How to fix A and S rank Hunts

[Lostwind1783]

Hunts are fine they way they are, HUNTS should feel like you need to get there fast or they are gone. It adds an awesome layer of competitive spirit to the game. If they dumb down the hunts that'd be a sad day.

While I like the concept, I have to disagree with needing to feel like you have to get them fast. I understand that as they are, they feel kinda like a bounty hunter system, where everyone is a hunter trying to kill their mark. But it isn't a competition if all the LS's are helping other players possibly kill the mark faster, which is rather inviting competition to give you less of a chance of winning yourself per se, as opposed to it naturally being built around the concept of a competition. If that were the case, the Hunt would be soloed by and credit locked behind the first person to tag it, because they "hunted" it, they "found" it, so naturally it's their win.

To the posters about PVP, PVP is another beast entirely that also needs a lot of adjusting. I would not want to force players to have to do it though as it is a very different dynamic to the rest of the game's content. (Not to mention all the pvp abilities to add to bars ><)

Also, I enjoy daily hunts now. More than anything, my post was made to try and end the vileness I feel from the community when A and S's spawn.

[Dante_V]

I don't mind the way they are. If you actually go out and find them yourself with a group and kill them it's fairly simple and easy. Usually if I'm hunting I don't use a LS. We group up, search, find it and kill it. No drama. No 100s of people porting in asking for holds and stuff. Just find the things yourself and go to town.

On the flip side I don't expect anyone to hold a hunt for me that I didn't find.

[Ayrie]

Just remove RAID gear/incentives. Make hunts fun for people who want to hunt. Give them appropriate awards.

When it becomes a convenient gearing path is when it turns absolutely unbearable to be around.

[KisaiTenshi]

you have a chance at a rare drop for beastmen seals

Forget that nonsense. The only thing you need to do to increase the toxicity of the hunts is make it so that there are rare drops that people complain about "hunting the mob 100 times and never getting it"

Hunts need one of two things to fix them:
1) Either scale the HP by participation, or scale it by the number of people in the zone and announce it to the zone so that everyone has a good 60 second warning that the monster has appeared to get to it.
2) or Remove the seals entirely from it, thus neutering the hunt.

The simplest solutions are usually the best short-term fixes, but long-term it would make more sense to stop creating "hunt" content when the players are not playing it as designed and rectify that solution.

eg
a) Scaling HP favoring fuller parties (eg monster has more HP if it's 50 single players than 7 parties of 7 and an odd man out or 5 parties of 8 and one party of 2)
b) Scaling reward by party size (eg 20% bonus for a full party)
c) Scaling reward by party contribution (eg 100% bonus to party contributing the most damage, 50% to second party, 25% to third party)

Those three ensure that players who actually want to do the hunt form parties, and leeches will just be left to form their own parties and not get bonuses.

And as for fairness
d) Announce in the zone when either the monster spawns, is discovered, or is engaged. Give a cooldown before it actually can take damage.
or
e) Drop some kind of token from FATE's in the zone that indicate when the next S rank hunt monster will appear if it will appear in the next hour.

[Vaer]

As long as this doesn't drastically change for any esoterics gear, hunts are a working system now.
.

Well the current upgrade items aren't highest tier like the twine or sand of time. This upgraded gear is at the bottom-mid of the tier. I can easily see them making the upgrade items for new weekly tome gear around the same amount of seals as before or more if they keep the weathered - unweathered system for tome.

[Bhuni]

Just stop with the upgrade items being available through the most braindead way possible and make people earn their fully upgraded gear.

[VarinaVashai]

Hunts are basicly just the same as F.A.T.E, its the same content type. difference is the icon.

As stated previously hunts where ment to be fought by smaller party to give some challenge, there is no challenge in 100 ppl steamrolling 1 npc all desperatly trying to get their one hit in.

So hunts are in its current form horrendous, the seals and whole hunt reward system should just be moved into the boss F.A.T.E for each zone. So that the "hunters" can still steamroll their seals.

And if they want to implement acctual hunts they need to up the difficulty, add tagging. And a far more complicated system then there is now for spawning them.
But that would make them Notorius monsters, and people would cry it is to difficult.

Or we can just keep Hunts as they are, there are alot of ppl that percive it as a very engaging challenge to hunt them down and roll them with an overwhelming amount of ppl, or they could just make an npc in ishgard for those players to talk to and get free seals since its the same difficulty.

The whole upgrade fad is bad design anyway, rather then having us upgrade the same gear. They should spend time designing new end game content raids etc for new gear of higher ilvl.

[Raist]

In Reference to the BS/KS BCNM idea...they could also take a cue from XI's eventual Abyssea and Land King changes. Farm rare drops from local targets and/or repeatable quests that you use to spawn an NM (either the stationary spawn point, randomn location, or an actual arena instance). This could also open the door to tiered spawns as well---lower tiered ones could drop the items to pop the higher tiered target.

Just as an example, S rank could require a specific drop from an A, or maybe a set from any combination of A, B, and local mobs. Same could be done for A--need to farm drop(s) from B's and/or locals to pop the A's. This way people can farm some items solo and then team up to kill the NM's in a <hopefully> somewhat more organized fashion.

[StouterTaru]

Top level gear upgrades should be exclusive to desynth of untradeable big fish 30 ilvls above desynth cap.

[Takfloyd]

No need for such convoluted changes. Hunts can be very easily band-aid fixed by just scaling their HP with the number of players fighting them so the "early pull" hate is eliminated.