The side content inside pagos could use some review

Posting this at the request of a friend.

We've had entire threads dedicated to leveling, NMs and light farming, but I want to talk about the main side contents inside pagos: bunny farming, cold-warped lockbox farming and (partially to those two) the 3 haste gear pieces.

I think they went too overboard with RNG in pagos. To get the /shiver emote you have to deal with RNG to get the item, with RNG chance to get a cold-warped chest, with RNG chance to get a mutated mob, all on top of hours of chaining Anubys monsters, so 3 RNG walls and a long time investment.

Depending on your luck grinding for 2 hours with minimum breaks might get you around 8~10 lockboxes give or take a couple more, and from those boxes you're more likely to get materia VI and already-devalued furniture than anything else because they also decided to make the emote and minions super rare.

Bunnies are a bit easier on the time commitment as you have more freedom of when to take a break, but even after the last adjustment bunny boss HP is way too high, it scales based on how many level 31-35 are in the map, or in case the lower bunnies, scales with the entire map, even though the content is only designed around 1-2 full parties doing it, as there's a hard cap of # bunnies that can follow players, so they can take up to 3 times as long as any NM for a small party to clear. Then comes the RNG, so far getting a gold chest from bunnies seems to be ~5% chance, so 95% of the time you'll be getting absolute junk, you can spend entire days several days and not see a single gold chest.

Now come in the haste pieces.

Optical hat is linked to bunnies, and this makes the RNG even more ridiculous. On top of the 5% chance to get a gold chest you need 5 different hakutaku eyes from them, so even after weeks farming you might end up getting the same eyes over and over and not get all 5 different eyes.

Cassie earrings... anyone who has been in pagos for more than an hour knows the titanic effort that is spawning cassie, 400+ kills and no spawns, people literally time out doing nothing but trying to spawn her and rarely spawns. On top of wasting your time for 3 hours in a row (4-5 if you manage to re-enter the same map) the three times I've been to cassie none of the 144 people in the map got earrings, my server market still has no earrings listed and none sold.

Are we being punished with Pagos? The original leveling was an excruciating grind, light farming is still an excruciating grind, cold-warped boxes are an excruciating grind with terrible RNG, bunnies are a slow excruciating grind with even worse RNG, and the chance of one person getting all 3 haste pieces by themselves is near zero despite the pieces not being all that good in the first place.

https://i.imgur.com/XQZazcO.png

I might be in the minority here but I don't mind the grind and RNG.

It's not like the emote is anything that's needed, it's just a rare want. Plus they're probably going to make it easier soon anyway.

The RNG implemented in this game has no consideration to the players time and money and is just a glorified slap to face. Pagos just made that abundantly clear to everyone that the RNG is terrible and I find myself doing every piece of content begrudgingly because I know how low my chances are of obtaining my desired outcome. It's not even satisfying after you get said item, its exhausting and annoying and SE you need to realize it's 2018 and everyone is doing the same damn thing of heavy RNG just to keep players addicted. It's lazy, annoying and just disappointing.

I probably wouldn't dislike Pagos as much if they hadn't made everything worse. If it was just the exp and relic that was a grind but I could still reasonably get the "fluff" items then at least I could feel some motivation about going in. I wasn't thrilled by Anemos, but knowing that to get a scorpion harness all I had to do was level up to the level of the fate and then do it until I got the drop, and Serket was basically guaranteed to pop at least once per instance, made it a lot easier to stick with it. There was at least a way for me to hope I might get something that run. There's no hope in Pagos.