How are you liking Pilgrims Traverse?

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Originally Posted by ThurinTurambar

Pretty visuals, accessibility through the roof. Some fun ideas.
But ultimately extremely undertuned in endgame, combined with shallowness of the difficulty type (basicly only "dodge the hidden aoe lmao").
This drasticly diminishes replayability value, aside from some odd eggs like scholar, the dungeon plays almost the same on every job/role.

For comparison Palace of the Dead presents several problems to overcome (problems in good sense):
High damage / double auto skills
Damage over time skills
Area denial
enrage mechanics
time consuming mechanics (high hp, slow, paralasys)
Crowd control
And lastly, the shared one - dangerous aoes.
Add to it that potd mobs often combine several of those: Sasquach is both area denial and high damage, Claw is high damage, cc pull-in and a time risk due to slow. There are also some distinctly easier options to 'farm' but you never have enough of them to progress without tackling one of those obstacles above. (ofc im talking deep potd)

PT endgame basicly only has the last one, add insane incense drop rate, making it a very underchallenging experience for solo player.

Also such huge focus on aoe isnt really casual/party friendly either. Someone pulls a mob behind you? Someone steps on luring? Recipe for disaster
If instead the dungeon was blanced damage/hp/mechanics towards a standard comp light party, it would be the best of both worlds - solo players would find the challenge they are looking for, and parties can clear without 100-0 situations and feel good about it.

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Cannot agree more with the reasoning.

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Originally Posted by ThurinTurambar

Problem is not job design, but mob design. Id argue that tanks and healers have their strong suits basicly invalidated by one shotting aoes. Which means the only thing that matters is how high is your dmg output. Thats why mobs with irregularly high damage, double autos and dots matter. Same reason why mobs with higher hp pools / slowing mechanisms are important. There is no better way to scare a tank than a mob that plummets your dmg output if you fail its mechanic.

Here is proof of my ideas: https://youtu.be/PPKXHZcgg_Q
I shouldnt be able to do this on mch, but with Pt design i am

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You are both saying the same thing, the only way to deal with how overpowered the tanks are and how bloated the healers are is to make literally everything a one shot on every role otherwise you can just tank and heal through it with minor effort. It’s the same reason savage has leant on body checks for so long. Because the only way to balance the raw bloat of the kits is to take them entirely out of the equation

I think it ended up that way because both HoH and PoTD's high auto attack damage and bleeds basically shoehorned most players into two paths: Tanks or Kiting on MCH. Soloing on anything else felt like a challenge run

Orthos was the first big shakeup where autos didn't matter but respecting mechanics did, and it resulted in tanks and healers feeling awful because the HP pools were so bloated and unfun to deal with the content just died on release. Selfish DPS reigned king here.
Pilgrim's Traverse feels like it was designed with the Orthos mentality in mind but they scaled back the mob HP to be reasonable for support jobs to deal with. The removal of Amnesia and Blindness felt like it was done trying to balance out the feeling of jobs in this content as some were just completely crippled by those effects.

This is probably the most balanced a DD has ever been for job performance, but it came at the cost of making it the easiest DD.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Card buffs and expedience are far less useful than just doing more damage to cut down on time.

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I'll give you the point on card buffs, but your point on expedient makes no sense; you can't "do more damage" when you aren't fighting anything, and expedient can save time spent backtracking through rooms.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Holy can arguably be a downside because it reduces the tanks ability to stun and you never want to pull multiple mobs in the deep floors anyway so you are better off using glare while the tank stuns

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You're not always gonna have a Paladin in the party, and the deep floors also have patrol groups that are somewhat unpredictable and can be very deadly. I can't count the amount of times in the final two sets of floors where a well-timed Holy saved my group from sudden patrols sneaking up behind us, or a group of Sawtooth and Demon patrols converging onto the party from multiple directions, there's even been a handful of times where Holy spam allowed us to survive accidental extra pulls and luring traps.

