The Hunt is garbage and needs to be fixed

[Kinazu]

Call me old fashioned, but I really enjoyed Hunts a lot more when they were still locked on your own World. I fondly remember being active in the Hunting community around Stormblood. Sure, there was drama, sure it wasn't perfect, but I atleast had the sense of a comminuty, and I don't feel like that's the case right now. I used to remember a lot of names from the community when it was still locked and there always were a set of people that spawned the S-ranks.

Oh well, I do miss the old days, but I understand that this at least gives everyone more chance of catching a train or a Hunt.

[Eraden]

Mao is correct at a minimum A ranks need 4 hours to respawn, 6 is max. Hunt train conductors usually wait until all A ranks in Endwalker and/or Shadowbringers respawn to do another train. This usually waiting till all A ranks are over the 6 hour mark. A train can usually take 20-30 minutes depending on spawn points and such as well.

What Eraden I think is hinting at, is that instead of waiting for them all to spawn, if they are killed right as they spawn, within a 24 hour period you can get 4-6 kills depending on how early a same A rank spawns.

Mao usually sees three to four Hunts Trains per day when Hunts Trains really actives. Is MUCH killings of A-Ranks and gatherings of Stones and Nuts to be dones!

[ACE135]

Forgive Mao for askings but isn't A-Ranks on 4-5 hour timer? If is true, then no matter how fast A-Ranks get killed, will still has to waits few hours for respawn.

As Jacob already said, A ranks have a respawn time ranging from 4 to 6 hours and ARR A ranks have a shorter one (not sure anymore since I stopped hunting 5 years ago). So for example when an A rank respawns after 4,5 hours it keeps being untouched for about 1,5 to 2,5 hours depending on when the train goes. And if after killing it after 4,5 hours and it maybe spawns again about 4,5 hours later then you have 2 kills after about 9 hours. When the train always goes after about 6 to 7 hours after the last train then the train has the 2 kills after about 12 to 14 hours. In that time the A rank could have spawned a third time already.

Mao usually sees three to four Hunts Trains per day when Hunts Trains really actives. Is MUCH killings of A-Ranks and gatherings of Stones and Nuts to be dones!

It isn't always about the tomestones and hunt currency. There are players whose actual fun lies within going out looking (hunting) for the hunts and killing them (with doing some mechanics). Sometimes I did nothing else the whole day than flying (or running in ARR zones) around looking for A ranks. I had fun with that, when there almost always were hunts about to respawn and gave something to do. But now everyone just goes "hunting" every 6 to 7 hours.

Call me old fashioned, but I really enjoyed Hunts a lot more when they were still locked on your own World. I fondly remember being active in the Hunting community around Stormblood. Sure, there was drama, sure it wasn't perfect, but I atleast had the sense of a comminuty, and I don't feel like that's the case right now. I used to remember a lot of names from the community when it was still locked and there always were a set of people that spawned the S-ranks.

Oh well, I do miss the old days, but I understand that this at least gives everyone more chance of catching a train or a Hunt.

Yes I miss the old days too. Was nice to see the same people almost every time. But time has changed, sadly.

[Swad]

SE should have killed hunt trains years ago. Hunts need a huge rework anyway.

Make all the hunt bosses poppable via tradeable items that drop off overworld monsters or fates, no more stupid timers or mentally ill hunt train leaders running 3rd party plugins spamming /1 so they get attention.
Make all the bosses scale to 8 players so they can be more challenging, no game will properly scale a boss to 300 people hitting it at once.
Only the popping party can engage the boss, much like a started duel in Bozja.
Completely kill the hunt achievements down x10 so they are reasonable instead of the x000s. Long overdue change.
Increase rewards for killing bosses a ton, remove cross DC hunts so Dynamis isn't dead.

All this is a simple solution to a dumb system that they probably overlook cause JP are more organized and have less issues with freaks.

[Grimr]

yeah they don't like A rank trains because it trivializes the tomestone grind and lets people rapidly max gear compared to other means. This is especially true when people can chain them across servers. But to be fair, they have too many grinds in the game at end game so if people are using hunt trains as a substitute for the duty finder, I'm all for it.

If they would expand expert roulette to have more than two dungeons and update the rewards to the rest of the roulettes then they would be worth doing. Til they do something about it hunts are way to go

[dspguy]

On Primal, I probably get to about 90% of S-ranks. I'm not on a hunting Discord. I hear it second hand in FC chat or Novice Network. I wonder if this is a DC/community problem more than a hunt problem.

[Jojoya]

On Primal, I probably get to about 90% of S-ranks. I'm not on a hunting Discord. I hear it second hand in FC chat or Novice Network. I wonder if this is a DC/community problem more than a hunt problem.

That's going to depend on what an individual believes the problem to be and what angle they're looking at the problem from.

Too many people showing up? That's because the hunt rewards well when it comes to getting tomestones for low time/effort and streamers started advertising the hunt to their followers when interest in the Hunt had originally been fairly niche. It was true before we had world visit even if some can't remember it. It remains true in the wake of world visit and data center travel. Lowering or removing the tomestone rewards from the Hunt would actually be the best way to remove the congestion problem. The number of players that care about their kill counts for achievement mounts and/or the hunt currency is much lower than the number of players who care about just the tomestones.

