Rewarding Skill, Emphasizing Risk/Reward, Current SP Problems and How to Fix it

[Reika]

It isn't the monster rank that needs to be raised, its the difficulty of the monsters at 10 ranks higher than you. Also some monsters are just plain more difficult than others. they should give monsters more abilities like they do the mongrels, gnats, moles, etc. Monsters in general besides mongrels and gnats need more HP and evasiveness to make them harder to kill if they are far above your rank.

[Naylia]

Increase the dlvl 10 restriction so that killing even harder mobs rewards the player with more SP.

Yes please - we should always reward players who take on more challenging content. I'd go farther than your comment and say why have a cap to dlvl ever. If your group can take him down, keep upping the multiplier. Balance the Party "Bonus" instead of artificial limit on dlvl multiplier.

Enlarge certain mob populations and respawn rates so that the number of viable SP grindable areas increases.

Not sure that increasing is necessarily the right answer, but maybe instead BALANCING the rates...

Increase Base SP for certain mobs to make them more desirable to rank up on.

Base SP should be reflective on the mobs difficulty compared to equally ranked other mobs and I'm not sure that's currently true...

Implement EXP chains like in FF11 to encourage speed and efficiency, and to also give players a dynamic mini-goal to work towards.

Like this, as long as the multiplier doesn't get too high to through off exp gain balance. But you should definitely be rewarded for playing better - and killing more, harder, faster is better...

Increasing the number of simultaneous overworld mob claims to 5 at once, so that AoE attacks play a larger part in non-leve battle (but with suitable safeguards in place to prevent exploits like Astral Burning).

Yes please! Let me engage multiple mobs without worrying about which mob am I killing and how does that effect my SP gain. Parties that take on the challenge of engaging multiple mobs should be rewarded for such with at least the normal SP.

[Rentahamster]

It isn't the monster rank that needs to be raised, its the difficulty of the monsters at 10 ranks higher than you.

It's not the monster rank that needs to be raised. It's the dlvl cap. You get more and more SP for higher rank mobs up until you hit mobs that are 10 ranks higher than you. After that, you don't see any additional SP gains.

By increasing the dlvl cap to 15 or 20, you are allowing parties to fight mobs that are 15 or 20 ranks higher than you, and naturally, are tougher and harder to kill.

Monsters in general besides mongrels and gnats need more HP and evasiveness to make them harder to kill if they are far above your rank.

Since the dmg and evasion equations in this game rely so heavily on rank difference, they already are pretty hard.

[Jinko]

Yea the way monsters scale in this game would put you at a severe disadvantage if they removed the dlvl anyway, there would be a cap of course which would be your death.

Which IMO is enough, I don't see the need to have any dlvl cap at all.

[Rentahamster]

Yea the way monsters scale in this game would put you at a severe disadvantage if they removed the dlvl anyway, there would be a cap of course which would be your death.

Which IMO is enough, I don't see the need to have any dlvl cap at all.

Yes, this is a very good point. For all the flaws of the random SP gain system we had at launch, it did encourage players to team up and fight really hard monsters (albeit using tactics that were really dumb). There weren't any noticeable dlvl caps as far as I can remember, and the only thing stopping you from abusing the system by fighting mobs way too high above your rank was that if you tried that you'd die - which is, a good enough system as any artificial limit. That way the "cap" is emergently generated and is only as high as the player or party's skill.

[Shiyo]

The Sp cap exists because they're afraid of astralburns/Power leveling I think. Funny thing is it's extremely easy to PLVL with their current system...

[Sileface]

Some nice suggestions!

Add Eyes (e.g. "Evil Eye") to your list alongside raptors, peiste, and eft. I mainly mention them because they are probably the best SP/hr in a grinding PT due to low HP and weak attack, but they aren't found in any large number to suit a full party. Best for solo/duo.

Also, drakes are a higher tier even still. The most i've gotten from a raptor >10+ is 450. I get 600sp from a drake >10+. Though not comfirmed, I suspect there are other mobs on this tier (Goobue and Morbol possibly). But Drakes are all I have solo'd and can confirm. Parties 45+ (maybe even lower) sould be fighting drakes, not raptors, which give much more SP and spawn in high enough numbers for full party.

[Rentahamster]

The Sp cap exists because they're afraid of astralburns/Power leveling I think. Funny thing is it's extremely easy to PLVL with their current system...

Not quite...I think the current "one mob claim at a time" system is in place to prevent astral burning. The dlvl SP cap exists so that you can't get too much SP by killing stuff waaaaayyy above your level. But, as Jinko pointed out, it wouldn't really be a feasible strategy anyway since you'd probably die. Death - a natural cap and the ultimate measure of your skill.

[tachikoma]

The poster of this topic needs to be hired by SE these are all extremely well thought out examples of how to quickly adjust the sp gains and encourage everything that FFXIV stands for. Something as simple as removing the dLVL of 10 cap would instantly make thousands of players happier and encourage party play. I almost wonder if SE is purposely holding back on fixing these types of party dynamics just so that they can have time to fix the party search system which is an abomination of FF and stands to be the worst invite / kick / loot distribution system I've ever encountered in any game. Possibly the worst example of programming ever.

[Rentahamster]

Some nice suggestions!

Add Eyes (e.g. "Evil Eye") to your list alongside raptors, peiste, and eft. I mainly mention them because they are probably the best SP/hr in a grinding PT due to low HP and weak attack, but they aren't found in any large number to suit a full party. Best for solo/duo.

Also, drakes are a higher tier even still. The most i've gotten from a raptor >10+ is 450. I get 600sp from a drake >10+. Though not comfirmed, I suspect there are other mobs on this tier (Goobue and Morbol possibly). But Drakes are all I have solo'd and can confirm. Parties 45+ (maybe even lower) sould be fighting drakes, not raptors, which give much more SP and spawn in high enough numbers for full party.

Yeah, Evil Eyes are not plentiful enough to be a sustained grindable mob like efts and raptors are. There's only one real eyeball mob camp, but it has a slow respawn rate.

Drakes are sorta good SP, but they don't die as fast as raptors, and there aren't enough mobs that respawn quickly enough.

Goobues, I think have a decent base SP modifier too. I used to kill those for kicks a while ago, they seemed to give decent SP, but are too hard to be considered a grindable mob for R50 players.

Morbols have a really high base SP since I remember getting something like 400 SP off of a killed morbol in a party of 4 or 5 players who weren't even within optimal rank of each other. We had some rank 38-ish mages.