>>Can special attacks be evaluated on how we can defend against them and tuned to their appropriate ranks?

FTFY.

Special attacks are horribly broken across the board. I'd love to see them fixed. There's lots of creatures that get skipped because of this issue and it's a waste.

> Given the staffing shortages, please just turn off all special attacks until a review can take place that puts all critter abilities on core combat.

This make make a certain amount of sense in the short term, for higher level critters, because there's a fundamental shortage of choices. But I'm nervous about turning the abilities off entirely. Why? Because, honestly, I like hard hunting areas. I just wish there were more reasons to go there. In fact, it's the very lethality of hunting in hard areas in GS4 that makes the combat there so much fun, even though it's simpler. It's easy for them to do this, though, since there aren't SO MANY things that need to be done by the character in combat.

My suggestion, which I've made before, is not to remove these abilities but rather to provide increasing levels of bonus experience (essentially RPA's) for hunting difficult critters. Perhaps it could be accomplished via the critter attaching a flag to the character when engaging that decays over the course of a couple of minutes, to ensure it's not abused. When each experience pulse happens, it processes that pulse with the bonus experience if that flag is attached.

Different factors that make a critter difficult to could stack to provide a more powerful bonus.

For example:

0 - Standard critter. Experience operates as normal.
+1 or more - Special attacks, with more than one point given if the attacks bypass normal checks.
+1 - Critter casts debilitation spells.
+1 - Critter casts TM spells.
+1 - Highly resistant or immune to a form of damage.
+1 - Creature equires a bless to hit.
+1 - Unskinnable creature.
+1 - Hunting area is a pain to use for whatever reason (underwater, hard to get to, unmappable maze, etc)
+1 - Hunting area is mixed with different types of critters with a significant difference of skill.

Each area could have these factors added up and an RPA-like bonus granted, the strength of which would be determined by the total.

For example, I'd point s'sugi malchata as:
+1 cast fireball
+2 cast sandstorms which improve their balance, pulls people from hiding, and stuns them, and cast sand webs
+1 cannot be knocked over
+1 are in a mixed area with the much lower retan dolomars
+0 You could make a case for the hunting area being a pain, but I don't think it quite rises to the level of adding points.

This would point them as 5 in difficulty, a significantly more difficult challenge than normal. Hunters here would get a significant bonus to experience.

I wouldn't mind seeing loot scaling as well, but if I were implementing it I'd do experience first and see how much of a shift it created in hunting habits. I'd know that I would gladly seek out harder hunting areas for the exp gain. Heck, if this was implemented properly, it might create actual demand for difficult areas instead of everyone clustering around the easiest to kill critters.

- Saragos

There's a difference between "hard hunting areas" and "impossible to hunt at or near level because of laughably broken special attacks". I'm all for a challenge, but there's some areas that are just hilariously broken (looking at you, shalswars) that would otherwise be a great area.

I can't agree with this strongly enough. If there are finite development resources, it seems like a great way to "release" a bunch of much needed "new" hunting areas by simply making the existing ones that are never touched viable by switching off special attacks until they can be reviewed and tuned.