That the relics this expansion were acquired entirely through tomestones did not help. In past expansions, most players would have quit going to trains and S ranks once their weekly cap was hit. With the relics costing a total of 6000 Causality (or its predessors depending on when someone started working on them), stopping when weekly cap was hit wasn't enough. They needed to keep farming more tomestones for their relics.

What's the impact of that? Assume the player only gets their tomestones through hunts.

Right now, someone who wants to cap their weekly tomestones via the Hunt would need to attend 8 EW trains or 30 EW S ranks. (Comedy can't be obtain from previous expansion hunts)

Someone just getting started on farming all 19 relics would need to attend 475 EW trains or 1475 EW S ranks to get all the Causality needed (it takes 2 Shadowbringers trains to get the same Causality as one Endwalker train, and it will take 8 prior expansion S ranks to get as much Causality as 3 EW S ranks give). Obviously they're not going to be able to get that all in a single week but it adds massively to congestion since hunts get promoted by some highly visible members of the general community as the best way to farm tomestones.

The congestion is more from game design this expansion because the relics were made tomestone only.

Hunts dying too fast? Combination of congestion and power creep. Hunts at the start of the expansion were far more congested than they are now (despite relics not being added yet). The 36 kill trains were taking a minimum of 90 minutes even as bullet trains, which would equate to 30 minutes for a standard 12 kill train. Bullet trains now can be completed in about 12 minutes. Power creep is massive during end game but the HP for hunts remains the same throughout the expansion because some players don't reach end game until late and SE doesn't want those players to feel excluded as they try to get gear.

Hunts getting pulled before people arrive? All sorts of things contribute to this. Congestion, rapid communication that reaches one part of the community, slow communication reaching another part of the community minutes later, but most of all the problem mainly ends up assuming things. Players assume they're entitled to be part of every kill (they're not), that others are supposed to wait for them to arrive (no one has to wait), that they have 5 minutes from the time they get the relay to arrive (except they received the relay 3 minutes after the spawn and others who got their relays sooner are already itching to pull because they have other things they want to do).

The Hunt is rapid, real time content. Even with a cooperative and courteous community, you don't want to wait because you can never be certain of exactly when a hunt was spawned unless you were in the zone when it did. Drop what you're doing and get to the hunt as fast as possible.

[KageTokage]

Call me old fashioned, but I really enjoyed Hunts a lot more when they were still locked on your own World. I fondly remember being active in the Hunting community around Stormblood. Sure, there was drama, sure it wasn't perfect, but I atleast had the sense of a comminuty, and I don't feel like that's the case right now. I used to remember a lot of names from the community when it was still locked and there always were a set of people that spawned the S-ranks.

Oh well, I do miss the old days, but I understand that this at least gives everyone more chance of catching a train or a Hunt.

I miss that as well. Hunts died slower and there was much more of a community formed around it.

Nowdays with the relay bots being prevalent as they are and drawing in people from across the entire DC within a few minutes, the experience feels very impersonal.

[Jojoya]

I miss that as well. Hunts died slower and there was much more of a community formed around it.

Nowdays with the relay bots being prevalent as they are and drawing in people from across the entire DC within a few minutes, the experience feels very impersonal.

Agreed, though I believe that it extends farther than just the hunt. It's also not limited to this game. It's a problem for all online games that give players access to populations so large that it's more convenient to replace players than help them improve.

Unfortunately, it's what gamers have decided is the best way to get what they want and they don't have an interest in the smaller server communities that existed in the past. They're focused on instant gratification instead of long term satisfaction.

[Rowde]

I wrote this in another topic, but I agree the system is stale and personally feel that trains have ruined it. Again, why even design these monsters to have mechanics if this is the way players are interacting with the content, they may as well be training dummies for all the mechanics that occur before they die.

Can't argue that trains are more efficient for currency, so they either change that with a simple nerf... which most likely results in wide abandonment of the Hunt by players exclusively interested in currency or try something different.

My suggestions were:
1) Give all A Rank and S Rank Hunts actual rare drops. A mix of Glamour, minions, bardings, mounts, etc. and a mix of Untradeable and Market Board eligible.
2) Make FATEs interact with Hunt Timers. Each FATE successfully completed takes a random amount of time off the Hunt Timers for that Zones A Ranks and S Ranks.
3) Retrofit Bicolor Gemstones to ARR, HW, and SB zones and introduce new vendors.
4) Give the Hunter-Scholars that already exist in every zone new dialogues that inform the player about the status of the Marks and indicate roughly how much time is left on the timers. For example: "There haven't been any sightings", "Many reports coming in", "The beast has been sighted nearby"


This gives ppl interested in the Hunt a reason to interact with FATEs, which will potentially help ppl that are already in the zone doing FATEs either just for leveling or for Bicolor Gemstones. Since A Ranks will also have Rare drops then ppl after those drops have a reason to camp a zone completing FATEs to get a specific A Rank to spawn faster... which is also making the S Ranks spawn faster.

So Marks will probably get killed more often as soon as they spawn based on the desirability of their drops, which makes the trains less efficient without actually nerfing the currency.