Hunts - Preventing prepulling and sniping

[Rowde]

As someone that was an avid hunter in ARR to SB... I have many thoughts, pre-pulling and sniping are the least of them.

The main problem with the Hunt is that it has been too thoroughly solved and players have mostly optimized the fun out of the activity.

In regards to S Ranks, early in Shadowbringers the methodology for what determines spawn points was solved. This is part of the reason why pre-pulling and sniping is even possible... a spawn notice is now broadcast to everybody, but some players are then looking for the S Rank, and some players already know exactly where it will be. Personally, I think they need to rework this completely. At the very least, the spawn point should not be decided until the S Rank is ready to spawn in its current window. Ideally it would be completely random.

In regards to A Ranks, I'd have to look it up, but I feel like Yoshi-P has been asked about this before in previous Q&A sessions, and they resist making changes to A Ranks because they intended for them to be Full Party, or 8 player content. Well... we've gone through two expansions now with an "A train" hunt meta. The system falls apart under the weight of trains. Fun or not, trains completely trivialize the difficulty, so the major issue now is that the rewards no longer match up with the difficulty of the content. Personally, I think major changes need to happen to A Ranks, moreso than S Ranks. If they don't want to do anything with them at all, at the very least they should up the pop-in/draw priority for A Ranks so they improve the visibility for all players.

If they want to fix the system and embrace trains, then A Ranks (and perhaps S Ranks) need to have some sort of dynamic scaling to respond to the number of players that show up to them, similar to Skirmishes/CE in Bozja/Zadnor. Like for every 8 players that are present within a certain circle of influence (invisible FATE circle) around the Hunt mark it gets a stacking buff that increases its HP/Def. However, if they decide they want to stick to their guns with A Ranks being intended for Full parties, then perhaps the amount of tomes/seals needs to scale down if a mass amount of players participate. Like it shouldn't be possible to get full credit at all if 60 ppl are smacking the mark and killing it in 15 seconds or less.