Make FATEs more challenging

[Faelim]

Often, I'm seeing everyone asking for FATE rewards to be reduced, or for dungeon rewards to be made better, etc. etc.

That isn't what this post is for.

What I'd like to see is for FATEs to become more difficult -- something worthy of the reward they produce and not a mind-numbing spam of AOE.

Give FATE swarms more health, more damage output, more variety of abilities (stuns, silences, slows). Make some FATE swarms a mixture of high DEF enemies, as well as high MDEF enemies to make them less susceptible to AOE spam. Make it a requirement to split a mob of FATE enemies into manageable groups instead of cattle-herding them into one massive group to be AOE'd down. Make FATE swarms scale by strength, not by number: 5 very powerful creatures require better tactics to deal with than 20 very weak base creatures.

Make boss FATEs more than just tank and spanks. Give them world boss-like qualities (scaled in difficulty appropriate to their location in the game). Make them hit harder, and use scarier abilities. Make them aggro wipe, so they require more than one tank, and give them terrifying ranged skills making them unable to be kited.

Make them something challenging, where people must measure risk vs reward when they form FATE parties. Let it reward people for cohesion and working as a team, instead of "zerging" things to death. Make the FATEs likely to last longer than the first 2-minutes of their spawn timer (but with a well organized and cohesive group, a FATE can still be dispatched quickly).

The impact of a change will be realized quickly, when mindless or sloppy gameplay leads to FATE parties being steamrolled by more powerful enemies. It'll force the players to either adapt and play smarter, or move on to alternative avenues of growth (quests/dungeons).

I have nothing against FATEs directly, I love the concept. I just feel that, in their current iteration, they're not as epic, intense, or nearly as fun as the first couple of times I walked into a FATE circle.

[Raiseplease]

Agreed. The fates need to be more challenging. Specifically, I think the best way to go about this is to make FATE difficulty, or at least enemy health, scale with the number of players present.

This would ensure that no matter how many people are present, everyone experiences a fight that lasts longer than 2 seconds per enemy.

[Faelim]

Hypothetically, with a difficulty increase like I'm imagining, a "zerg" on a FATE would just lead to everyone's unfortunate demise, in a worst case scenario (ie. if people play it like they do today).

However, a pack of players that don't know each other but play as expected of their role with mediocre organization should still be able to finish FATEs, albeit in a reasonable amount more time than currently.

And in the best case circumstance, where it's a highly cohesive group, the FATEs should take roughly the same amount of time as they do currently, where "zerging" has been replaced with well-executed gameplay.

This would promote appropriate play styles, as well as allow currently undervalued "zerging" classes (such as any class but Bard/Black Mage for swarm FATEs) far greater ability to participate in FATEs as well.

[BirdDog80]

I've thought this same thing since I started playing. There are already some decent mechanics in-game that would be nice to see in FATEs and make them more engaging: the exploding wisp mechanic from Halatali bosses, that slime mechanic from the last boss in Brayflox, things spawning in the field to destroy to prevent a super power attack, players getting trapped in destroyable prisons, etc.

...but I'm not sure it is possible with the game in its current state. Any FATE with a large number of players causes a lot of technical difficulties where you cannot see and/or target mobs, players, and spell effects. Also, the rewards system needs some work so that players can join in and rest assured that they won't get gimped on rewards for doing something other than spamming damage abilities.

[Mazley]

The Chimera in Northern Thal is pretty rough....you usually see a whack of guys dead

[Kyro]

So basically you don't want FATEs to be ''casual'' content? Because that's what they are intended to be, Yoshi-P said so himself. >.>

[Faelim]

So basically you don't want FATEs to be ''casual'' content? Because that's what they are intended to be, Yoshi-P said so himself. >.>

I don't necessarily believe that "challenging" and "casual" are opposite in meaning. By difficult, I mean roughly on par with dungeon bosses, which isn't so difficult as to be considered harder than "casual".

As it stands, there is little to no organization or tactics required for the mass majority of FATEs, hence the prevalence of "zerging". I think it would be a positive change to require more thought and participation from people doing a FATE.

This is not to say that people couldn't still gain benefit from a FATE by doing next-to-nothing, but that it would require more players (than not) to carry their weight in completing a FATE.

[Loxius]

I'd rather see a difference in time spent in the fate zone, now some can be there from start to end heal 1 or 2 person and get bronze others just get in the last 30 seconds spam some random aoe and get gold medal. Just not how it should be.
I would let all fates last 15 minutes where the xp is still based on damage and healing but also on the total time your in the fate, so if you're only like 2 minutes in the fate you get 3k xp while if you're the full 15 minutes there you get like 25k or something like that.

Also automaticly party forming in fate zone would be really handy for healers.

[Faelim]

Been awhile since I revisited this thread, but I still would really like to see something like this in-place.

I've had the opportunity to do a few achievement-related boss FATEs, and those align a lot closer to the difficulty that I expect ALL boss FATEs to have (not just special bosses).

Also, auto-grouping people within the FATE would be a massive boon.