Crowd-sourcing and testing Eureka Pagos NM spawn condition hypotheses

After some deliberation, I decided it would be better to enlist the help of multiple people, if only to brainstorm and test NM spawn conditions. I'm of the mentality that players should do everything they can to try to make the experience better for the community, and fine-tuning our understanding of NM spawn conditions is key to doing so. In the event that NM spawns are not due to pure RNG, we need to figure out how best to spawn NMs, since the most commonly shared complaint is that NMs are almost 1/3rd as frequent in Pagos than in Anemos.

As a playerbase, we have observed the spawns of all 17 data-mined NMs in Pagos. The problem is the inconsistency/infrequency with which they spawn.

Here are a few situations that are troubling to understand at first:

1. Reports on Reddit tell of Louhi spawning with only 2 people left in the instance.
2. A player commented that it took 400 Ameretat (the presumed mob) kills to even spawn Copycat Cassie.
3. I solo-killed about 60 or so Val Snippers (and another group killed another 50-60) before King Arthro was even able to spawn in the next Fog. By then, I was the only one left in the instance and unable to kill him myself.
4. In an instance with only 4 people left and about 50-60 minutes left on my timer without having seen Hakutaku or Glavoid spawn when I joined, both these NMs spawned (Glavoid spawned just after Hakutaku was defeated) when no one was actively killing Blubber Eyes or Val Worms.

Now, here are some theories we already have concerning Pagos:

1. Pagos is subject to instance locking and unlocking, where, after an amount of time, the instance you are in will be locked to players, and after another amount of time, unlocked.
2. In Anemos, players can contribute to NM spawning in its downtime window (i.e., you can still contribute to the next NM spawn even if it was already killed recently). It is assumed to be the same in Pagos.

Here are some questions we need to base hypotheses on and test:

1. Do NM spawn requirements scale based on the number of people participating in hitting the NM mob?
2. Are the spawn requirements in Pagos drastically different from in Anemos?
3. Do chains give a bonus to the NM spawn?
4. Are mutation/adaptation mobs involved in any way in the spawning of NMs?
5. Are the bunny FATEs, "Down The Rabbit Hole" and "Curious and Curiouser" involved in any way in the spawning of NMs?

The most important question of this thread is this: how can players spawn Pagos NMs with the same frequency as in Anemos? To this end, we need to confirm and eliminate any various hypotheses/theories involving NM spawning as a community.

From my personal experience from today, I went to join a party and tries to spawn Cassie,

1) 3 Parties ( killing same morbol )
2) Sharing Chains, we had 3 ~ 4 Chain (30 kills)
3) Cassie Spawned
4) Instance was 130+ people

I assumed Chaining do plays a role

iirc, Yoshida too said that he will tries to adjust the AFK leecher from the base in which it might or might not scale with existing instance players count

NM's HP and Strength is based on the number of ppl on the instance OR number of players participating on the Fate. My party was the last 8 players on the instance farming lvl 37 dragons (with me as a lvl 35 trying to farm lights, the rest lvl 32-33). Eventually Hadhayosh pops, and the group wanted to try him out. The RDM said she/he was willing to use return and raise us if we wiped. So I switched to tank and tanked him while the rest dpsed and saved the LB for the last 8%.

He was much easier and we were able to kill him easily with just us. I was on attack element the whole time and barely took any damage.

A few days before when in a full instance, a different group popped Hadhayosh, a lvl 35 warrior was tanking him and he caused a alliance wipe, dots eventually killed him but we didn't get exp since he deaggroed for a second before dying to dots lol. xD.

My group was chaining the crabs for King Arthro and went through 6-7 chains and he still did not pop when the next Fog came. This was in a new instance and several other NMs got cycled through including Louhi.

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Originally Posted by Mofafafa

I assumed Chaining do plays a role

iirc, Yoshida too said that he will tries to adjust the AFK leecher from the base in which it might or might not scale with existing instance players count

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While we can't rule anything out, chaining may not be a possibility - otherwise, it would be impossible for high-level players to spawn a low-level NM like Snow Queen by themselves.

As for the AFK-from-base problem, fixing it in the manner you implied would only hurt everyone, unfortunately. People will AFK regardless of circumstance, and if they did adjust NM spawns to scale based on number of people participating in spawning, we would need a lot of data, data which we are unable to get unless we undergo a massive change in player mentality.

