Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Nie]

First, thank you to the OP for the translation. Opening the discussion is a great service to the community whether or not people agree with the premise of the post.

Here are a few things I'd like to add to the conversation:

"100% randomness would be unfair"
Why can't monsters have cooldowns, TP, and other combat resource limitations like players? Even better, how about they use things with some measure of AI? For example, Titan could use WoL when people are spread out, or might use mountain buster when the tank's HP isn't full. (In its current state this might be overwhelming; would need adjustment)

Vertical growth
I understand many people loathe the idea of multiple gearsets, but I think that kind of horizontal equipment progression is fun and allows character growth to happen at a slower pace. This allows the players on the more hardcore end of the spectrum to make marginal gains while the more casual players aren't left so far behind.

Content locking
While I understand the purpose behind time locks, it creates LS/FC/Static administrative nightmares. One common problem is a FC with some "static" groups and a surplus of a few extra people. The group must work out scheduling and determine which people are left out. Those people are forced to run with others who are not locked. Though I understand the intention is to provide people without an in-game community to run content, it detracts from the communities who want to help all of their members clear on a weekly basis without the agony of trying to find people who have a similar level of experience with a particular encounter. As an example, I 1-shot most of act 2 with my static, but struggle for hours to clear on my alt character (some weeks, tens of hours).

In addition, it would be nice to see at least some triggered (or similar) content. This would provide something for a small collection of players to do. For example, Sky and Sea were so successful because you could start with 2 people and farm easy triggers. As more and more people logged on, you could add them to the group and progressively tackle harder content. This type of content allowing group size to scale allowed people to log on and off as they pleased, without a hard schedule, and without fear of being locked out for the week.

Large-scale content
Simply put: it would be great to run content with more than 8 FC mates. The next addition to Crystal Tower is supposed to provide this but may not satiate the desire to build strong cohesion within a community.

Instanced content & immersion (yeah, I said it)
Simple things like the vast majority of content being instanced, not being able to see LS/FC details or even send and receive tells in instances is downright frustrating. A nice compromise would be simply fixing communication channels within instances. Real-world content has limitations with spawns, griefing, hardware/rendering/lag, etc... but some limited forms of it would be a nice addition.

[TeaTimeBear]

Instanced content & immersion (yeah, I said it)
Simple things like the vast majority of content being instanced, not being able to see LS/FC details or even send and receive tells in instances is downright frustrating. A nice compromise would be simply fixing communication channels within instances. Real-world content has limitations with spawns, griefing, hardware/rendering/lag, etc... but some limited forms of it would be a nice addition.

(Sorry about multiple posts, I don't have enough rep to include them all in one; tried to shorten)

Edit button gets past 1k.

[Nie]

Edit button gets past 1k.

Thanks, guess I should change it to "too noob to forums to know how to circumvent the character limitation"

(I've consolidated them now)