I do agree that it's still much more efficient to bring a SMN or RDM over a healer, but it's outright false to say that healers don't bring anything uniquely useful, particularly SCH and WHM.

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Originally Posted by SkankyRoe

I'll give you the point on card buffs, but your point on expedient makes no sense; you can't "do more damage" when you aren't fighting anything, and expedient can save time spent backtracking through rooms.



You're not always gonna have a Paladin in the party, and the deep floors also have patrol groups that are somewhat unpredictable and can be very deadly. I can't count the amount of times in the final two sets of floors where a well-timed Holy saved my group from sudden patrols sneaking up behind us, or a group of Sawtooth and Demon patrols converging onto the party from multiple directions, there's even been a handful of times where Holy spam allowed us to survive accidental extra pulls and luring traps.

I do agree that it's still much more efficient to bring a SMN or RDM over a healer, but it's outright false to say that healers don't bring anything uniquely useful, particularly SCH and WHM.

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It’s slower to bring a SCH who can use expedient for backtracking vs bringing a DPS that does more damage, you make up more time killing the mobs faster than you do running faster for 10 seconds was my point. Expedient isn’t making up for a DPS allowing you kill every mob in half the time

And that’s why I said that holy CAN be a downside, not that it always is. But its uses are niche and usually only for if you make a mistake. It’s not something you want to be relying on a lot. Though it is more useful without a PLD though I’d be using sleep on a caster on the situations you’ve described over holy

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Originally Posted by cashmoney109

The one shots are just another side effect of poor role balance and the game being completely overloaded with defense, healing and recovery tools. Tanks are overpowered and can do 70% the damage of a DPS while having 10x the survivability. Healer kits are overloaded and virtually incapable of running out of resources. DPS are littered with even more superfluous healing and mit tools because they removed every other form of utility but we still need to put up a flimsy front pretending this is an RPG. Not even to mention the infinite rezzes which they made even worse with phoenix downs. If there were no one shots it would play exactly like any other snoozefest dungeon in this game with zero chance of failure.

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Worst part is DPS defensives don't even help.

Like.... anywhere.... lmao

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

It’s slower to bring a SCH who can use expedient for backtracking vs bringing a DPS that does more damage, you make up more time killing the mobs faster than you do running faster for 10 seconds was my point. Expedient isn’t making up for a DPS allowing you kill every mob in half the time

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It depends on the extent of the combat vs the backtracking; a short floor with minimal backtracking sure, the SCH's tiny bit of damage could save a bit of time vs expedient. But most of the time you'll be avoiding as much combat as possible, and often you'll end up spending more time actually running through the rooms and backtracking, than you will actually fighting stuff. Most notable with this is when you use a Mazeroot and the exit is many rooms away. At least in my experiences I have found that often a good bit more time is spent out of combat, than in combat. The actual difference either way is probably minimal enough not to matter, but it's still something that exists.

Personally I've felt the most comfy doing my runs on WHM despite maining SMN and DNC. Holy is risky, for sure, but it's been a fun learning experience figuring out when and where to take that risk, and I've also had a few cool moments where a run was saved by using Thin Air+Swiftcast rez immediately after being rezzed myself. I feel like I don't get these sorts of neat little experiences in the standard battle content, it's nice to have something that honestly feels a tiny bit more fun on a healer than on a dps.

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Originally Posted by SkankyRoe

It depends on the extent of the combat vs the backtracking; a short floor with minimal backtracking sure, the SCH's tiny bit of damage could save a bit of time vs expedient. But most of the time you'll be avoiding as much combat as possible, and often you'll end up spending more time actually running through the rooms and backtracking, than you will actually fighting stuff. Most notable with this is when you use a Mazeroot and the exit is many rooms away. At least in my experiences I have found that often a good bit more time is spent out of combat, than in combat. The actual difference either way is probably minimal enough not to matter, but it's still something that exists.

