Pagos - It's possibly worse than we thought

I try not to post in general discussion any more since I feel it's a bit of an echo chamber in here but I wanted to share some info from the Pagos discord who have been recording and monitoring data regarding FATE spawns.

It seems that instances are "recycled" a few times. This means, if you arrive in a "fresh" instance as the first group with no one else in there - there's a possibility that instance is not fresh at all. This means, any work done by the previous players in this instance before, carries over to the "new" recycled instance.

Including fate pops.

It is 100% possible for you to spend a 3 hour lock out fighting the same mob in an attempt to spawn a fate (usually the higher level ones like Louhi, Cassie, Behemoth) but the fate will not pop due until the instance recycles - which you may or may not be able to get back into. I'm unsure of the cool down between recycled instances.

Example:
https://i.imgur.com/ow6CsKc.png

I have seen this myself in "fresh" instances where randomly the snowman or hakutaku fates will pop but no one was there. We've farmed corpses at night in an attempt to spawn Louhi, failed during our timer and had it spawn for the next people after us, leading us to spam the duty finder like crazy trying to get back in.

Another example with the copy cat cassie fate. A fresh instance where the previous entire instance had timed out, the instance then recycled and Cassie spawned on blizzard:
https://i.imgur.com/F0Z6yd6.png
https://i.imgur.com/DOjHbDM.png

The reason I'm incredibly angry that this is a possibility is because my group and I set alarms to wake up for a specific weather, got up and farmed four hundred and two morbals in an attempt to spawn Copycat Cassie. The current theory is that blizzard weather is a key since thats how we popped her last time so we tried to copy what we'd done before. Not only is this amount of grinding extremely excessive for "casual" content (assuming we are correct in the proper spawn conditions, of course) the real kick in the teeth is realizing that our work could just be recycled for other people. (That, and the earrings drop from Cassie seems to be ONE total for everyone who is fighting in the fate. Exactly the same as Diadem's EM weapon drop.)
After farming, no pop, the instance was not refreshing ( I think they lock off, go on cool down and then get recycled) and we could not get back in to see. All those mobs work, for nothing.

TLDR: What does this mean?
- It's possible your "fresh" instance is not fresh at all and you are completely at the mercy of the groups before you before the instance reset. Tracking NMs is therefore pointless because you do not have the data from the previous group if it's a "fresh" recycle. The only thing you can know is what is down from your own time in there, not what is up.
- You could spend 3 nights farming corpses to spawn Louhi, but it's possible he's on CD from the instance before, even if you thought you were in a "fresh" instance.
- You could spend 3 nights farming corpses to spawn Louhi, have your timer time out and the group after you will get the fate pop.

Have fun, everyone.

It could be that they’re not ‘deliberately’ recycled but simply that new people come in just as the others go out. I once joined an in-progress dungeon and when I loaded in, I was the only one there!

Might explain why NM are spawning very little.

That happened to me today. Entered Pagos and was only one in it. Waited 15 minutes still only one in it so I left. Entered again it was full of people.

Then don't kill that much mobs. Try 90 mobs, if not pop, try something else.
@Edit: Try to see this Pagos Tracker for Cooldowns.
Ty for the info anyway.

As more people are reaching higher levels, more NMs are popping. I use to see only 1 or 2 a session, but this morning, I saw about 6. Things are picking up it seems.

That's okay, after 2.5 hours today, got Louhi to pop, but SE's stupid instance killer left no one around to fight it

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LeoLupinos

@Edit: Try to see this Pagos Tracker for Cooldowns.
Ty for the info anyway.

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The tracker won’t help if you land in a reused instance and have no knowledge of which NMs are on cooldown already, which are not on cooldown, and how much longer the cooldown has left on any previously spawned before they can be spawned again.

I just want to also throw in a few of my own thoughts on Pagos. I got to 35 in about 5 days of basically consistent grinding.

