Suggestion/improvement for MSQ single-player duties

[Anyaria]

Hubby and I started playing the game a year or so ago. We do pretty much everything together in game and are nearly always partied. One thing that we'd love to see improved is the experience around hitting a single-player/solo duty in the quest line. Currently you have to drop group in order to join the NPC's in the duty.

The pain-point to this lies with not a) being able to just go into separate instances of the duty while partied (no impact on what the other is doing) or b) being able to drop group once you have already engaged the quest text. Currently, one or the other of us has to cancel out of the quest, drop group, and then re-click through all the quest text just so we can get back to the point where we can accept the duty.

Thank you kindly for your time and consideration!

[Jojoya]

Your part b problem sounds strange to me, or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to explain?

Are you saying you need to completely abandon the quest and restart it after dropping party, or only that you have to re-watch a cutscene that played after you tried to start the solo duty while still in party? I know the latter happens (though you can hit ESC on a keyboard to skip the cutscene replay, controllers should also have some sort of short cut to skip them) but you shouldn't have to completely abandon a quest and restart it. I was leveling alts with a friend during Stormblood and Shadowbringers, and not once did either of us have to abandon a quest that had a solo duty involved as a result of being in party together.

I imagine the requirement to drop out of party is related to old code. There used to be more things that could not be done unless solo (even chocobo companions had to be dismissed) though they've tidied some of it up over the years. I'm not certain they could make the change for solo duties though because of the instancing involved.

[Anyaria]

Have to click cancel on the little black solo duty notification window in order to drop group after getting the "you are about to join a duty" little pop-up window. Might be different from how it works if you are just on quest text, that I don't know. Once you get the little black pop-up window mentioning the solo duty, however, you can't drop group. Cancelling at that point cancels the current quest segment so you have to go back through any quest text. We have leveled together from pretty much the beginning quest all the way through Stormblood (just started ShB) and this is how it has been for every solo duty. If we try to hit "continue" on the black duty box it gives an error message saying we can't participate in that duty while in a group but to drop the group we have to cancel out of the duty popup and start over on that NPC's quest dialog.

[Jojoya]

Okay, so it's really just queuing for the duty (and related dialog/cutscenes) that is impacted and not the entire quest. That would match my experience.

I agree it's annoying but I'm not certain it's something SE could change due to code limitations.

My advice would be to make certain you drop group whenever you see a NPC surrounded by a glowing aura before you start talking to them. That's the indicator a solo duty is involved. I know that the aura doesn't always appear so sometimes you'll still get caught (my friend and I had the advantage of already completing the content on other characters so we would know the duty was about to happen). I think Stormblood had most of the quests where the aura wouldn't appear so hopefully your experience through Shadowbringers and Endwalker will be less frustrating.