[KhalidtheGrey]

I'm sure anyone who has put in decent grind hours has noticed that, once your build is even decent, PvE is trival, often all the way to hard level cap. Taking people with you is pointless beyond having more drop chances. It's often faster to just split up and strip a dungeon in a fraction the time.

The obvious solution is to give mobs better stats or make their AI better/give them better skills, necessitating more people go together. Though I'm leaning toward a more simple one, at least for now. More mobs. Roughly 1-2 more mobs per person in the party after the first. Of course the obvious issue is Crazy encounters would suddenly have 10-14 mobs, so you simply disable crazy encounters using this (or hard cap crazy encounters at 9 or so, bloodsoaked maximum). This would at least try to make encounters more challenging without just throwing even higher stats at mobs and would encourage people to party up and it wouldn't screw people over for going solo.

[Egil]

I like your idea, but I don't think that more mobs would solve the issue. Some of the mob mechanics could be updated to where they don't needlessly waste momentum and make decisions based off of your own classes/equipped skills. That would be a good place to start. Introducing new mobs that can only be found in 60+ dungeons would also help.

[KhalidtheGrey]

I know, I'd much rather the mobs were just better, but at least in the meantime I want a suggestion of a challenge. Most encounters I can blow through without hardly even being targeted, entering and exiting with full HP and FP (or close to it in FP). That said I tend towards glass cannon builds. I'm sure tanks have a non-existent issue with being targeted while the slowly grind the mobs to dust.

[MegaBlues]

I'd be for this, if certain monsters didn't outright murder you when you get in their range, and if there were less monsters per floor in dungeons. Just slapping extra challenge on top would make it harder for new players or those with weaker builds/items.

[Ranylyn]

What Blues said. One hundred percent.

That said, Khalid DOES have a good point; more people does take longer simply since more people need to take their turns, which often means things like waiting on the one person who got up to get a drink since someone else was taking too long, people refusing to sit still to be healed and running headlong into death like an idiot, forcing the party to take more time to get them on their feet and fighting fit before the next battle, people just flat out getting in each other's ways and hindering each other, etc. No, seriously, I've lost track of the number of times I've either deployed a medibot next to someone with 1 HP only to have them sprint off towards a Jammer Beta and die from the acid retaliation, or the number of times one ally knocked enemies out of the range of another ally's invocation or something. People are just complete IDIOTS when it comes to battle, sometimes, and the whole party suffers for it.

This next scenario is something I see nearly every time I'm solo in a BDP and there's another party in it; I'll get to the core after clearing my area, and see a party of 4 fighting a boss; there's the boss and 2 normal enemies left, and the party is already at close range and attacking. I'll fight the boss solo. I'll check on them after I'm done. They still have the boss and both normal enemies left. IF you can manage solo (Which IS a big if; see my spoiler tagged rant about IC builds vs OOC optimizing below) there seriously ISN'T a reason to ever party up since all you're doing is butchering your efficiency. 2 people splitting up to clear a floor is seriously 4x faster than one party of two clearing a floor. And it only gets worse with 3 or 4 people in the party.

I'm all for adding more enemies per party member simply to give more rewards for partying, so it's not a complete waste of time. Unless absolutely no one has AOEs, it shouldn't take much longer than normal per battle, and it'd let each individual fight actually be worth something as opposed to needing to wait for a Crazy. So long as this means the ones going it alone don't get overwhelmed to the point that people are forced to party. It's a small community, parties aren't always available (especially since RP often takes place outside of BDPs,) and solo is a fact of life.


Rant about how IC restrictions and RNG-based struggles can actually make PVE hard for a number of builds:

Not every build makes PVE trivial, and getting the gear you need is very RNG dependant; what you need for a more gimmicky niche build may not be stocked by players running shops. Seriously, do NOT get me started on the hell that is acquiring a 4-5* item that can't be crafted. They're not either already high power or ideal for rebelling, so no higher levels usually want them, so they can't be sold to said higher levels, meaning they can't be sold for thousands of murai, meaning people either don't often bother stocking them, or charge over a thousand anyways, which keeps them out of the hands of level 40s still using the tutorial weapons but who can't bring in the big money yet.

Here's just one example of how not every build dominates PVE. You know people joke about how gunners are now plate mail wearers due to the def/res revamp and the ability to allocate stats? Let's look at what happens to someone who gets tired of that and tries to go full glass cannon with low def/res, but all kinds of great offenses. Black Beasts happen. Said gunner goes to beasts. Kiting the beasts is impossible due to their high move, and even if you apply liberal use of movement hampering/boosting (Celcius Shell + Shukuchi, for example) they'll just Dark Calling over. The low-def gunner is just straight dead unless they use both One Overcharge and blaze shells. End of story.