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Originally Posted by RareItems

NM's HP and Strength is based on the number of ppl on the instance OR number of players participating on the Fate.

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The HP scaling is true, and there is someone on the Eurekan Explorer's Discord keeping track of the various HP amounts of each NM in relation to the number of players in the instance. However, I do not agree with the Strength being scaled. Consider that NMs both hit and feel like sponges when an instance has a lot of players but only few players are participating (e.g., the Sabotender Corrido problem in Anemos).

A player counts toward a NM's HP scaling if they are at the eligible level. This is a likely explanation for why the level 21 bunny takes so long compared to the level 31 bunny FATE with the same amount of people.

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Originally Posted by Tsumdere

My group was chaining the crabs for King Arthro and went through 6-7 chains and he still did not pop when the next Fog came. This was in a new instance and several other NMs got cycled through including Louhi.

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This is unfortunately my situation whenever I try to spawn him. As an aside (don't take this as anything but a personal anecdote/complaint), he always tends to spawn when I don't try to spawn him myself.

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Originally Posted by MontyChamberlain

he always tends to spawn when I don't try to spawn him myself.

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Just out of curiosity I've checked your Lodestone to confirm a hunch and voilà: your guardian deity is Althyk, Umbral Earth and weak to Water in Eureka. Maybe spawners blessed by Byregot/Rhalgr or Thaliak/Nymeia would fare better?

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Originally Posted by madoc

Just out of curiosity I've checked your Lodestone to confirm a hunch and voilà: your guardian deity is Althyk, Umbral Earth and weak to Water in Eureka. Maybe spawners blessed by Byregot/Rhalgr or Thaliak/Nymeia would fare better?

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Unfortunately, my main's guardian diety is Thaliak and I too have been having extreme trouble spawning King Arthro. Cool theory but probably completely false.

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Originally Posted by madoc

Just out of curiosity I've checked your Lodestone to confirm a hunch and voilà: your guardian deity is Althyk, Umbral Earth and weak to Water in Eureka. Maybe spawners blessed by Byregot/Rhalgr or Thaliak/Nymeia would fare better?

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While that sounds plausible at first, there is a chance that all players in an instance would be of one guardian deity, and they would be short on luck if that was the case.

Last evening my group and another were trying to spawn Anthro, and between us we easily killed well over a 100 crabs, perhaps 200. The King never spawned.

The instance dwindled, and my group moved on to clear some challenge logs for members and suddenly there were only 13 people left in the instance. And Surabhi spawned. The interesting thing is that over the previous 2+ hours no one had been killing any billygoats. That area was deserted. 12 of us gathered and took down Surabhi with no issues at all.

I can't see a reason he spawned other then he just wanted to and did.

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Originally Posted by madoc

Just out of curiosity I've checked your Lodestone to confirm a hunch and voilà: your guardian deity is Althyk, Umbral Earth and weak to Water in Eureka. Maybe spawners blessed by Byregot/Rhalgr or Thaliak/Nymeia would fare better?

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They would never put anything that needlessly complex in this game. They tend to keep things as absolutely, bare bone simple as possible. Most difficulty and complexity is also reduced to a numbers game which is why they use dps checks over tactics in content and relay on "highest number wins" for weapons and armor instead of adding boons to armor sets or individual pieces and let the players decide what would work best for a given situation.

I myself believe people are overthinking it. It is likely something so extremely simple that it's being overlooked. But best thing to do it check numbers, its likely in there somewhere and even more likely bloated to cause an increased sense of difficulty. It's again more likely that they overbloated the numbers still since they always over or under estimate those calculations and since they made Anemos so easy, its likely they overdid it in Pagos.

I could also see them just removing the specific spawn conditions completely and just have each one appear randomly at a given time, under certain weather conditions, etc. depending on the amount of overall damage is done in the zone compared to the # of players in it. Which would make more sense if they were trying to force ppl to not just afk.

Wouldn't a good test be for a fair-sized group for 30+'s to go beat the snot out of the little birds that pop Snowqueen? They'd wrack up the numbers needed pretty fast. So she'd either pop or be primed to pop as soon as her conditions opened in her window.

Seems a good place to test. We are getting to the point where there are enough 30+'s to start this sort of investigation.

Put simply, this game needs a proper Public Test Realm where nearly completed content is thrown up to a select group of players to try and break it. This way the Devs can see how actual players react and tackle the content instead of internal testers who "know" how its "supposed" to be run and make the appropriate changes before it goes live.

