Why are elite hunts so valuable? What are the devs thoughts?

[Taruranto]

How are they not broken when they aren't balanced with the rest of the content?

A full hard mode dungeon clear gets you 50 myth and 45 soldiery.

Or

you can hunt and get:
B Rank: 5 Allied Seals, 30 Myth and 10 Soldiery.
A Rank 20 Seals, 80 Myth and 20 Soldiery.
S Rank 50 seals, 200 Myth, 40 Soldiery.

In the time it takes to run one dungeon you can get multiple B/A rank kills for far greater rewards. Not only that but you're also collecting allied seals on top of it. There is no content equivalent to hunts which make them devalue the rest of the game.

Nothing wrong with that. Dungeons are instanced. Hunts are not.

Instanced content doesn't belong in a mmorpg and automatically garbage that panders to non-mmorpg players.

[Grizzlebeard]

Nothing wrong with that. Dungeons are instanced. Hunts are not.

Instanced content doesn't belong in a mmorpg and automatically garbage that panders to non-mmorpg players.

I assume you're being sarcastic.

[Illya]

How are they not broken when they aren't balanced with the rest of the content?

A full hard mode dungeon clear gets you 50 myth and 45 soldiery.

Or
you can hunt and get:
B Rank: 5 Allied Seals, 30 Myth and 10 Soldiery.
A Rank 20 Seals, 80 Myth and 20 Soldiery.
S Rank 50 seals, 200 Myth, 40 Soldiery.

In the time it takes to run one dungeon you can get multiple B/A rank kills for far greater rewards. Not only that but you're also collecting allied seals on top of it. There is no content equivalent to hunts which make them devalue the rest of the game.

To balance Hunts with the rest of the content SE needs to take away myth and soldiery from the hunt rewards and limit the number of books you can purchase each week.

Well I didn't enjoy the idea of having to do 30 Brayflox speedruns for each Animus upgrade book. It requires 1,500 Myth per book or a total of 13,500 Myth to upgrade from Atma to Animus, before Hunts this meant you literally had to do 270 Bray SRs to fully upgrade your weapon. Does that sound fun to you?

I'm really happy the Hunts give so much Myth, because normal people who didn't run Bray 24 hours a day actually had a chance of upgrading Atma to Animus. This is I think one of the goals that Squenix had when they implemented Hunts.

There's no reason to nerf the tome rewards from Hunts, because before Hunts the amount of grinding you had to do in order to get the Myth for Atma to Animus upgrades was absolutely insane, and even if all you wanted to do was cap your Soldiery weekly you would have to run Bray 9 times. Who wants to run Bray 9 times every week? The 4-man dungeons in this game are so boring and terrible, and Coil is on lockout so even if you did your weekly Coil farms you still need to run Bray just to finish capping Soldiery.

Hunts are amazing, I'm already on my 6th book out of 9 for Artemis Bow Animus and realistically had I stopped every time I had hit 1,500 Myth I could have had all 9 books done in a week instead of getting 14 Saurian Skins. But I'm really happy with how Hunts work in terms of getting Myth fast.

[ChiefCurrahee]

Well I didn't enjoy the idea of having to do 30 Brayflox speedruns for each Animus upgrade book. It requires 1,500 Myth per book or a total of 13,500 Myth to upgrade from Atma to Animus, before Hunts this meant you literally had to do 270 Bray SRs to fully upgrade your weapon. Does that sound fun to you?

I'm really happy the Hunts give so much Myth, because normal people who didn't run Bray 24 hours a day actually had a chance of upgrading Atma to Animus. This is I think one of the goals that Squenix had when they implemented Hunts.

No one forced you to do speed runs. I've upgraded my Animus, and I didn't do a single brayflox speed run. The difference? You had your new shiny weapon a few weeks before me. Big whoop.

Hunt devalue the rest of the games content, because they over reward for the nature of the content. It has made the game unbalanced in reward design. Which is why you see the massive zerg.

It's not because hunts are the most fun this game has to offer. It's hunts are the single most rewarding thing to do in the game.

[Nyalia]

What's with the "devs are ignoring us because the community managers aren't posting in this thread" stuff? The community managers talk to the devs regularly, voice our concerns and questions, and share the responses with us. If a question is trivially answered, it gets an answer quickly. If something is not working as intended in an objective manner, it is a bug and if it's a simple one, they fix it (like the same mark bill twice in a row). If it is working as intended, but the results aren't what they were going for, then a "quick answer" isn't available.

Chances are high that the devs are watching the data from the hunts and seeing if they feel the results are not what they were going for. They wouldn't have anything to say to the Community Managers yet, so they have nothing to say to us. Spending the time to fix something instead of developing new content isn't necessary a step forward. If the content isn't having the desired effect, they can't assume that a fix to the content will have the desired effect either.

