Quote Originally Posted by Gnova View Post
My preferred MMO experience would be level 5-50 in overland groups exploring non-insyanced dungeons and killing named mobs for gear.
Except that the gear is indirect (through seals) I think that's kind of what FATEs are intended to be. Either a massive boss monster or swarms of smaller ones that take numerous people to take down, but they appear on the open landscape rather than in an instance, so anyone in the area can join in. The concept's great. The implementation, however, is a bit of a letdown, I think because there's rarely any sort of complex mechanics involved, so if you try doing a lot of them, they just become a mindless grind. I think if as much care went into designing the FATE system as designing the dungeons, they could have the potential of being a real highlight of the game.

(The only case I can think of where any other mechanic was used in a FATE beyond "just kill everything" was a temporary FATE during the winter festival, where you need to kill imps, but couldn't attack them until you got hit by a snowball from the boss. At least it demonstrated that yes, it's possible to put fight mechanics into a FATE. If they'd follow up and expand on that idea a bit further, they could come up with something good.)