Personally I've felt the most comfy doing my runs on WHM despite maining SMN and DNC. Holy is risky, for sure, but it's been a fun learning experience figuring out when and where to take that risk, and I've also had a few cool moments where a run was saved by using Thin Air+Swiftcast rez immediately after being rezzed myself. I feel like I don't get these sorts of neat little experiences in the standard battle content, it's nice to have something that honestly feels a tiny bit more fun on a healer than on a dps.

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I've noticed that too many parties generally lean too far on the "avoiding combat" side of things, if anything. In a party of 4, it is usually far quicker to just kill mobs that are in the way instead of waiting for them to move so you can slip on by (just for someone to not walk exactly like you did and aggro things anyway).

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Originally Posted by CarlCarl

I've noticed that too many parties generally lean too far on the "avoiding combat" side of things, if anything. In a party of 4, it is usually far quicker to just kill mobs that are in the way instead of waiting for them to move so you can slip on by (just for someone to not walk exactly like you did and aggro things anyway).

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The final two sets of floors the enemies get fairly dangerous with their mechanics and the patrols especially can quickly cause things to go south, so it's generally much safer to sneak past the static enemies, and often faster when taking into account the extra time that would need to be spent dodging the OHKO mechanics.

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Originally Posted by SkankyRoe

The final two sets of floors the enemies get fairly dangerous with their mechanics and the patrols especially can quickly cause things to go south, so it's generally much safer to sneak past the static enemies, and often faster when taking into account the extra time that would need to be spent dodging the OHKO mechanics.

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The vast majority of mechanics are trivial to dodge in terms of time-investment, and all but 6 enemies in 81-100 can be stunned (And of those 6, only 4 of those will realistically even have time to do a mechanic before they die).
From my experience in matched parties, sneaking is often slower instead of just killing most mobs in the way as there are plenty of people who hesitate too long, accidentally aggro a mob anyway, or step on a luring, instead of just killing said enemy in <20 seconds.

I'm inclined to agree, the sneaking to keyroom and clearing after the fact strategy is a relic of when high floor enemies were actually scary like the last 20 floors of HoH.

Orthos and PT reward more of keeping uptime on your killing and getting it out the way faster. Moreso Orthos than PT but I think they're both very similar.

Yeah the biggest run killers for me have been

1) Party is split, people attacking things that have insane range and nobody is ready for an AoE that wipes everyone out
2) People try and sneak past a room instead of just killing the 1/2 enemies in it, get caught up with patrols, run into uncleared room and aggro too many things to handle (surprisingly common)
3) The Sonic speed buff is active which makes everyone run all over the place aggroing everything
4) Gung-ho tanks that think they're invincible.

Seriously I've cleared floor 99 with 4 DPS more consistently than any time there's a tank on the team.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Yeah the biggest run killers for me have been

1) Party is split, people attacking things that have insane range and nobody is ready for an AoE that wipes everyone out
2) People try and sneak past a room instead of just killing the 1/2 enemies in it, get caught up with patrols, run into uncleared room and aggro too many things to handle (surprisingly common)
3) The Sonic speed buff is active which makes everyone run all over the place aggroing everything
4) Gung-ho tanks that think they're invincible.

Seriously I've cleared floor 99 with 4 DPS more consistently than any time there's a tank on the team.

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For me, most of my wipes have been to bosses.

The cactuar and the arm guy both have a mechanic where the safe spot is like one tiny square, and you have to read the name of the move to know which variant it is and then use that information with the layout of the visual tells to resolve where the safe spot is, and I can't do it fast enough reliably. I've mostly been carried by being paired with people who can resolve it fast and just following them. Same with the last boss's dual cast where you have to step in the right puddles, I'll probably only be able to do it if I follow someone. I feel like they should have some sort of bespoke castbar UI for it if I'm meant to be able to see both, the hate list is not what I would call a readable mechanic.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

For me, most of my wipes have been to bosses.