Quick fixes are just a bad idea with things like this because even a simple change can be too extreme. Example: the quick fix to the hunts of increasing mark HP so more people can get to them in time. That not only didn't change much, it locked more people OUT of hunts because you can't just kill a mark you run across anymore. You need to shout for help and be lucky enough to get invited into a party. If the intent was to allow more people to be involved in Hunts, it backfired, since it's harder to get credit if you're not in a Hunt-focused party/LS/FC, and now hunts lock out more casual players.

In regards to them wanting Hunts to gear people up faster, well, that's not a bad thing, but there was a definite mistake with the implementation. They decided that Sands of Time were too valuable to give as drops in Syrcus Tower, and the gear from the top tier of raiding too valuable to give out more than once per week. That's fine and sensible for reasons, but them giving Sands of Time from Hunts, which are content with no limitations. If they wanted everyone to have Sands, why not make them drop in Syrcus Tower? If they wanted everyone to have i100 gear, why lock the Oils of Time in Syrcus Tower behind the loot lockout, but not the Oils of Time obtained from Hunts?

There are several perfectly valid ways they could of implemented the Hunt rewards:

1. Have Sands and Oils of Time obtainable from the Hunt, have Sands and Oils of Time drop in Syrcus Tower and not as part of the Weekly Loot Lockout, and increase both Myth AND Soldiery from all dungeons not just the roulettes (gear up everyone fast from multiple sources of content)
2. Have Oils of Time obtainable from the Hunt and have Sands of Time drop in Syrcus Tower as part of the Weekly Loot Lockout (Speeds up accessory upgrades while keeping left side upgrades limited, encouraging endgame content while keeping Hunts as a quick way to gear up)
3. Have a weekly lockout for Sands/Oils of Time obtained from the Hunt, similar to other equally valuable content (makes Hunts a new source of endgame loot, but on par with other sources of endgame loot)

Now, some people have been pointing out that Sands/Oils are not gear, but upgrade items, and the gear is behind a 450 soldiery/week lockout. While that's true, people who have been playing a long time have plenty of soldiery. If the intent of Sands/Oils dropping from Hunts was to gear up newer players fast to catch up with others in preparation for new content, then why do it this way? This strongly favors the players who are NOT new, and thus have tons of soldiery items already, meaning the newer players have even more catch up to do which did not have its weekly lockout reduced or removed.

Right now, there's a lot of content that I'm really interested in participating in. But I don't do any of it because whenever I try, I get shouts/LS/FC notices about a Hunt mark spawning, and the loot is just too good to pass up. Would you rather run a dungeon with some friends for 15 Sold, 80 Myth (or whatever it is) and a chance at useless gear after 30 minutes of moderately hard content, or go kill an A rank mark for 20 sold, 80 myth, and a chance at endgame gear after 10 minutes of trivially easy content?

Whomever says that you won't be fighting elite marks all the time hasn't done enough hunting. This morning, I played for two hours, only half the A ranks spawned (average case) and I still obtained 1,000 myth, 250 sold, 210 seals, and a blood-spattered logbook (worth 250 seals). And that was an average case, not a lucky streak of tons of spanws (well, the log was lucky). If I had spent that time dungeon diving, I would have had time for four dungeons, obtaining ~350 myth, ~80 sold, and (on average) 4 pieces of i70 gear or philo mats. The above items, btw, gave me enough sold and seals (almost by themselves) to get and upgrade an i110 shield (cost: 390 sold, 500 seals).


In short (tl;dr and all that), Hunts should be fixed but I'm glad they're not implementing a knee-jerk reaction quick fix, and Hunt rewards don't jive with the rewards from similar content (explanations for the quality of hunt loot and for the weekly lockouts are contradictory).

[Makado]

Why don't people understand that sands and oils are capped by soldiery? Just because you can gets bunch of them doesn't mean you can use them. I got my other character to 50 3 weeks ago, and all I could use is one sand and now have to wait until next week to use another. Wow a single 110 a week or every 2 weeks even big deal. And the people who already have been soldiery maxing every week most likely were doing coil so already have pieces upgraded anyways. It isn't a big deal.

[Exstal]

Why don't people understand that sands and oils are capped by soldiery?

Why don't you understand that 2.2 has been out for 4 months and many people have full soldiery gear?

[Makado]

Why don't you understand that 2.2 has been out for 4 months and many people have full soldiery gear?

Guess you didn't bother to read my comment. Not everyone caps soldiery every week, and then you have new players as well. It takes 7 weeks of soldiery cap just to get your legs, body, and an allagan tomestone weapon (also whatever time it would take to win a roll on one). I do not know the numbers on who does and doesn't get max soldiery, and neither do you. But I'd say those who always do most likely did coil and had their pieces before hunts anyways (or at least were getting a few).

[Cosmoswan]

i also think that coil 6/9 are in my point of view very more difficult than coil 1/5 use to be at the same gear progression. So when they will release a ' new new coil ' , it will be hight élitist than ever and only few people could be able to go in , and so the community will rage more than ever . So for prevent that and mass abandon SE prefer trick the ilv before .

[Taruranto]

I like that they are 1)not behind some stupid lockout 2)open world and not instaced.