I've been giving the hunt a lot of thought lately, due to its prominence whenever they come out with new content. I realize the devs are no longer looking at this thread, but I'm going to put this out there anyway...


The current system is useless as f**k. If you want to gate content behind something like the hunt, make the hunt an actual event, rather than zerg content that pisses people off. There's already a decent system in place to do this, it would just take some adjustments.

The daily hunt bills are perfect, and there should be more of this. Gives you something to do every day that increases your progress towards the goal of gearing up your character. However we still have these A and S rank hunts that people kill in under 10 seconds to the chorus of a hundred people screaming "TOO SOON!". Much like how the B rank hunts are now a 5 second spawn and a weekly bill, something similar could be done with A's and S's. So here's my proposal:

B rank hunts become a daily hunt for a large number of seals, rather than a weekly. The difficulty of B's is perfect, tough enough that you might want someone else around, but it's not really necessary. Totally soloable. They respawn in 5 seconds, so anyone who needs them can hunt them down and kill them. People who are "Late to the party" merely have to go find it again. Most people hunting B's will wait a few minutes for the 2 or 3 other people in the zone who need to kill to arrive, and there's almost never any bad blood over these.

A rank hunts become a weekly target pulled off the hunt board, just like B's are now. A's should be tuned to be a challenge for a team of 4, with more hit points rather than dealing more damage (This would eliminate the NEED to have a tank, though a tank would certainly make it easier. Since it's open-world, most people have a tank class available anyway). A rank mobs would be spawned and locked to the team that spawns it by doing something like lighting a series of torches (Example) in the 4 corners of the zone, requiring that you have at least 4 people. An A rank hunt mob would not be able to be spawned as long as that A rank is currently active, and the currently spawned mob would despawn after a reasonable time has elapsed to prevent people from spawning it and leaving, blocking others from spawning it.

S rank hunt mobs would also be a weekly bill that you get from the board, but tuned for a party of 8. Similar methods that are currently used to spawn the S rank mobs would be used, but the chance of spawning it would be much higher to prevent a build-up of people trying to spawn one mob, then 10 teams zerging it down (As we have now). S ranks would also be locked to the team that spawns it, just like A's are.

This would allow the more careful gating of gear upgrades by SE (I saw someone running around in full 180 on day one of early access on Behemoth...) and would virtually eliminate the toxicity of the community in regards to hunts. Yet at the same time, it allows the same feeling of it actually being a hunt, rather than an instance with a boss.

But I tend to have unpopular opinions. :P