• This is incredibly casual unfriendly. If you do not have at least 4 - 5 hours a day to spare in Pagos, it's possible to get little to almost no NM pops for the work that you'll need to do to get experience. Expect at least 1 - 3 pops per 3 hour session.
• Expect to miss the NM pops as a low level with no aetheryte access or mount. Since there is no train, its possible your party can be on the complete opposite side of the map when an NM spawns. + The panic + sleeping dragons, it will take time to get to NMs. You gotta hope the higher level players will wait.
• You will need to consistently grind. If you slack in your group, you're going to drop the chain which will kill experience for everyone.
• Because of this ^ the level disparity will absolutely become an issue. Low level players in high level groups will be a dps burden.
• As a result of these ^ People are less likely to break away from their groups to help a player needing a rez. Don't go alone. Seriously.
• The low level bunny fate is, weirdly, a lot harder than the level 31 one. Voretooth is super beefy. Level 31 fate will mean your treasure will be in high level areas but its way quicker to farm.
• I farmed the high level bunny fate for 3 hours straight and got nothing except junk. There's a reason the drops are tradeable - they're have no where near the same drop rate as Anemos. In that time in our group of nearly two parties, we collectively got maybe 1 - 2 bunny housing items, 3 hakutaku eyes, a couple of cards, 2 minions. No mannequins or weapon housing drops.
• The speed belt and cassie earrings seem to be one drop per entire population present at the fight.
• The sleeping frozen void dragons in choke points seem to only exist for a train deterrence.
• As a midcore raider, I have put more total hours into completing Pagos than I did into progressing and clearing Sigma savage.
• Alongside your EXP grind, there is a Nexus light grind (renamed) at the same time. By the time I got to 35, I had what I needed for one +1 Pagos weapon with no extra grinding required.
• I wish they had have put in rare dyes or crafting materia in as drops. It might have made the lock boxes less of a bitter pill.
• I like that they have added in reskins of old glamour with no class restrictions. I hope this continues in the future.

Story Spoiler - Edit: I don't know how to format spoilers :3 A little help here?

It's treading water for very little gain for hours on end with no chance to have a break since the chain experience is your key to levelling faster. The weapons themselves seem to be nothing more than simple glamour and a check box to tick off since Tsukuyomi, tome weapons, raid weapons, HoH weapons and basically anything else in this game is nearly of equal or better stats for about an 8th of the effort.

Final thought: Pagos plays very similar to Diadem 2.0 in which the higher end fates need to meet x quota to spawn, that of which may not happen in a 3 hour lockout + one drop for the entire party like the Diadem Emergency monster thing that happened. There are layers of RNG and RNG to drops making farming for anything a completely miserable experience.

I think that last point is possibly the most disappointing of them all. It's like they literally learned nothing from that previously hated content and have managed to wedge it back in under a pretty map. I expected an expansion of Anemos, not a thinly veiled Diadem 3.0. Yoshi said in live letters that each iteration will add in more features. I expected an expansion on the magicite fighting system, not magical bunnies with crappy materia drops.

I love this game but Pagos is an absolute miss for me. I feel bad for my FC members who absolutely will not have the same amount of time I had to grind and this content will be endless, unforgiving, and ultimately, uncompleted.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

The tracker won’t help if you land in a reused instance and have no knowledge of which NMs are on cooldown already, which are not on cooldown, and how much longer the cooldown has left on any previously spawned before they can be spawned again.

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But you can know how is the max time you can keep killing the same mob for NM to spawn. I think the soft cap is 120m.
He can always see if there's a tracker or not. I would re-enter some times until I get a tracker, so that is more garanteed to be worth the grind.

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Originally Posted by LeoLupinos

But you can know how is the max time you can keep killing the same mob for NM to spawn. I think the soft cap is 120m.
He can always see if there's a tracker or not. I would re-enter some times until I get a tracker, so that is more garanteed to be worth the grind.

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Do you have a source for this info?

And no, you are missing the idea here. Please read my post

- It's possible your "fresh" instance is not fresh at all and you are completely at the mercy of the groups before you before the instance reset. Tracking NMs is therefore pointless because you do not have the data from the previous group if it's a "fresh" recycle. The only thing you can know is what is down from your own time in there, not what is up.

