My Review of Pagos: An Uninspired Disappointment

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Lastly, and I feel this is important, is progression. There's a MASSIVE difference between farming mobs in either Eureka and in an older MMO; leveling up doesn't actually do anything. You get numerically stronger, thats it. We're not able to equip stronger gear found only in Eureka. We're not even getting more magicite (as far as I've seen, please tell me I'm wrong). You're just getting more durable. It's a very small detail but there's a feeling of enjoyment in knowing if you get a few more levels you can equip a piece of gear that's going to make your attacks stronger, faster, or specialized in any way.

Sadly, you aren't wrong. There is no Magicite increase in Pagos. Ironically, one of the new systems designed for Eureka appears to remain an afterthought.

I played BDO and given that game 3 chances. How you can say BDO's grind is better is mindboggling.

As noted, BDO has significantly better combat which supports a grind like that. I never said the grind itself is fun or that I enjoyed it. Like you, I quit BDO for precisely the same reason. If I wanted a game like that though, I would play those types of games. I choose to play FFXIV because I prefer mechanic driven combat, not a Korean MMO grindfest, which is what Pagos is. And a horrendously designed one at that due to their combat limitations.

[Derio]

Honestly this is the worst relic. I prefer the other 2 compared to this. Even the horrible atma drops from 2.x is better than.

[Brill_]

People bring up it's supposed to be a throwback to the ffxi leveling days. To put this into perspective.
FFXI - To level from 98-99 you needed 55,500 exp. Base exp for fight a mob the same level as you is 200.
FFXIV - Eureka to level from 21-22 i need 600k exp. Base exp for killing a mob the same level is about 950.

You need 11 times the exp to level in eureka as you do in FFXI and mobs are only worth 5x the exp. Plus in FFXI, you had exp boosting rings to help and chains were not capped at 30.

FFXI has a different combat system than FFXIV. You were not required to press a button every 2.5 seconds in FFXI. The combat of FFXIV is not designed for constant non-stop mob chaining. It's endless button mashing and carpal tunnel as the end result. The FFXI exp grind was nowhere near as bad as what Pagos is.

On a seperate note, Pagos is the exact same thing Anemos. When was the last time consecutive relic steps were identical? Yeah, they reused light farming. They didn't have you farm atma, then on the very next step farm atma again. With Anemos, we did the FFXI grind, now in Pagos we have to do it all over again. Devs should've came up with something different for Pagos.

[Keladon]

i woke up Tuesday morning excited to play the new content in FFXIV. The Rathalos MHW crossover stuff i found awesome a touch grindy but fun and engaging, unfortunately outside of that the 2nd part of Eureka was a giant tire fire. I found it after playing a few days to be extremely boring and mind numbing, the content itself feels like the devs no longer care about their player base or listen to us, i played FFXI and honestly i would rather level from scratch in that game then FFXIV and that's sad. Eureka feels empty and thoughtless from the devs and if this is what they produced after 2 years they need new people bad because the team they got now is going to strangle the life from this game i hope the devs see this thread because they need a wake up call

[Fawkes]

People bring up it's supposed to be a throwback to the ffxi leveling days. To put this into perspective.
FFXI - To level from 98-99 you needed 55,500 exp. Base exp for fight a mob the same level as you is 200.
FFXIV - Eureka to level from 21-22 i need 600k exp. Base exp for killing a mob the same level is about 950.

You need 11 times the exp to level in eureka as you do in FFXI and mobs are only worth 5x the exp. Plus in FFXI, you had exp boosting rings to help and chains were not capped at 30.

Also with the exp loss when you die in FFXI, it's apparently 8% of your level, until level 68 where it's capped at 2400 exp.

I don't know specifically for Eureka what it is but I have heard people say 25-30% exp loss per death. Maybe someone can clarify the exact numbers but I assume it'll still be abysmally worse than FFXI with the higher exp per level.

[Azper]

I guess I'm just confused more than anything. Anemos was equally terrible upon release until people discovered and formed the NM train, which in turn made the content more bearable thereby increasing the number of participants. What in the world possessed them to literally copy-paste the same grind, yet brutally nerf the one method that allowed for any meaningful, timely progress?

"Let's take their mounts away to start. Let's also make regular enemies giant HP sponges that hit like trucks, but reward pitiful experience points. Speaking of experience points, let's make the required amount to level through the roof. But don't give them any more magicite--wouldn't want things to be too easy. We should also probably have a death penalty from the start to discourage any kind of exploration. Oh hey, let's put in FATEs that reward 0 exp and given random bunnies that lead them through dangerous territory for utter trash...er...treasure. Surely anyone would love this!"

