I have an idea! (This is where you run away screaming)

[Durthane]

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kept to myself in MMOs as far as they would let me, played Bst in FFXI, geared up my DK just so I could solo more outdated content for neat toys in WoW with a little mount farming when I was feeling masochistic.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. >_>

[Mahri]

If the difficult solo bosses were only such due to clever mechanics and not just because they're giant HP sponges that you'll never outlast in a DPS race, I'm all for it.

I love difficult solo content. Mind, it makes sense why devs would want to focus time and money on group stuff in an MMO, but there is absolutely a place for one-player challenges. Some of the class/job quest duties, for example, can be rather tricky, and that's a good bar to start from.

If these challenges were similarly based in a personal choice made by your character, like job, Grand Company, or role, that could be a good place to start building ideas at.

[Durthane]

That's about what I had in mind. Mostly just take existing bosses and ramp up the difficulty while tuning it to solo content. Would have to prevent kiting for the most part or Brd, Smn, Sch, and Blm are going to laugh at the bosses. Lots and lots of insta death mechanics, some mechanics similar to Urganites in FFXI where you need to do somthing to open the boss to damage or you'll never beat the fight before the timer or your HP runs out.

Maybe have a few bosses special made for the arena, platinum fights you have to pay gold tokens to unlock or something. (Key word: Unlock, not enter. We want people to have to die a bit in this place and losing a big investment like that would turn people off to the game) Make em break the normal play style of the game, a crash bandicoot style chase boss without the bastard camera angles, stuff like that. What they could reward I have no idea, maybe just gold tokens with the real reward being the fight itself and achievements.

I've slept since I thought about this last and it still seems like a good idea so I guess that's a good sign lol. Thanks for y'alls time.

[Woggers]

No disrespect intended but why play an MMO if you're more interested in solo play than playing with a PT? There are plenty of single player games that are entertaining and no interaction with others. I just find it odd to pay for a monthly subscription for a MMO(Massively MULTIPLAYER Online)game and be expecting to play solo the whole time? But to each their own I guess

[Durthane]

Because I enjoy my Fc, I enjoy clearing simple content with a party, hell I enjoy clearing hard content with competent folks. I also enjoy enjoy personal achievement just as much, just because it's an MMO does not mean every bit of meaningful content should require a party. Hell there is solo content now, it's just SE and to be honest most MMO developers think party content requires a challenge while solo content requires a massive ridiculous grind with little or no real challenge.

Now, the rewards for hard solo content do need to take a bit longer to pay off or have other issues to keep it from eclipsing group content. But considering the number of players griping about not having much to do, a limited number of uses per day would allow it to exist without hampering Coil and similar group content too badly.

[ruinedmirage]

The problem with mechanics based battles is that they're all routine. Look up a perfect strategy online on day 2 and prepare for farming.

A solo arena isn't a bad idea, might even be implemented in Gold Saucer. But the trap remains - if it's made by SE, it's scripted, therefore easily, easily farmable when you don't have to rely on picking up other peoples' slack. There will be no challenge once the videos go up.

Randomizing content might be better in the long run eventually, such as random battles in the arena, using random movesets in random environments utilizing random mechanics. That's just me, though. It's one reason I decided to try out Diablo 3 again...

[Shenandoah]

I really like the party content. I like DF and how we're using it to level. I like spamming dungeons even back when everyone is farming FATE to level. When SE ramped up the EXP for dungeons and introduced Roulette, I was so happy.

With that said, I really like the idea of solo content to break the monotony, so to speak. Sometimes I'd run around treasure hunting by myself lol, but a challenging solo content like an arena fight sounds like fun too. Something like D3 (I know, bear with me lol) Infernal Machine boss fight where you have to fight uber version of 2 bosses at once, which is just insane on Torment VI on a plvl330 wizard solo, but it's really fun to try XD FF14 implementation might be a little bit different. For one, I like that you have to gather Key from Keywardens in D3, but knowing SE's RNG they might take ages lol, and Uber bosses in infernal machine is also designed for party content and sometimes is easier to do in a group.

I like the token style reward. It could even be vanity gear for all I care lol.

Though, I doubt SE will do it D:

[Yumi_umi]

I have solo'd some dungeon bosses before and can solo quite a variety of dungeon mobs.
Usually i only do this when the party decides to rage quit, d/c and never come back or say the good ol' " i gtg fc needs me ".
I'd usually stay and continue on while waiting for replacements.
you can't really solo in a dungeon/ bossif you aren't a healer with 6k hp +.
Cuz some cleaves do 2-4k damage after mitigation.

[Durthane]

Aye, the scripted nature of the fights is a problem for a solo challenge, if turn 5 or ex primals didn't require a group they wouldn't be much of a challenge either. Randomizing the encounters would work for some bosses, Titan for instance. But fights like Garuda where everything she does is based upon following the script to the letter rather than just attacking a player would need much more tweaking to work.

They could add gimmicks like four types of add that have to be handled differently depending what type you get or things like that. Make the player have to react properly and quickly, sure you know what to do but the trick is registering when to do it and doing it while maintaining damage on the boss and dodging more scripted elements of the fight.

As to whether they would add something like this, I doubt it. SE is usually very stubborn about how their game is played. But as someone mentioned, with the Gold Saucer coming up the battle square might just happen. Though I doubt the rewards will be enough to compete with coil, maybe CT at least.

[Bigpurpleharness]

OP

Here's the issue with that. "Hardcore" raiders are already a huge minority, if you put ridiculous levels of difficulty on it, you're going to be making content for VERY extremely few.

So you're going to have bad players from both the raiding and solo crowd hating it, with bad solo players saying you shouldn't design content for a minority and bad raiders state how it's "cheap", and "shouldn't have rewards >= 8 man content".

If you make it scale with difficulty, you'll appease the solo players (provided the lower difficulties don't take so long that by the time you get the drops they're obsolete), but then the raiders will cry even more.

That being said, I would LOVE ridiculously hard solo challenges that awarded titles. Given that 75% of coil's difficulty is finding 7 non-terrible people that you don't hate, I would love 1-4 man content that was harder and gave merely cosmetic awards (Which is the only way to remotely compromise with both camps for "hard content" I believe). Of course I've done multiple SL1 Dark Souls runs for giggles, so I respect the fact that my opinions of what's difficult and what isn't is probably not the norm, and perhaps shouldn't be designed around.