Seriha wrote:
What you're more likely to find is that these mobs will never be killed outside of possible quest requirements.
Ignoring XI for a moment, I think back to Aion and how they had literal sections of zones stocked with nothing but what we could call dungeon/elite mobs here. The only ones that ever got killed were tied to repeatable, albeit grindy quests that rewarded decent gear for its level. And this only happened in the early 30s and then at the, then cap 50, for the miragent set at the weapon phase. Very rarely would one see people just killing these mobs for the hell of it. Even when I soloed Kratia with my cleric, it was rarely I actually engaged the surrounding mobs, instead favoring pulling her to a safe spot near a waterfall.
That said, I'm not outright against more powerful mobs in the open world, but I'd very much like to see it reflective of a more dynamic system, which would also require new zones built with such in mind. We need FATEs where the objective is to attack/defend a point, as an example, where the outcome results in modifying the strength of related mobs and influencing which FATEs spawn after. Give players access to good things if these mobs are suppressed to their weakest state, but at the same time, you need to make them worth killing when they aren't without completely encouraging people to never weaken them. Basically, this would be a good spot to slip in meaningful acquisition rates for the current top tier of tomes based on its relative level. And I'm not just talking like 5 per hour, but literally comparable to dungeons.
Although grinding monsters is not the popular way to level in modern mmos. It was a part of XI and while this game shouldn't be XI-2, that doesn't mean there is no desire for some form of that in XIV from previous players who played XI. I feel to avoid the power level or negating quest leveling in the off chance grinding monsters is faster xp than quest grinding. They should just take the concept of some of XI events and make them work in this game, and not to farm tomes. Things like Nyzule, assault, abyssea(minus overpowered buffs), limbus,salvage,etc. To make it work it would have to have a definite time limit and some form of small cooldown to keep other content relevant.
Back in the pre original launch era. I proposed an idea for something I called journey leves. It was built around the idea of banding together to travel to a distant land. The idea was there would be elements of roleplaying such as gathering firewood, food,shelter materials, etc because the journey would be so long(spanning multiple real life days). At certain intervals when the party was exhausted, dehydrated,hungered,etc. They would need to build a campsite. Also while traveling they would have to navigate by using the sun and the stars in the sky. The campsites would serve as waypoints/savepoints that a group could return to a continue point on another real life day to resume the journey. I got the idea from Breath Of Fire 3 and the ice mountain in FFVII. Just massive zones similar in size to beaucedine glacier and xarcabard combined, and even bigger. Of course to make a journey take real life days, creating a zone of that size would be ridiculous. So they would need some sort of phasing that randomizes the zones or something.
Anyways that was dream I had. I could so see questing AF 3 or weapons in a zone like that..