The cactuar and the arm guy both have a mechanic where the safe spot is like one tiny square, and you have to read the name of the move to know which variant it is and then use that information with the layout of the visual tells to resolve where the safe spot is, and I can't do it fast enough reliably. I've mostly been carried by being paired with people who can resolve it fast and just following them. Same with the last boss's dual cast where you have to step in the right puddles, I'll probably only be able to do it if I follow someone. I feel like they should have some sort of bespoke castbar UI for it if I'm meant to be able to see both, the hate list is not what I would call a readable mechanic.

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Not sure if the 90 boss has it but the 99 boss uses the new feature where you can have cast bars show up above the boss models. For Drain Aether this makes it very easy to quickly see who is casting Drain Aether first.

You can find the setting for this in Character Configuration > Display Name Settings > General > Tick on 'Display progress bar'

The thing I don't like is the entrance. We got 4 NPCs, 3 of which are tiny, and they aren't standing with their backs to the wall or at any sort of landmark like all the other Deep Dungeon NPCs. It's really hard to find them with a lot of people around, and the entrance is non-descript and disorienting to walk to in general.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Yeah the biggest run killers for me have been

1) Party is split, people attacking things that have insane range and nobody is ready for an AoE that wipes everyone out
2) People try and sneak past a room instead of just killing the 1/2 enemies in it, get caught up with patrols, run into uncleared room and aggro too many things to handle (surprisingly common)
3) The Sonic speed buff is active which makes everyone run all over the place aggroing everything
4) Gung-ho tanks that think they're invincible.

Seriously I've cleared floor 99 with 4 DPS more consistently than any time there's a tank on the team.

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4 DPS was my first clear. Tanks can only survive an AoE if they pre-mitted, and that can still put them in auto range. Better to just kill stuff faster. Also, barring patrols, one person can always hang back without attacking.

Historically, the #1 wipe reason is not using pomanders. People will gather every gold chest on every floor and not use anything unless they have three of it. You can tell they don't even have the menu open.

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Originally Posted by SalamanderIX

The thing I don't like is the entrance. We got 4 NPCs, 3 of which are tiny, and they aren't standing with their backs to the wall or at any sort of landmark like all the other Deep Dungeon NPCs. It's really hard to find them with a lot of people around, and the entrance is non-descript and disorienting to walk to in general.

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A lot of it screams lazy, unthoughtful design, yeah.

Based on my experience;

- Tanks are still fine to go with. Your dps isn't great and time is your biggest killer, but with the amount of pomanders that you get, it's not that bad. Unlike HoH where you had to carefully manage your pomanders, here you can throw whatever you wish. Game is really generous, specially later on 91+ which makes this DD easy. DRK has pretty decent damage, probably better than warrior. GNB may have better damage?

My personal recommendation is to just play dps as mobs here cannot do critical with basic attacks and on later floors all abilities one shot regardless if you are a tank or not (perhaps tank with steel can tank one ability but I doubt. HP buff from bark perhaps?).

Samurai is my go-to thing and you should definitely play this class. Strongest damage in my opinion and you destroy mobs even at higher floors at such speed that most of the times they won't be able to cast their abilities or even do something threatening. You also have a stun which you can use for patrols or succubus.

Edit: only reason to play with a tank is that you can survive some boss mechanics and is more forgiving there. Allowing for more mistakes, otherwise go dps. Oh and also this is DD doesn't have impurity debuff which means that you can never have "no abilities". Another thing why it's extremely easy as gloom + damage down is fairly nothing.

Q40 needs rewards. It has none.

What about the reward of personal satisfaction?

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Originally Posted by melbye

What about the reward of personal satisfaction?

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If the gameplay was good then maybe

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

If the gameplay was good then maybe

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Guy has 6,700 posts about a game with gameplay he doesn't enjoy.

Ten clears or so later, PT is great. People unfortunately suck at easy mechanics and do stupid stuff like not binding Pilgrim's Potion as a tank, Clemency-ing yourself because you didn't interrupt a mimic and then complaining that the party pulled too early because (looks at smudged writing on hand) you wanted to wait for pox to run out on floor 80.