I killed a bunch of lvl 29 water sprites during fog, but Anapos didn't spawn until 56 minutes (ET) into the next weather cycle (heatwaves). Repeated this in another instance and it spawned 1hr 24 minutes into the next weather cycle (blizzards). Decided to keep track of kills for the third try. About 72 sprites were killed during the fog window, but there was no spawn after (storms). Waited until the next fog window (occurred 5 cycles after the previous fog started, or 1hr 55 minutes later) in the same instance and killed 47 more. It then spawned 2hr 7 minutes into the next cycle (storms). When it spawned, the duty timer had about 26:30 left and it didn't spawn in the 153:30 before that.

Got into what looked like a fresh instance since both elemental conflicts had just started and the players there the longest had only been in for 10 minutes. Anapos spawned during fog after about 62 kills.

There are also the Louhi daytime spawns to consider. Using Anemos logic, the required number of mobs had already been killed and it was only Louhi spawning once his cd was up, but we're also hearing it takes most of a lockout or a bazillion kills to spawn him. Both can't be right unless Louhi's cd is longer than two hours.

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Originally Posted by Myriads

Wouldn't a good test be for a fair-sized group for 30+'s to go beat the snot out of the little birds that pop Snowqueen? They'd wrack up the numbers needed pretty fast. So she'd either pop or be primed to pop as soon as her conditions opened in her window.

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This is a good suggestion, but keep in mind that a lot of the 34-35s are doing one of 3 things: 1) light-farming adaptation/mutation mobs (Frozen Void Dragons have recently been seen to have slightly higher light drops in early data), 2) hopping from instance to instance in an attempt to chain-spawn Louhi for Louhi Ice drops, or 3) spamming bunny FATEs in an attempt to get all Hakutaku eyes. I am in the camp that is spamming the bunnies and have been doing so for the past few days, so I have not really been trying to spawn the lower-level NMs (which, sadly I would like to do if these eye drop rates were not so atrocious).

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Originally Posted by MageBlack

Put simply, this game needs a proper Public Test Realm where nearly completed content is thrown up to a select group of players to try and break it. This way the Devs can see how actual players react and tackle the content instead of internal testers who "know" how its "supposed" to be run and make the appropriate changes before it goes live.

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Square Enix is a small indie game company without the resources to do that, remember? /s

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Originally Posted by Vnolan

I killed a bunch of lvl 29 water sprites during fog, but Anapos didn't spawn until 56 minutes (ET) into the next weather cycle (heatwaves).

There are also the Louhi daytime spawns to consider. Using Anemos logic, the required number of mobs had already been killed and it was only Louhi spawning once his cd was up, but we're also hearing it takes most of a lockout or a bazillion kills to spawn him. Both can't be right unless Louhi's cd is longer than two hours.

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We've definitely confirmed that NMs can spawn in different weather from their spawn fodder. The real problem is getting everyone to do something that benefits everybody, which is NM spawning. NMs give guaranteed light, Pagos crystals, and EXP, and if not for either the low NM spawn rate or the enigma of how to get them to spawn, we wouldn't be in such a soul-crushing grind.

Let's hope that the hotfix on Monday night addresses more problems than just the EXP chain bug, especially since the timeframe appears to be in Japan's normal work hours.

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Originally Posted by MontyChamberlain

We've definitely confirmed that NMs can spawn in different weather from their spawn fodder.

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If they were on cooldown or if the required mobs were killed outside the weather that spawns them (pulled before weather change), right? If it spawned in the latter case, it would be when the mob died, not several Eorzean hours later.

Anapos spawned a little over 2 hours and 33 minutes (rl) into the instance. There was no spawn of Anapos until then. If Anapos was spawned (when cooldown starts) and killed one second before I entered the duty, that would mean a 2.5 hour+ (rl) cooldown. It spawned about 6 minutes (rl) after the last sprite was killed. There was no NM up right before it spawned and both elemental conflicts were up.

Either the cooldown for Anapos is longer than two hours, something was preventing it from spawning, there is another requirement besides killing those sprites or there is a bug somewhere.

my experience, we got 3 nm spawn under 1-2minute after kill one nm when instance oly have under 30 ppl.

maybe less people make spawn more easier,idk :/

I saw that two with <60 ppl we got like 3 fates in row... which is weird.