"Well, what kind of idiot wouldn't use blaze shells against things weak to fire!? And who in their right mind would ever go low def!? Serves that moron right! Let them die and suffer and screw what they think, I want the entire game to be balanced around the people who min/max for raw efficiency at the expense of IC, and aren't idiots!"

Maybe you haven't noticed, but sometimes, people like to go for themes that match IC motivations. For example, in Final Fantasy 4, Rydia lost her home in a fire, and as such, didn't learn the fire spell until she was forced to by a story event (needing to melt a wall of ice blocking the way forward, and she was the only black magic user. She had absolutely no choice in the matter. If she didn't, an entire kingdom would have been wiped out. Avoiding the kind of thing that forced her to learn fire is downright easy in SL2, considering we don't have anything that dramatic and serious going on.)

It can make perfect sense for a character to swear off an element, focus more on an element, swear off a stat, focus more on a stat, etc. Someone with a leg injury that never properly healed may choose to go low cel, even as a class that benefits from it, and compensate via other stats. A duelist who nearly froze to death might swear off crystal rose because the cold now holds a much more sinister grip on their mood. A Corbie who lost their wings in a fight might hamper themselves by not using Gain Air anymore. Yes, some people do limit themselves like this, for IC reasons, and these are all things that can potentially make PVE downright infuriating for some people.

[Neus]

Normal mobs should probably be a little trivial but dangerous in the right circumstance. Considering you're going to be plowing through a lot of encounters on your way to the boss, making every encounter a huge challenge would probably just be frustrating. The boss itself should be decently difficult.

Though I know some builds clear encounters very quickly and trivialize matters too much, probably all the Wretched Oil users.

[MegaBlues]

@Dev, the new dungeon clear meta is spin2win Boxer, and Black Bubble is more egregious than Wretched Oil. But tangents.

And yes, most mobs are easy to deal with but lethal if ignored, but some are seriously "Kill these before they get to attack, or you're losing half of your HP". Like Firewings, Corruptors, Sliders, those floating sword enemies, anything with poison, and some other things I'm probably forgetting.

I think the best solution to encourage partying is some sort of morale bonus. More EXP, higher drop rates, additional damage/defenses. Tiny things that make having to deal with other people worthwhile. Maybe even something like FFXIV's party bonus, where each person in a party gives benefits to everyone based on their class.

[Snake]

To be honest, not partying up speeds up the dungeon clearing since instead of 4 people taking turns, it will be 4 people taking 1 mob of monsters each. Easy fights are okay for people who want to boss rush, but like this it only makes Crazy dungeons fun. (Except when it's a 65+ Crazy. Those are impossible to solo without specific setups, a lot of PR-Hi Potions and faith in god.)

Although, the 'more monsters if you are in a party' serving as some sort of mini-bloodsoaked would be mostly welcome. (Or just making Bloodsoaked a curse you can get from a catalyst or a specific object/action/whatsoever thematic, like Haunted Soul.)

[Shujin]

While I am usually in when it comes to add some difficulty to the game, and harder challanges with more Rewards and such, I would also like to point out that we don´t really need to change the current system to much.
What I mean is that we really should keep what we currently have be as it is, for newbies or less experinced players...Often enough I hear people struggling with our current dungeons just because they lack the experince to deal with the differnt things or have no help at all. I really wouldn´t like them to require help in every dungeon instance they go.

So instead of super boosting monster count/stats or anything of the like I rather see dungeons that are marked as "Expert dungeons" that do have advanced stats and such...This reminds me of a project people talked about in OOC, for which I originally made the new Goblin Icons. The idea was to have at a certain level monster "Envolve", those envolved monsters would look differntly from their original form (see old Goblins->new Goblins) and some more skills/stats, making them stronger overall.

So maybe instead of letting them envolve in a certain level there could just be a dungeon type for those stronger monsters?

This way we would have a cool new feature, newbies still have their newbie friendly grind to learn the game and the players with knowledge get a new challange.

This dungeon type would obviously aslo work without new Icons since that would only be a flavour thing with eye candy, but I think it´s important to mark the dungeon with a dungeon title that clearly stats that the monsters inside of them are stronger and not newbie friendly..

[Snake]

They'd be new monsters regardless of their base, Shu.