Let me rephrase.

Say you get into an instance, your party and one other. Every single person has 180 on their timer as the instance starts to fill up. It looks brand new.

What I'm saying is, there's a possibility it's been recycled. It's been locked off and respawned with the same things on CD. Despite it looking new, it isn't.

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Originally Posted by LeoLupinos

But you can know how is the max time you can keep killing the same mob for NM to spawn. I think the soft cap is 120m.
He can always see if there's a tracker or not. I would re-enter some times until I get a tracker, so that is more garanteed to be worth the grind.

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And if the instance is reused with only these newer players in it, as described in the OP? Who are they supposed to get the tracker from? Assuming one was even being done in the first place?

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Originally Posted by Tigerlilley

It seems that instances are "recycled" a few times. This means, if you arrive in a "fresh" instance as the first group with no one else in there - there's a possibility that instance is not fresh at all. This means, any work done by the previous players in this instance before, carries over to the "new" recycled instance.

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I don't think is there a "recycing". It's more likely it's random at start.
Maybe the 120m cooldown from Anemos is not the same for Pagos too.
Who knows, maybe it's the random cooldown and random mobs requeriment to spawn NM.
I was basing myself with the tracker, but it seems it's not based into data mining.

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Originally Posted by LeoLupinos

I don't think is there a "recycing". It's more likely it's random at start.
Maybe the 120m cooldown from Anemos is not the same for Pagos too.
Who knows, maybe it's the random cooldown and random mobs requeriment to spawn NM.
I was basing myself with the tracker, but it seems it's not based into data mining.

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The tracker is only as good as the person filling it in, and if that person has absolutely ZERO clue if they're in a new or recycled instance, this means the tracker will not be able to tell you. Basically Anemos stopped letting ppl into and instance and let it die off after 4 hours but now OP is saying Pagos is different in that the instance can carry over for the next set of people, messing trackers up with no real way to find out.

The trackers are a small problem.

My biggest gripe is that the spawn conditions for some of the higher level NM spawns seem to require you to be in the same instance for more than one lock out.

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Originally Posted by LeoLupinos

I don't think is there a "recycing". It's more likely it's random at start.

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Fairly certain this was a thing with Anemos as well. I was once in an instance that was deemed “dead” after 30 minutes (came in with 100 people, and it soon dropped to sub-50), and within an hour, it had started to refill again (made it all the way to 144). So I do think this is something that can occur.

@TigerLilley. While there are issues that will hopefully be fixed tomorrow such as the chain clock not resetting and others. I think when it came to Pagos, Yoshi and the devs sat down one last time and decided how to get rid of as much afking as possible. The result worked, we are spread everywhere and getting anywhere is a pain for NMs. You can't bunch up with other groups as the group that tags it gets 100% xp and the other group gets 20% xp. So they took care of their and are saltiness out on afkers but the down sides of the fix are horrid. hoping for a rez. good luck if you died outside a normal path players often take.

Needless to say the point you bought up on recycled instances makes sense. I have gone almost 3 hours without a single NM. other times I zone in and it is 2 to 4 NMs back to back for no reason. Players are not even in the area.

Hopefully they have some fixes for this tomorrow night as this is really the worst relic step ever and that includes the 11% drop rate in ARR relic line.

Last as always a good check, what do the JP forums say about this? Those are far easier for SE to read and I really doubt they care what is said here by NA/EU players.

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Originally Posted by Millen1

Last as always a good check, what do the JP forums say about this? Those are far easier for SE to read and I really doubt they care what is said here by NA/EU players.

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According to reddit they're not too happy with the content either. I do wish we could have grown up conversations on this forum without deviating into PARSERS. EVERYTHING IS TOOO HARD. PARSERS. BOTS. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. I watched a bunch of raiders come in to voice about no more Ultimate when that thread happened and the community here turned around and said, yeah good, ultimate sucks, more content for me only please. Amazing. No wonder we are largely ignored in terms of feedback.

Until then I guess we just hope the JP community comes through with some good suggestions to improve the current format. I believe there are some quick translations but I haven't looked through myself.

