Hunts. /discuss for what they are.

[joshsecret]

My 2 cents on Hunts:
1) PS3 Limitations- Large number of characters and PS3s do NOT get along.
-- a) you have to be in a party.
-- b) you have to hope you zone-in in time.
-- c) you have to hope you get there in time.
-- d) when you cannot see the target, which is most of the time, you have
to hope you can somehow gain enough aggro and that your party
can not only see the target but also was able to do enough damage.
-- e) 1 seal...... your reward if any of the above is off.


2) Cause and effect- Hunts have effectively killed most other content.
-- a) statics run with statics for most content. puggers run with puggers for most content.
-- b) if you cannot be in a static then you must be a pugger. which means you must be doing
content other puggers are doing otherwise you sit and wait hours for people to even join you.
let alone beat it.....
-- c) if [see 1] has put you off of Hunts altogether, good luck finding puggers to run things with.
-- d) brand new content completely ignored because of effort/reward imbalance.
-- e) boredom. The End~

[Colt47]

The problem with the hunting content isn't the fact people can get 110 gear easily. Rather, the problem is that there are so many people rushing the hunts that it's very difficult to manage to get a decent number of seals at peak hours. I've found myself scheduling time before work in the morning just to be able to get to A rank and S rank marks. In the evening hours on a weekend the hunts are so crowded that people pull early out of fear of losing their reward, and then the crowd comes in and nukes it to the ground within seconds.

Beyond this, doing hunts is still far better then repeatedly running Primal EX and bahamut coil.

[Miste]

I am not really against hunts, or really for hunts, I just don't mind them I guess. I have participated in them for many hours at a time since release on occasion so I do know the ups and downs of it. I usually have some fun participating in hunts, I like looking for them, but I can understand why some may not like them.

It makes sense that they added a way for people to get i110 gear besides coil (the previous patch did not have this problem since Myth was i90 and so was coil gear), they are preparing players for the new content, since SE has designed this game as a gear treadmill soon they will add higher ilevel gear which will make the current stuff outdated. So people might as well be able to obtain it.

1. You get more myth and soldiery from killing an S rank in 3 minutes than you would doing 2 expert dungeons back to back.

This is true, but you forget the S ranks all have 24 hours to up to 48 hour respawn times. So basically to get full credit on one you gotta be in a party, get lucky one spawns and make it there in time to get any credit. It is more RNG than anything. So it is not a viable way to get myth/soldiery if you actually want it now instead of "I'll be set when an S spawns....if it spawns". You can get a lot of myth/soldiery if you spend about 3-4 hours hunting if you get a set of A Rank spawns and get full credit on all of them. It is kind of fast but you have to have a party and be getting full or close to full credit for each one. It is one way to cap soldiery but I've done Expert Roulette a lot and the queue is not too bad for it and you can cap using that just like previous patches.

2. You only need to kill 1 S rank hunt to have enough seals to buy a piece of myth armor and an accessory.

This is not a problem really in my opinion. Myth gear is only i90 and is very out of date, so why stop people from obtaining it?

3. There's a chance of a hunt dropping an item that you only need 3 of to exchange for a Sand of Time.

This is RNG again. Yes it can be ridiculous for very lucky people, but they may be a minority. I personally have killed 20 S ranks and only gotten 2 logs. My A rank is even worse, I have killed 130 something A's and 0 logs. ZERO. So unless you are blessed by the RNG the drop rate does not seem that good.

4. There is no cap on ANY of this (save for the soldiery), so it's possible for somebody to upgrade all of their soldiery gear within a week to the i110 levels.

This point I do believe some have cause to gripe about. I'm so neutral about stuff I don't really mind but...this point is causing most of the imbalance in the game that people are upset about.

A lot of the player base is spending a lot of time doing hunts I think. PF's on my server have become fewer, DPS queues are kinda long but being main healer I don't really know the whole situation with this. I still have not done Ramuh, cause most people don't seem to care about it.

I like the new ST, but the queue is quite long, and if you compare the time invested, not worth it. It drops non-upgradeable i100 gear, so it is just a placeholder till you get soldiery and then sand it. You have a chance at an oil of time, but comparing the time if takes waiting to get in, the time it takes to get to Xande and kill, and oil is not 100% drop, then having to lot against others and likely losing lot...you might as well have just gone and did hunting to get an oil. Basically the only thing ST is good for is getting a unidentified allagan tombstone, since you cannot obtain that unless you do SCoB.

TL;DR - I have enjoyed doing hunts, I have some fun participating in them, but I can see why others don't like it. I can also see some of the problems with the imbalance it has created. It has made a lot of the other content they added kind of pointless, which makes it hard to get people to play with.

[Colt47]

My 2 cents on Hunts:
[B]1)
2) Cause and effect- Hunts have effectively killed most other content.
-- a) statics run with statics for most content. puggers run with puggers for most content.
-- b) if you cannot be in a static then you must be a pugger. which means you must be doing
content other puggers are doing otherwise you sit and wait hours for people to even join you.
let alone beat it.....
-- c) if [see 1] has put you off of Hunts altogether, good luck finding puggers to run things with.
-- d) brand new content completely ignored because of effort/reward imbalance.
-- e) boredom. The End~

There is another side to the content argument as well. Part of the reason hunts are "killing off" that other content is because it's actually rather monotonous and boring in it's own right. The only reason people were doing it was to get geared up, not because it actually is engaging in a way people want to be engaged in (except for maybe the first few runs of it). When faced with two places selling the same bucket of paint, we go where the better deal is. That and hunts are one of the few "randomized" content types the game actually offers. Dungeons, primal-ex fights, etc, are all static and repetitious: No random layouts, no random boss or monster placement, and certainly no randomly allotted loot tables.