This is one of the most blatant attempts at them trying to artificially extend their poorly designed content that I've ever seen.

We are about a 4-6 weeks out from the next major patch and for them to delay Pagos this long only to serve us this just feels awful. As someone that went through every relic step prior to any nerfs, this is the first time where I throw my hat in the ring. You win, SE. Good job on killing all the fun.

[Aridoth]

Pagos is badly designed. I wondered in Anemos, and still in Pagos, what is the benefit of the death penalty. This is an ancient mmo punish mechanic that should have stayed dead. We've never had a mechanic like this in ffxiv, and it needs to go away. It discourages exploration and risk taking.

I hated losing my mount at the beginning of Anemos. It felt like I spent all this time on this character only to get everything taken away in this new area. But now in what is supposed to be a continuation of Eureka it gets taken away again for some unknown reason.

Then the quests. I'm level 23 now and both quests have been "go find this thing, thanks, now go gain 2 more levels while I figure out what it does". There is no progression happening, only the most generic and painful type of grind there is, killing hundreds of mobs as slowly as possible and going through stacks of eureka potions. There is no variety or fun involved outside of the rare NM's. I'm all for a really long relic grind, but it needs to have a little variety and no punish mechanics where you literally lose progress.

[Rangar]

Here's my problem with this whole situation: SE has already pulled this stunt in another bit of content in the game . . . remember Daidem? They hated the way players made use of the system, and so their idea was to make stuff pop at 1/20th the rate before; within a week it was dead content. After dumping all these resources into it, NO ONE played it because it wasn't fun. Now SE is trying to throw a carrot in front of us by using the same thought process for relics. Honestly SE, if you're reading this, you can just stop wasting your time on Eureka cause if you keep this up, NO ONE will do it. It comes down to two school of thought: you can make something grindy and easy, or harder but less effort to accomplish it. If you make something stupid grindy and hard, people will look for fun elsewhere. This is a game, people want to have fun, that's the bloody point. No one is asking you to hand us anything, but you gotta have the right balance of difficulty with grind, and I think most will agree you got it VERY WRONG with Pagos.

[Kuroka]

Also with the exp loss when you die in FFXI, it's apparently 8% of your level, until level 68 where it's capped at 2400 exp.

I don't know specifically for Eureka what it is but I have heard people say 25-30% exp loss per death. Maybe someone can clarify the exact numbers but I assume it'll still be abysmally worse than FFXI with the higher exp per level.

I died once on 24, i lost excatly 200k exp.....

[Vaer]

People bring up it's supposed to be a throwback to the ffxi leveling days. To put this into perspective.
FFXI - To level from 98-99 you needed 55,500 exp. Base exp for fight a mob the same level as you is 200.

Not entirely wrong, but somewhat misrepresented, once ToAU dropped it became significantly easier to level due to colibris (It jumped to 7-10k/hr, the exp to level capped at about 44k, so at the top end it would take 2-4 hours to get a level). You would have to compare it to cap 75 or XI in it's prime, during CoP days it would take about an hour to get 2k exp at lower levels, more if you had a good group, bad groups would make significantly less and the exp never increased, but your exp to level did. It eventually capped out at 2400 because any more than that would be brutal, since dying anywhere in the game and not getting a raise set you back 30 minutes-1 hour of grinding + getting a group time, and you could delevel stripping some of your gear.

Honestly since people already hit 27-35 on day 2/3 it is significantly easier to level in Eureka than in XI 2004 IMO.

XI after Abyssea (when the cap started to be increased) was released, leveling became a joke in comparison.

It sometimes took people a couple months and even a year to hit 75 on just one class back then, since there were speedbumps like the subjob/genkai/limit break quests.

The carpal tunnel is correct though, in XI it was more about being methodical and working with your group with synergies to kill things faster, most of the time you just sat there auto attacking to get TP, and spells had decently long cast times so you weren't mashing buttons the entire time. Skillchaining/Magic Burst, MP conservation, SATA so you could chain more mobs before having to take a break to rest HP/MP. Back around 2004, 75 cap getting to chain 5 was a decent group. That's only 6 mobs. Depending on party comp, at that time your healer would be out of MP so you would have to stop for a minute or two to let it fill before starting again. Average groups only got to maybe chain 2 or 3.

Pagos is still meh though. At least when you leveled in XI you got new skills, abilities, spells, gear etc. Here you barely get anything except the privilege of fighting another boring set of mobs that are mostly training dummies with a damage/defense multiplier.