Why does hunt mob HP not scale?

[RichardButte]

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)...

To clarify, A ranks would start with a set minimum amount of HP (and be unsoloable), and would gain additional HP for each person that attacks them.

Therefore, if 10 people fight an A rank, it takes 2 minutes to kill.

If 100 people fight an A rank, it takes 2 minutes to kill.

For the record, I enjoy hunting: I like the social aspect of players working together to report locations over a player-created network. It's just that a person actively searching for a hunt mob can miss out on it if it pops at the other end of the zone, even though they were working to find it while many of the people who just rush out and pull it were not.

And, simply put, that SUCKS...

[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.

[Kenji1134]

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.

So you could get a quest to go into Cutter's Cry. Kill (for example 10 out of 20 ant mobs), and Chimera. For completing this "Dungeon Hunt" you get (either 50 or 75, regardless of the dungeon) seals.
This gives us options.
1. Do rank 3 hunts for 75 seals per day. Or all of the HW hunts for a total of 100.
2. Go around "hunting" A's, and the occasional S.
3. Run random dungeons to get seals. Which would only help get more people gear, xp, and into HW.

[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.

[silentwindfr]

Rank A is means to be killed by a group of 4 player, a play well stuff with a chocobo companion can do it, will be long but it can be done.

just a reminder:
- Rank B solo monster
- Rank A group monster.
- Rank S raid monster.

why the hp don't scale more? because since tons of people will show up, you will end with a monster with 15 billion of hp... far more dangerous than any big boss of raid or anything else they can create. the trouble with the hunt is not the hp of the monster but the fact that you have 1 monster for hundred of people. that where the system fail and why a lot of people (me included) say the system is a failure and needed to be redone for avoid this sort of stupid and unadapted system.

[Donjo]

Hunts aren't getting scaled HP. A Ranks aren't intended to be attacked by the entire server at once.

B's are intended to be soloable.
A's are intended to be fought by a single party.
S's are intended to be fought by an Alliance or more.

This is the way hunts were originally envisioned by SE. They tried boosting HP(B's needed a light party and A/S were just bumped up a bit but not enough to require more people) soon after the hunt started when they realized that people weren't doing it correctly, but it didn't work. They then switched to B Ranks being worth nothing except weeklies and the rest were left alone. This got it back closer to the original ideal of B Ranks being the fodder of casual players who would just find one once in a while and get some seals. Now the casual player was able to take that 100 seal weekly and also do dailies that were boosted in value to get their upgrades. Unfortunately, this also didn't work because it took weeks to get even a single upgrade item. Heavensward does the daily/weekly dichotomy much better as it now takes 2-3 days to get an upgrade item so a patient player can fully kit out one job in about 3 weeks. A great compromise for players unwilling or unable to participate in the A/S Rank zergs.

So A Rank Hunts are actually fantastic little pieces of content when they're fought with the correct number of people. They actually have mechanics! As previous replies in this thread have surmised, there is no way to "fix" hunts at the killing the monster stage without making things needlessly complicated to the point of excluding the casual or possibly even the mainstream population. Furthermore, any attempt to fix things can and will be abused by the hardcore crowd to the point of the additional mechanics doing nothing in the first place.

So, there is really one, and only one, way to "fix" hunts: stop putting the tome gear upgrade items as a reward.

[RichardButte]

why the hp don't scale more? because since tons of people will show up, you will end with a monster with 15 billion of hp...

Except that the other games that have done this (WoW, GW2, etc.) have not experienced this problem.

FATEs already have a scaling mechanic where, depending upon the number of people who contributed to the fate the last time, the fate will change next time to accommodate that number of people.

If an A/S rank pops right now, it'll be dead seconds after it's called. Again, scaling HP has worked wonders in other MMOs with rare monsters like this. There's no reason not to use it here as well.

[Nadirah]

So, there is really one, and only one, way to "fix" hunts: stop putting the tome gear upgrade items as a reward.

This.

/10char

[Causality]

Well The big issue they die so quick (right now) is they have Raid gear locked to random world spawns. I'm sure once Alexander hits the upgrade items to the i170s will be available in it. Basically Right now its the ONLY way to get these items and so every high end raid guild, thier cousins, friends of friends of friends enemies, and thier little brothers and sisters are after these things. Poor Sabotender Ballarina has no Idea what hit her! And never mind how much poor Nandi is shedding tears from its eyeball. More so the Heavensward ones names are still being learned and are far easier than some of the Old content As were when they were introduced.

They need to buff the A ranks in my opinion. They are obviously not tuned for a bunch of i160-i180 players going after them.