I do have low hopes that they are going to fix the NM spawn conditions on the basis that this is how Diadem2 worked and they REALLY wanted to kill the NM train. And any left over fun.

In the meantime I suggest going in there with the knowledge that you will largely be only to grind out experience by hitting mobs for hours on end. Unfortunately, that's all there is :/

Something is definitely wonky with the spawn timers at the very least. I've seen some weather/time of day NMs pop like 10-20 minutes after the mobs required to spawn it disappear. Hell, one time an entire party that was farming the golems past the ice dragons to spawn King Igloo left to fight Hakutaku, and my party followed them back up to chain grind/assist them afterwards (since most of us had leveled from Hakutaku and were ready to move on).

We barely made it up there when the FATE suddenly spawned out of nowhere while we were about to sort out each party's positioning/how to split the mobs so we didn't interfere with each other's chains. Like, we didn't even have enough time to kill one.

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Originally Posted by Millen1

Last as always a good check, what do the JP forums say about this? Those are far easier for SE to read and I really doubt they care what is said here by NA/EU players.

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Read some translations and briefly translated a few things myself: last I read, JP was mostly of the mind that:
—The Bunny FATE seemed pointless/not worth it
—They didn’t like that there was no mount
—The progression felt tedious

They really did go out their way to prevent any aspect of Anemos and the train from happening. I'm surprised they haven't done away with shout and put some sort of block on goups in any area larger than 10-20 people just to be doubly sure. 20people at point XY? right invisible walls form and prevent any more for entering that area. No congregations in this instance please and thank you. Enjoy your stay at Eureka Pagos!

If they just made normal enemies drop crystals, I wouldn't lament the low spawn rate on NMs.

You can get 60K+ EXP from ending a 30 chain on a mutated monsters at higher levels, so it's scarcely even worth trying to get NMs to spawn strictly for EXP as the vast majority of them have spawn triggers that never adapt/mutate.

Won't Pagos be nerfed to hell by the time the next patch comes around? I mean the whole point is to keep people doing it and getting not that much so they keep at it long term to get the weapons, not get them all in like a week or two that some people did in Anemos?

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Originally Posted by Lubu_Mykono

Won't Pagos be nerfed to hell by the time the next patch comes around? I mean the whole point is to keep people doing it and getting not that much so they keep at it long term to get the weapons, not get them all in like a week or two that some people did in Anemos?

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Whats the point in getting a weapon that you'll never use since next patch will out ilvl it?

I mean, ok, for raiders this relic step is usually pointless until the verrrry last tier before an expansion but content is content and if it's fun, or rewarding, then hey, I'll give it a go.

I think what also gave Anemos a little bit of longevity is dyable AF gear. Don't ever underestimate what the average player will do in the name of glamour.

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Originally Posted by Lubu_Mykono

Won't Pagos be nerfed to hell by the time the next patch comes around? I mean the whole point is to keep people doing it and getting not that much so they keep at it long term to get the weapons, not get them all in like a week or two that some people did in Anemos?

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If it takes a few weeks to get your ilv370 relic, then you ll have 2-3 weeks tops to enjoy it before 4.4 drops and it becomes outdated. Of course there will be the next step, but what if they repeat the spread out content and release the next Eureka/relic step a couple weeks before 4.5 drops? It will be outdated on release again, thats not worth the hours you ll have to invest at all. I always loved doing the relic but im not even gonna bother this time. Theres a difference in putting in work for something or getting a reward thats useless.

I think this is the most grown up conversation about Pagos we've had. the real question I have is are the devs paying attention. I may not have spent as much time as everyone else in the place yet but after seeing how Anemos turned out most of my company was excited to go there and got immediately discouraged on the first attempt there. I've gone back a couple lockouts and figured out how to get levels but this is really feeling unfriendly to people that can't spend 2 lockouts a day grinding. I did find info on the weapon work needed and that looks like I'd expect for a weapon work.

