BIG FAT /SIGNED
caps was needed to emphasize how great and obviously needed this idea is (I keep telling about that myself everywhere I can).
I also absolutely LOVE the idea of BONUS: Get a ton of ZCoins if your party used NO Heroes, NO PvE skills and NO Consumables.
It's the way to add a ~real Hard Mode~ to the game without adding a whole new mode, but I'd also add using PvP versions of skills there as a requirement for bonus - reason is obvious - some skills like Shadow Form or Ether Renewal are absurdly overpowered and would easily dominate this gameplay type. Sadly it may be quite complicated to implement.
Implementation idea:
It could be a popup window upon entering of an explorable area in HM, without heroes and if party leader has active Z-VanQQ for the area, it would ask every player for confirmation of activation of the
Pure Mode - changing of all skills to their balanced (PvP) versions. All players would need to click Yes before it activating and players shouldn't be able to perform any action before making this choice.
Checks for usage of consumables or PvE-only skills activations could be separate from Pure Mode so usage of one would just fail the bonus, but the regular vanq could still be completed.
Or Pure Mode itself could also disable all the other stuff (PvE-only skills, consumables), but then there should be a way to go back to imba-mode if party finds it too hard, so they haven't wasted all that time and could use some imba to complete the vanq without qualifying for the bonus reward.
Yeah, I can dream