What's your first impression of Eureka?

[Fyce]

-snip-

- At Lv.1, the number of FATE you can spawn yourself is zero.
- At Lv.5 you can spawn Sabotender, Lord and Teles. If they weren't stomped by the FATE train, that is. If you are working on one of these and the FATE train comes, they'll pretty much one-shot any trash you were farming. You'll instantly become utterly useless.
- At Lv.10 you get more options, but at that point most players simply try to follow the FATE train. For low level FATEs, you can participate. For higher level ones, you just hide in your corner and hope no monster see you. Once the NM pops, you throw one skill at it which will do something like 13 points of damage, and then you go hide again. Unless you are a Rez Mage or a healer, at least you can keep your fingers busy throwing heals/raises with these jobs.
- At Lv.15 you start being useful for the crowd as you can fight against a bunch of enemies. You still won't be as effective as a Lv19-20, but at least you don't feel completly out of place. There are still some trash and FATEs that will wreck you though.
- At Lv.20, now you're the captain. You can go and kill wherever and whatever you want. Mostly. You butcher all trash the FATE train usually do. And you can also AFK, but that's your choice, it's not the game forcing you to do so.

If people don't see how the leveling process gives you more and more freedom and effectiveness, Lv.1 and 20 being complete opposites in that aspect, then I'm sorry for them.

Even before the train became the meta there was little danger in exploring due to the sheer number of people that can raise you on the map. Like Krotoan, I had already trekked up to both aetherites long before I could use them. It was hardly an impossible feat. More non impossible feats: At lv 1 I was in a full party of lv 1's and 2's fighting lv 4's. Our tank would pull 2 or 3, our dps were AoEing, and I was healing. By the time I was 5 in a group of 5's & 6's we were killing lv 10s. Round up 2 or 3, nuke them down. Can you guess what I'm doing at level 20?

I round up 2 and nuke them down

So, you never joinded the FATE train and felt utterly useless when they were killing stuff 10-12 levels above you? You only ever killed monsters and FATEs of your own level, implying that you could even find a group of people with the same objectives?

Kudos to you then. You actually played the way the devs probably intended it to be played.
It means that my point was not applying to you, but to the thousands people following the FATE trains.