...Yes, that happened to me. Also people with like 50 aetherpool joining reclear parties makes me go insane bc there's no way to look at their gear until you are in the instance.

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Originally Posted by MayuAmakura

Based on my experience;

- Tanks are still fine to go with. Your dps isn't great and time is your biggest killer, but with the amount of pomanders that you get, it's not that bad. Unlike HoH where you had to carefully manage your pomanders, here you can throw whatever you wish. Game is really generous, specially later on 91+ which makes this DD easy. DRK has pretty decent damage, probably better than warrior. GNB may have better damage?

My personal recommendation is to just play dps as mobs here cannot do critical with basic attacks and on later floors all abilities one shot regardless if you are a tank or not (perhaps tank with steel can tank one ability but I doubt. HP buff from bark perhaps?).

Samurai is my go-to thing and you should definitely play this class. Strongest damage in my opinion and you destroy mobs even at higher floors at such speed that most of the times they won't be able to cast their abilities or even do something threatening. You also have a stun which you can use for patrols or succubus.

Edit: only reason to play with a tank is that you can survive some boss mechanics and is more forgiving there. Allowing for more mistakes, otherwise go dps. Oh and also this is DD doesn't have impurity debuff which means that you can never have "no abilities". Another thing why it's extremely easy as gloom + damage down is fairly nothing.

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Succubus doesn't need to be stunned. You line of sight their cast. The dangerous patrol at higher floors is the 3 headed plant-hydra.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Guy has 6,700 posts about a game with gameplay he doesn't enjoy.

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*Gameplay he used to enjoy and still sees potential in

It's another Deep Dungeon... not much more else to say about it

Speaking of succubi and other similarly cast inclined enemies inside, I do actually appreciate the addition of markers over head to indicate the danger, much like glowing enemies can indicate they're casting a room wide or buffing themselves. It's good feedback, but in the case of the succubus enemies and similar ones it also becomes extremely confusing when said ability gets stunned because the marker stays and doesn't go away, but does nothing since the enemy has been stunned, which sends very conflicting signals.

Also another side note for pilgrims, the later levels have actually been some of the best community content lately. Like lots of people actually chat and talk about stuff, crack jokes, sharing tips freely... it's been nice.

I have enjoyed just being able to queue for a deep dungeon and follow that save all the way up to the top. I dont know how long it'll stay alive but I hope its for a while.

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Originally Posted by 0blivion

Ten clears or so later, PT is great. People unfortunately suck at easy mechanics and do stupid stuff like not binding Pilgrim's Potion as a tank, Clemency-ing yourself because you didn't interrupt a mimic and then complaining that the party pulled too early because (looks at smudged writing on hand) you wanted to wait for pox to run out on floor 80.

...Yes, that happened to me. Also people with like 50 aetherpool joining reclear parties makes me go insane bc there's no way to look at their gear until you are in the instance.

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That's why I just do solo even though it takes a bit longer. Rarely I had good party members who would listen. Most of the times it's people running around mindlessly in every room and triggering all traps because "it's so boring, idk what to do".

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Originally Posted by BlisteringFrost

Succubus doesn't need to be stunned. You line of sight their cast. The dangerous patrol at higher floors is the 3 headed plant-hydra.

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You can LoS yes but sometimes you won't have enough time so stun is best thing or you want to burst it faster without losing time. Also hydra is definitely not a dangerous patrol in my opinion. Sure it's big and doesn't allow you to see much but fighting this thing is extremely easy because if you just stay in front of it, you will be safe from all mechanics except the frontal cone which is also predictable. Succubus was more anxiety than this.

The ones that actually fill me with dread are the acherons at stone 96+. Perhaps I havent figured out all of their moveset though and I'm overthinking it.

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Originally Posted by Valence

The ones that actually fill me with dread are the acherons at stone 96+. Perhaps I havent figured out all of their moveset though and I'm overthinking it.

