party and solo based enhanced grinding systems

[Volsung]

Hello all, I'm just gonna propose some stuff to enhance both solo and party based exp/sp grinding. Reason: Leves are great for once every 36 hours exp session and cater to the casual game, but some of us would like to continue to exp either by ourselves or with others. Please feel free to share other ideas.

exp chain feature. I'd like to reference this entire post: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ight=exp+chain
It has some great ideas by a lot of posters. Mostly a mix of FF11 and 12, with choices for varied effects. I believe they said something was in the works for the future but still want to mention it. solo or party

lfp and /sea functions: I know this is coming according to admins, but probably won't make it for 1.18, they said it would be enhanced so maybe lfp for multiple classes? Would be amazing!

Guardian's favor: spend a portion (2-5?) for buffs or maybe a choice from a list of buffs. maybe works solo better but also in party

Promise system: pledge an amount of time to be exping at the town/camp aetheryte and receive buffs accordingly. While giving buffs this could prevent you from entering instances/leves/nms. But you can take off the effect, if taken off early the option to use again disappears for a set amount of time. works solo or party

enhanced effectiveness of incapacitation: increases tactical attack with different weaponskills

Class Entanglement system: party buffs based on varied weapon presences. I'm hoping there could be a buff per combo of two weapons and when the party is made you choose the ones you want from a list. ie. 8 different weapons = 4 buffs. 4 of the same weapon 2 different = 2 buffs

allow 7 player parties the buff large party but at 7% bonus instead of 10% like strength in numbers has. Its not always easy to fill all 8 spots.

some sort of party positioning feature to grant bonuses to players. maybe like when a fight starts move around the enemy until your character gains a glow, stay there until the others find theirs, then a 3d effect happens and all chars gain some sort of stat then can move freely. This would help smaller parties. EDIT HERE: maybe only use 2-4 party members for this so the rest of the pt is free. promotes strategy again

Comradeship: up to two other players may be registered as comrades, the more exp you achieve with them, the higher comradeship level goes, allowing for more enhancements

EDIT HERE: A system where a player in a party can request a position (lets use FFXIII ones for short) lets say you're in a party of 5, open the menu click your name and an option comes up that says position, then you open that and click on Ravager, then appropriate abilities for that position get a boost. I like this and lets you build a party but not necessarily quick cross classing

I know a lot of this is not detailed. SE does the balancing, keep things from being overpowered and has final words.

Please feel free to share additional ideas. I want a fun and rewarding exp party system !

[Gun_Anam]

'tis good to see a productive post on the forums with reasonable ideas. I'd like to make some comments...

Guardian's favor: spend a portion (2-5?) for buffs or maybe a choice from a list of buffs. maybe works solo better but also in party

This makes perfect sense. The Guardians Aspect is there and isn't being put to use to the best effect. I'd like to see the aspect cost reduced slightly for leves, then allow the 'buffs' you mentioned to be acquired from aetherytes to allow crafters to reap some benefit from GA SP bonuses.

Promise system: pledge an amount of time to be exping at the town/camp aetheryte and receive buffs accordingly. While giving buffs this could prevent you from entering instances/leves/nms. But you can take off the effect, if taken off early the option to use again disappears for a set amount of time. works solo or party

Wouldn't this negate the need for the GA buffs? It seems that it's not really a promise system if you're able to break it at any time. I'm not really on board with this one as it's a bit overkill.

enhanced effectiveness of incapacitation: increases tactical attack with different weaponskills

I agree that incaps aren't being used to their full effect either. Some incaps seem to have no effect at all, and others are quite difficult to achieve. For example, I was soloing some hogs in Mor Dhona last weekend and thought i'd try incaps for fun. I was killing them for about an hour and for almost every one it took me until the last 1 or 2 hits to finally get the incap on the head. This was with me using only the incap weapon skills every time I had enough TP to use them, along with damage buffs. Now I've no idea how it would be possible to incap these if there was more than 1 person attacking it as the damage from building up TP for even 1 attack would be enough to kill it before incap. I think the incap system needs to be re-evaluated as the damage required for incaps does not appear to have been taken into consideration when re-balancing for reduced party sizes.

Comradeship: up to two other players may be registered as comrades, the more exp you achieve with them, the higher comradeship level goes, allowing for more enhancements

I like this concept. It's sort of like attachment points for weapons except for people. As fun as it would be to turn my friends into materia when the attachment points reach 100 I think your idea of different benefits for this would be more appropriate.

[AlexiaKidd]

Some good idea's here, here are some things I would like to see to enhance play for solo and parties:

Party

SP/EXP Chains - As mentioned these would be great and I hope they can make them so the chain isn't just time based to keep it going. Maybe use other things as well like finishing the mob with a Battle Regime or Magic Burst and other things to make different Chain Types.

Remove the Mob Rank SP Cap - At the minute there is no point in fighting mobs more than 10 Ranks above your own as the SP/EXP is capped at that point. This needs to be changed as you can easily kill mobs of that Rank with only a few people so there is no need to group up in large parties.

Mob Distribution - Mob Distribution is horrible in this game and respawn times are too long. They need to create area's where all the mobs are of a similar Rank to allow people to grind on them. They don't even have to be all the same mob type, mix it up so that we can fight different types of mobs and use different strategies for them in the same area just make sure they are the same Rank range. Also look into mob respawn times as they are very slow for example if you do a Raptor grind you can easily clear the area before the first lot have started to respawn and that also involves running around a huge area to find them and if another party turns up to grind them too then you are screwed.

Changes to GA - Currently you can only use GA on Leves, why? It would be great if you used GA kind of like an SP/EXP band. If you changed GA so that it worked for a set amount of SP/EXP say for example it gave a 50% boost for 20k SP then that would be great. At the minute if you are smart you only use GA on the "good Leves" and this also promotes the idea of Leve abandoning a little bit. If GA was changed to work how I would like then you could fire it up, do a Leve that gets you 5K SP, do some grinding for another 10k SP and then do a Behest for another 5k SP and then your GA would run out as you had hit the 20k SP limit. Of course because of the 50% bonus you would have actually got 30k SP and not 20k SP. Also with this method for using GA you could even D/C or Logout and continue working towards your 20K limit on return so as not to waste it.

Solo

Call your Companion - To help solo players why not allow them to call out their companion to help them out in battle and fight along side you. If you are a GLA and had a mage Companion you could call them and they could come and cure you and then help with nukes. By calling them out I do not mean for just one fight I mean that they stay and follow you around for an hour or so. FFXI had a similar system but in FFXIV you could really flesh it out.

[Monkey]

Call your Companion - To help solo players why not allow them to call out their companion to help them out in battle and fight along side you. If you are a GLA and had a mage Companion you could call them and they could come and cure you and then help with nukes. By calling them out I do not mean for just one fight I mean that they stay and follow you around for an hour or so. FFXI had a similar system but in FFXIV you could really flesh it out.

Ever since I got my companion I've been wondering whether they'll put her to good use within solo or even party play. I would be even content if its like a rare occurrence. Such as if you and/or your party are about to wipe there's a .1% chance one of the party members companions just happened to be watching and gives the party a boost, whether it be reviving the whole party, if a mage, or taking on a few of the mobs attack, if gladiator. Some thing of this nature would satisfy me. This was just a random idea, but something that puts the companion to use would be great.

[Volsung]

Yea I don't believe ALL the items listed need to be used, but maybe pieces of them, all of them, or they can even be changed. Like maybe the positioning thing could only apply to 2-3 members and trigger events that way the rest of the pt is free.

I would LOVE to use my path companion! maybe they could be altered in a way different that our current leveling system just to give it more depth. you guys get likes