Pagos is almost unplayable

[KisaiTenshi]

There is quite a lot that can be done solo actually, it's just extremely slow and uninteresting but not impossible. Light (frosted protean) grind can happen solo at least which is better than doing nothing if having trouble finding a party with the same objectives for hours. The louhi ice will probably be nerfed by making it available from an npc since they set a precedent by doing that for pazuzu feathers. Light gains will likely be nerfed (increased) eventually.

The only nerf I expect from Eureka is when 5.0 comes out, and at that point they should just drop the loss of exp/level penalty, at least as long as you were at the same level of the monster or higher. Right now this penalty is the only reason why not to single-player the entire thing. A tank, healer or RDM can more or less endure this content with chains, but it's slow. Other DPS, do not have adequate time to recover HP to do a chain.

Like, I get why this content exists, it's basically the same insane grind of the 2.x and 3.x relic weapons. What did they nerf for those? They removed quantities, not steps. Light grind was never actually "nerfed" per se in HW relic weapons, they just made all the dungeons give the same amount of light, thus brayflox HM wound up being the fastest thing to solo to do due to the lack of obstacles. I imagine a similar thing exists for Pagos, just players who leeched off the Anemos train are now complaining about it.

Footnote: When digging up videos from 2013, we had FATE trains back then too on the regular ARR maps. You might ask, "gee why would anyone level off FATE"'s and well wouldn't you know it, ARR didn't give out as much experience back then, and DPS were essentially locked out of dungeon queues due to there being too many of them and not enough healers and tanks. While a "train" mechanic isn't inherently bad, it's borderline cheating since it's not the intended mechanism to level up, and by doing so, it exposed a weakness in the lockboxes rng, since you didn't get anywhere near as many boxes if you played it the way it was intended.

So it seems they "fixed" that for Pagos, but in all honestly I consider the Eureka content to just be a "bad" design where we wouldn't have complained so loudly about it had the content had a halflife of at least one patch cycle, but instead the train reduced the halflife to one day, and everyone else went back to doing what they were doing before, and complaining they are bored.

I'll say it again, some of you people are only bored because you choose to making it boring. If SE was in it's right mind behind some design decisions, they'd realize that they should offer the best reward something for clearing content synced on minimum ilevel, and never for unsynced. All parties should be levelsynced/ilevelsynced to the value of the weakest member of the party, and the Eureka content is one of those places where this was a glaring oversight, but not the only content where it creates that problem. All content should be levelsynced to the weakest player when a party is formed, that would allow high-level players to be able to party with low-level ones, anywhere.

[Rufalus]

Like, I get why this content exists, it's basically the same insane grind of the 2.x and 3.x relic weapons. What did they nerf for those? They removed quantities, not steps. Light grind was never actually "nerfed" per se in HW relic weapons, they just made all the dungeons give the same amount of light, thus brayflox HM wound up being the fastest thing to solo to do due to the lack of obstacles.

I don't think that was the extent of the changes. iirc they heavily nerfed almost every step of zodiac/anima series. The messages like 'feeble' and 'gentle' stayed the same but each of those ratings gave twice as much light as they had originally. There was still dungeons which gave more light than other dungeons and a rotating bonus window which gave specific instances a higher light rating for a limited time so we could get some variety and fish for a bonus until we find it. That's how it still was post-stormblood when I went back to finish all of the lux weapons. I would almost certainly expect light grind nerf for pagos eventually. It's a super bad stage atm for repetitious grinding and those are the ones that get nerfed the most to help people catch up to the latest stages. They plan certain steps of weapons to be crazy slow at times when they want to stall our progress a bit, but it's never permanently that way.

[KisaiTenshi]

I don't think that was the extent of the changes. iirc they heavily nerfed almost every step of zodiac/anima series. The messages like 'feeble' and 'gentle' stayed the same but each of those ratings gave twice as much light as they had originally. There was still dungeons which gave more light than other dungeons and a rotating bonus window which gave specific instances a higher light rating for a limited time so we could get some variety and fish for a bonus until we find it. That's how it still was post-stormblood when I went back to finish all of the lux weapons. I would almost certainly expect light grind nerf for pagos eventually. It's a super bad stage atm for repetitious grinding and those are the ones that get nerfed the most to help people catch up to the latest stages. They plan certain steps of weapons to be crazy slow at times when they want to stall our progress a bit, but it's never permanently that way.

Yeah, basically they turned knobs, not deleted steps.

Like the kind of thing players would demand to be nerfed would be cutting entire steps out of tedious things, but instead SE just cuts the quantity. You can look at the history edits of some of the wiki's pages to see where significant changes were made, but in general every ARR and HW weapon still takes a huge amount of time, even if the amounts were tuned. They can't cut a step out because lore reasons.

It's akin to changing a recipe. If you want to make 1 dozen cookies instead of 2 dozen cookies, you can't just cut 4.5 cups of input ingredients and cut the cooking time in half, you have to cut all the ingredients by exactly half, but the recipe order and cooking steps order stays the same.

But with Eureka, the thing that causes the most amount of time wasting is in fact how experience is handed out, and taken away. If they remove exp loss from monsters that are equal or less , then it at least becomes viable to play solo. If they want to move to a sped-up mode, they would just silently turn the knobs on the exp gain/light gain, without having to do anything else.

Like level 1 mobs in Eureka have no equivalent elsewhere in the game, they are literately scaled up in a way that it takes about a minute to defeat one of them solo, and because the groups are so close together, you're punished for using your AOE, which for healers, further reduces the number of skills you can actually use. Logically you could just Repose/Sleep the other mobs, but the actual length of time the mobs need to sleep isn't long enough to be of any use, and you'd still be prevented from using your AOE's again.