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Originally Posted by MontyChamberlain

3) spamming bunny FATEs in an attempt to get all Hakutaku eyes. I am in the camp that is spamming the bunnies and have been doing so for the past few days, so I have not really been trying to spawn the lower-level NMs (which, sadly I would like to do if these eye drop rates were not so atrocious).

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Question for you. In your bunny farming have you gotten the Happy Bunny Card? And if so from one or both level fates?

Also I'm curious about the eyes. Do those all drop from one or both fates?

I appreciate the answers if you have them.

Fresh Instance. 79 water sprite kills during fog, no Anapos spawn until two hours (ET) into the next weather. Next fog window: 78 water sprite kills. Kills and fog ended while Anapos was still on cooldown (assumed cooldown is two real-world hours), no Anapos spawn. Fog window later in the instance after cooldown was over: 61 water sprite kills, no Anapos spawn

Other things of note in the same instance:
There were two Snow Queen spawns, with them being two hours (rl) apart
To my knowledge, there was only one Louhi spawn, and it happened at 2:31 PM (ET), about 4 hours and 13 minutes (rl) into the instance.

Today had 3 full parties for over hour and half killing nothing but morbols and no Cassie spawn. We must killed over 400 of them. Also server was in was new one when entered it. From sound of it they need to fix spawn time to all the NM's.

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Originally Posted by hynaku

Today had 3 full parties for over hour and half killing nothing but morbols and no Cassie spawn. We must killed over 400 of them. Also server was in was new one when entered it. From sound of it they need to fix spawn time to all the NM's.

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There's a nasty theory that NM timers in a true "fresh instance" function similar to hunt timers after a maintenance...

Meaning they all start on cooldown. No idea whether that would be a shorter cooldown like S Rank timers after maintenance though...

It's a pervasive theory I see in /shout while in Pagos (I'm still leveling to 35 so I've mostly been concerned with chaining still and haven't researched too much into NM spawns yet).

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Originally Posted by Vnolan

Fresh Instance. 79 water sprite kills during fog, no Anapos spawn until two hours (ET) into the next weather. Next fog window: 78 water sprite kills. Kills and fog ended while Anapos was still on cooldown (assumed cooldown is two real-world hours), no Anapos spawn. Fog window later in the instance after cooldown was over: 61 water sprite kills, no Anapos spawn

Other things of note in the same instance:
There were two Snow Queen spawns, with them being two hours (rl) apart
To my knowledge, there was only one Louhi spawn, and it happened at 2:31 PM (ET), about 4 hours and 13 minutes (rl) into the instance.

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All of the above is in a single instance before the maintenance. In the instance after maintenance, there were no Snow Queen or King Arthro (spawned 32 mins into above instance) spawns at all after 2.5 hours despite a mass slaughter. However, there were two Ash Dragon spawns two hours apart.

Before the maintenance, it was clear there was something other than "kill x number of mobs, get a NM" was going on, since very little would be explained by just killing a particular mob. I'm going to guess and say they lowered mob requirements because players have yet to discover the trick. If it continues, they'll probably come out and provide a hint.

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Originally Posted by Myriads

Question for you. In your bunny farming have you gotten the Happy Bunny Card? And if so from one or both level fates?

Also I'm curious about the eyes. Do those all drop from one or both fates?

I appreciate the answers if you have them.

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Various users on the Eurekan Explorers Discord have seen eye drops from both fates. There seems to be a higher percentage of silver coffers in the level 31 FATE, but the sample size is too small at this time to really determine that. In either case, alternating both FATEs would be the best thing to do to ensure you get more chances to get eyes due to there being a noticeable gap of time where the bunny fate will respawn.

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Originally Posted by MontyChamberlain

Various users on the Eurekan Explorers Discord have seen eye drops from both fates. There seems to be a higher percentage of silver coffers in the level 31 FATE, but the sample size is too small at this time to really determine that. In either case, alternating both FATEs would be the best thing to do to ensure you get more chances to get eyes due to there being a noticeable gap of time where the bunny fate will respawn.

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Usually the bunny fate respawns when everybody has lost their bunny treasure buff; from either finding their treasure, or the bunny dies.

I've been in many situations where I or a small group of people are left alone in an instance. Even after finding the treasure (or if you find it quickly enough), there is a 3-4 minute grace period before the next one can spawn.

There should be a thread for the bunny fate mechanics and drops. There is surprisingly little good info on the web about it other then what Monty has shared.

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!