players trying to kill it, thus raising or lowering it to the challenge at hand.

Even with only 10 people, an A rank has never been like Odin or Behemoth and never will be, even with scaling.