Highly Notorious Monsters

[Alhanelem]

Obviously a lot of people hate the idea of HNMs but it's honestly some of the best experiences I ever had in FFXI. This is my outlook on it.

Most of us don't hate HNMs, we just hate the waiting game. I'd LOVE HNMs if it was all about the NM itself and the gear was rare and amazing because the fight was hard. The only reason I didn't like FFXI's HNMs is because you spent most of your time waiting. Yes, if you got creative you could ensure the time wasn't totally wasted, but for the most part, that's what people did: wait. 960 posts later and I still dont understand why people think having to not play the game for 30 minutes, check the game for 30 seconds to see if the NM pops, then go back to not playing the game and repeat that several times is good game design. Yes, I suppose it is one way to ensure that gear is rare, by making it so no sane person would be willing to not play the game they paid good money for for several hours just to for a *chance* to fight an NM that has a *chance* to drop the rare item.

I just don't see any of that as necessary to either have nice gear rewards or a competitive spirit/atomsphere.

I seriously think it's going to be a game where you can get some of the best gear with only playing 30 min to an hour at a time. That is what people want right? It's sad but true.

I don't understand why the best gear in the game should only be accessible to people who play the game like it's a job and not like it's an actual game. It's absolutely unhealthy when a game requires you to play it as many hours a day as you would work a job. Why can't gear rarity come from challenge rather than waiting forever and ever for a mob to spawn?

Honestly FFXIV already did a decent job of that with the primal fights. Despite their best efforts, some people just couldn't beat garuda, or hard rivenroad. They just aren't good enough and that's okay. It's a lot better than not even having a chance because you don't have the time to waste being idle for hours and hours.

I had a lot of fun battling some of FFXI's hardest HNMs. I just didn't have fun sitting around waiting for certain ones to pop when there were a lot of other things in the game that i could have accomplished. Tiamat was one of the best ones- for a while people didn't really understand the exact pop windows/times and for a while it didn't matter, because Tiamat was a challenge when it was new and it was up all the time because it was a tough fight. Vrtra is another example of that.

The "3 kings" as we called them were changed to be force pops instead of timed pops with spawn windows, and the funny part is this actually made the items more rare- proof that you don't have to have spawn windows and long timers to have gear that not everybody can get.