If what Tigerlilley is saying is true, then how are players supposed to get their weapons to the third stage from Pagos when they can't even spawn the last NM for the items? I get that the developers wanted to discourage the train happening again but I don't think they considered the expectation that players got from Anemos. I can understand them wanting to combat the afk players and the train but this to me feels like a complete 180 swing in the other direction, not a happy medium.

I had 3 NMs pop within 15 minutes.... At the end of the instance when almost everyone had already left.
My advice, stay the full time if you want to see NMs, as tedious as that is.

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Originally Posted by drgnmstr44

If what Tigerlilley is saying is true, then how are players supposed to get their weapons to the third stage from Pagos when they can't even spawn the last NM for the items?

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Hi there. If it makes you feel better, I got my weapon. The first time we popped Louhi we thought wow! That was easy. Just a few chains and he popped. The second time we did corpses until the end of a lock out and got nothing. Louhi popped in the instance after ours and we had split the party then spam the duty finder trying to get back in. It took like, half a day real time. The 3rd time was similar to the second, it took us about a day of trying.

I didn't sleep a lot. It's unreasonable, but it's not impossible. It's certainly not as "expected on cue" like Pazuzu was.

However, you're correct. It's very unfriendly to players who can't spend more than 2 lockouts a day grinding.

NM farming isn’t ideal in Pagos as was shown in the initial launch that the creators intended for people to do leveling via chains just like FF11. Thus the experience gained in NM was very low initially. Due to the many complaints and the “unexpected” longer than usual for people to level up, SE took the easy way by simply adjusting the experience gained in NM and had reduced the # of mobs to spawn them. These indirectly causes more and more people to level up quickly and now the issues is light farming limitations and constraints inside a 144 people instance whereby there are only one or two options to do the light farming. Good luck trying to fight that out with the rest of the 144 people!

Truth be told, Pagos is intended to have a feel of the FF11 eras and it clearly shows. This is nothing compared to the numerous wasted time people tried farming VE etc. Aahhhh those times of setting alarm clocks in the wee morning hours only to have the window open for HNM.......

I don’t know if it’s old news but i noticed if Void dragons uses adaption they would give some decent lights and sometimes its RNG and there is also Rng to get that light aswell.(it tells u everytime u get light feeble suff or something on chat box). Which kinda annoyed me to the part where IF void dragons or other mutation/adaption mobs does give chunks og light/crystal guage and locked behind the rng of getting the liight gauge to fill and also the «only sustainable» for this «lightfarming».
(Its like dragon without adaption gives robust but adaption gives sturdy but again there is low chance on getting either of robust or sturdy).

I hope u guys understand what i mean for those who lightfarm. Cuse the light feeble on ur gauge isnt always guranteed but NM are. Even tho mob-light-farming-chaining is more efficient than waiting for NM to spawn.

It also questions me whenevrr this is «the» only way? So far the adaption/mutated mobs seems to more efficient atm.
Cuse we cannot depend on NM spawn thru out our time instance either since the NM spawn r sometimes on «cd».

The unpredictability of the Fate spawns and the issue with instances recycling makes a bad experience just so much worse, I've gone over 2 hours without seeing a fate and another time done 3 of them in around 20 minutes.

The worst thing is that at low-levels you are probably going to miss fates due to not being able to use the Aetherytes. Having to run most of the way on foot taking care to walk very slowly past several sleeping dragons only to die when a mob turns unexpectedly or get to the fate just after it finishes is not fun. I missed so many fates due to this and it really is disheartening.

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Originally Posted by Solarra

The unpredictability of the Fate spawns and the issue with instances recycling makes a bad experience just so much worse, I've gone over 2 hours without seeing a fate and another time done 3 of them in around 20 minutes.

The worst thing is that at low-levels you are probably going to miss fates due to not being able to use the Aetherytes. Having to run most of the way on foot taking care to walk very slowly past several sleeping dragons only to die when a mob turns unexpectedly or get to the fate just after it finishes is not fun. I missed so many fates due to this and it really is disheartening.

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The instance design needs a comprehensive rewrite, not sticking plaster hot fixes which appear to have dried up.