Why does hunt mob HP not scale?

[KisaiTenshi]

In pretty much every other game I can think of with rare monsters meant to be killed by a large group of people, those monsters' HP scale with the number of people attacking it.

Why is this not so in FFXIV? A ranks are literally MELTING in HW right now (and they melted in ARR as well, TBH)...

Ask yourself this. Do we really want someone to solo an A-rank monster in 10 minutes and get the full reward from what should actually take 50 people more than 10 minutes to kill and spread the reward?

The problem is not the monster's HP, the problem is the developers aren't solving the specific cheating going on that enables this. If they solved that, then there would never be more than 10 people able to discover the monster before someone attacks it.

What I mean is, right now the monster just appears, and persists until it's killed. That gives enough time for everyone in the zone to go right to it and kill it in about 20 seconds. The fix to this is to announce to the zone when the monster has appeared, and then count down before the monster becomes vulnerable (roughly 60 seconds), whoever happens to be in the right spot when it lands could either keep it to themselves or shout that they found it. Once the monster is engaged, anyone who was not in the "bubble" would only do zero damage.

Other games have tried a few ways of making it work, but ultimately it's the gear creep combined with predictable locations. Imposing a levelsync (eg turning it into a F.A.T.E) would solve only the gear creep, but not the number of players. While scaling the HP would just make everyone "stand outside" the range and then only engage it with the lowest HP available.

Like really, all SE needs to do is just make attacking any of the "Hunt" monsters trigger a FATE zone, where the level sync would be set at the level/ilevel of the player who hit it, scaling the HP to match. Perhaps it's harder to design, but it would solve the problem in question.

But the better fix would be actually randomizing the locations and times, people have learned how to predict/cheat where the monsters will appear way back on games that have done this for a decade.

My preferred fix would be to just give a time limit before the monster can be engaged and anyone not in the immediate area when it engages, gets no reward and does no damage, with the HP for the fight being scaled to the highest ilevel in the "bubble." But this is probably making it too hard and boring.

[RichardButte]

Ask yourself this. Do we really want someone to solo an A-rank monster in 10 minutes and get the full reward from what should actually take 50 people more than 10 minutes to kill and spread the reward?

I should probably have made this clearer: in those other games, the mob starts at a set HP and scales up as more people arrive to fight it.

A person would NEVER be able to solo an A rank, ever.

[KisaiTenshi]

I should probably have made this clearer: in those other games, the mob starts at a set HP and scales up as more people arrive to fight it.

A person would NEVER be able to solo an A rank, ever.

I'll approve of that.

Why not just make a spammable "Dungeon Hunt" quest.
Same idea as the weekly hunt, but without a lockout.

You would be able to get a random dungeon hunt quest from the hunt board, which involves killing X of Y mob, and Z boss.
This would be based on a randomly selected dungeon, with ANY dungeon being fair game, but leaning towards the HW ones.
When the quest is randomly generated, a dungeon is selected. Then some mob (Y) is selected, and (X) is the number of that mob in that dungeon divided by 2. Lastly (Z) is the end boss of the dungeon.

This was fine until you said "randomly generated", no you don't -ever- want "randomly generated" content, because that offends both the people who like storyline AND the people who don't like storyline but like to practice till they are pro's by memorizing things. If would be fine enough if quest changes every 4 hours to a different boss, allowing it to be picked up again if the previous one hasn't be completed. If they completed it, then there needs to be a cooldown before they can try THAT boss again, but anyone other boss should still be uncleared.

What I'd like to see is a "time-trial" or "boss-trial" type of dungeon mode. Boss-Trial would simply drop teleports in the boss room and entrance to take you to the boss room, lock it immediately and the clock starts ticking down. If you clear it at "B" rank, you get a tiny "B-Rank" type of reward. If you clear it at "A-rank" you get an "A-rank" grade reward, and if you clear it at "S-Rank" you get an S-Rank type of reward. A "S-Rank" type of reward would be like defeating before it a few seconds drops to A-rank. But this is an "alternative" way to do a hunt, not a replacement. You would still need to pick a weekly hunt off a board somewhere.

Like to be honest, I completely ditched doing most of the hunts in ARR, they were too boring and too much effort for what amounted to nearly-zero payoff the two times I actually found a S rank before anyone else obliterated it.