I was going over my goals earlier and realized something, none of em involve combat anymore. It's all craft, save up for a big FC house, and some fishing to kill time.

This isn't because I lack interest in stabbing things for fun and profit, it's just the next two instances I need to do to progress in gear is Turn 5 or EX primals. Have you ever tried to DF turn 5? Better question, have you ever wanted to waste an hour of your life and only have high blood pressure and a much lower opinion of your fellow man to show for it?

I've always kept to myself in MMOs as far as they would let me, played Bst in FFXI, geared up my DK just so I could solo more outdated content for neat toys in WoW with a little mount farming when I was feeling masochistic. (Damn you Rivendare!) I do enjoy the social aspect of the game, just not relying on others to pull off complicated fights.

To get to the point, why not add another option to gear up that isn't either a massive grind or reliant on a group. With a helluva lot of limitations of course.

I was thinking of an arena style area, a limited number of fights per day against truly hard solo bosses with a token system payoff. Say three tiers of tokens, bronze for mid difficulty fights that you have to be awake for but you won't need superhuman reflexes to survive. Silver for harder fights that would be akin to ex primals in solo form, need to be mindful of multiple bits of information at once but still can be reliably won, and gold for those days when you just want to eat dirt lol. Give the ability to buy the higher ranked tokens with the lesser ones, I'd say two bronze for a silver, two silver for a gold. Then allow players to buy better gear with gold tokens, five for a weapon/body/leg peace less for others.

The only drawback beyond just not liking the idea I can see is having to tune the fights to individual job classes, but since they could just reuse existing boss fights for the most part (without folks being too upset) it wouldn't be that much of a problem I think.

Ok, I'm done lol. Thanks for your time, and if this seems like a really bad idea please forgive me, I haven't slept in... Well I can't really remember. >_>