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They fill me with dread, too, but if I understand Maygi's guide correctly, you can LoS them. I don't think they were particularly sure either, though. I'll quote it here:

"⚠ Authority’s Edge: Roomwide half circle (?) AOE in the direction he’s holding his sword. When in doubt, just LoS it…"

It's also not stunnable.

This is the first DD I ever cleared with a matched party, and I'm thankful for everyone's help and guides for newbies.

Also, I have to say I'll never do the last floors F71-100 for fun now that I have it done since final F90-99 were extremely stressful for me and the rewards were meagre and I am struggling to even sell them on the market apart from the single platinum piece for 10k which I got from sacks.

I am glad if other DD fans like PT tho and if ppl were interested in 4 man Ultimate-like raids are happy with Q99 now. The First Light weapons are beautiful even without glow, so I traded a few grips for them now, and I like all the other tradable rewards too.

Waited 45 min to get a team
Went solo because of I couldn't find one, to build a little ether pool, while making at least the 10 first floor.
Went to floor 10.
Boss 2 shoted me.

I see another balanced content that need to be done as a tank, or to be someone that enjoy the queue simulator this game is. I know none of this has to do with the content by itself, but man.

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Originally Posted by CNitsah

Waited 45 min to get a team
Went solo because of I couldn't find one, to build a little ether pool, while making at least the 10 first floor.
Went to floor 10.
Boss 2 shoted me.

I see another balanced content that need to be done as a tank, or to be someone that enjoy the queue simulator this game is. I know none of this has to do with the content by itself, but man.

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The floor 10 boss has a trick to it--it's not the *boss* that's killing you. Going in as a tank won't really help with that. Probably hinder, tbh, if you don't have much aetherpool.

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Originally Posted by CNitsah

Waited 45 min to get a team
Went solo because of I couldn't find one, to build a little ether pool, while making at least the 10 first floor.
Went to floor 10.
Boss 2 shoted me.

I see another balanced content that need to be done as a tank, or to be someone that enjoy the queue simulator this game is. I know none of this has to do with the content by itself, but man.

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Welcome to the content that trolled most of the solo DD community day 1, myself included. What killed you was a dps check.

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Originally Posted by 0blivion

They fill me with dread, too, but if I understand Maygi's guide correctly, you can LoS them. I don't think they were particularly sure either, though. I'll quote it here:

"⚠ Authority’s Edge: Roomwide half circle (?) AOE in the direction he’s holding his sword. When in doubt, just LoS it…"

It's also not stunnable.

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Acherons are most certainly stunnable. Either that or my leg sweep is simply built different.

They were not stunnable in EO, so I assume this mistake comes from there.

Oh, interesting! I'll try that next time then, lol. I usually just don't fight them but if I wanna get my title, I will have to learn.

ok, now that I went until floor 50, I have to say they did a lot of efforts with this.

There is a lot of good things :
- up until now, every series of ten floor can be done with a pick up team, which is a big + to make deeper floor more accessible.
- same goes with the step at 51 and 71.
- weekly challenge that give you money for the interesting rewards. If it keeps the player in, it can be fun enough on the long run.
- viable way to farm memo.
- quantum supposed to give something for hardcore player that want more

The first 3 combined together make it so it can be done in smaller runs, no need to spend 3 to 4 hours the same day to try to get to the end if you don't have 3 friends ready to it.

For once in this expansion, they thought the content the right way "going from things meant for everyone, with more challenging optional option. After the disaster that was OC and FTB, it's a pleasure to see. I hope player will stay on the long run. For once I might finish it.

What could be made better
- 3 new currency, + 3 offering items : that's too much
- add a third save

It's not perfect, but this is probably the best designed content in term of shelf life while still being enjoyable since Zadnor, nearly 4 and a half year ago. And out of all things, it's a deep dungeon, that have been one of the weaker content that most people abandonned when the novelty faded.