How are you liking Pilgrims Traverse?

[DoorMattFE]

Floors - So Eureka Orthos kinda shifted things away from prior deep dungeons where autos were the big threat tbh. Now each enemy does have something, and it did often result in a one shot. Now my take on this?
okay thats, thats fine? People are saying its annoying how things are a knowledge check but DD is the MOST forgiving with all the checkpoints and queuing into all floors. But as someone who does so much content like older DD and hunts specifically, its a knowledge check! Deep Dungeons are! Knowing how to move and use resources are a knowledge check. But I'd say a solid 80% of the time, I saw a mob and lived bc I see its model or the move name and I know how to handle it. What PT does good I think is slowly integrate that into the higher floors. It's not as constant as EO, but it still exists. It makes floor sets more memorable being like "oh this enemy I need to watch for this". PT I feel engaged more. I mean this in a nice way but if you think the big long gator guy doing a move called "Left Side Smash That Will Slam to My (The Monster Casting It) Left", you should know what that does, and then know how 99% of the models we've seen of that since like HW does that first side, it ALWAYS does the opposite after. A troll/goobue in a packed room, it'll do a draw in first

Bosses - HOH/POTD bosses were eh, EO was good! But PT really made things unique and a threat and that is good. Someone mentioned the "gotcha" mechanic from the first boss and idk if thats a gotcha. But! The Courel boss, and the Antilion boss were really freakin cool especially

Rewards - Good! The floor 100 clear accessories are cute, we got an emote, glam set, the sets of weapons which look really good and thankfully don't glow because I wanna see the stained glass design not just Bright Lights. The norm with framing kits and some cool random minions/bardings. A lot of what I'm getting is for Quantum which im fine with atm but I haven't seen the EXTENT of the rare drops. I mentioned before but really happy we get music remixes from collections here too. The mounts are really unique and cool. Titles are pretty darn good from doing the floors, or solo, etc. It's what I wanted. ALSO SOMETHING IM SUPER GLAD ABOUT, using Challenge Log. Just having that extra reminder there will help this live out a bit more. It also being very casual and easy to hop in and out of cause you aren't stuck doing 21-30 forever

Overall: its DT battle content its good. There's some misses (Like the only big miss imo is the whole 30k accursed hoard achievement which is h. I guess its just following a pattern but still) but doing things like making it easier and less punishing to fully commit to is great, and the whole concept of making your own difficulty is really cool. It's their first interaction on a lot of new ideas so if its not perfect then thats chill. Chaotic wasn't perfect but for their first shot? It was super good.

Solid like 8.5/10 and I haven't even dived into quantum myself

[VictorSpoils]

Hard to say. Matched parties can't really do 70+ and on day 2 there are almost no fixed parties. There's no grind either because you have to clear it to get the next weapon, and the platinum hoard pieces just give more potions. Maybe it's just a Crystal thing.

[Yeol]

My favourite deep dungeon so far.

[CidHeiral]

Tried for the first time tonight and got to floor 50 with some guild mates. Pretty fun so far. The environments are nice to look at and I like that they're outdoors, good music, fun bosses, some nice rewards. Probably my favorite of the deep dungeons from what I've seen so far.

[MintHarlequin]

I've been enjoying it. Gotten to floor 80 in a matched party, 29 solo before deciding I should farm some more. 1-50 is very standard deep dungeon fare, but it's visually stunning and the unique mechanics are enough to keep it fun. I love the candelabra, although I do wish the negative effects were more threatening, as it stands it feels like the risk/reward is pointless, as the rewards are so good while the negatives can easily be ignored or negated with poms or incense (at least in a group) even at higher levels. I love the incense, I find them far more useful than the clones from EO while also being more varied than the HoH primals. The insta kills can be annoying, I'm sure I'll get frustrated by them in solo, but they aren't as gotcha as people claim. Most are based on aoes seen in enemies already seen in previous content. I agree that it's a knowledge check, which is typical of deep dungeons. My real issue with them is that in a group having a rezzer or two completely negates any difficulty of the upper floors. I think it would be far more interesting to have a mix of punishing aoes and strong autos. The bosses are fun, and feel challenging on solo, I'll always welcome a boss able to actually kill players. The rewards for PT are good, I welcome having more items you can buy with currency, the weekly challenge log seems like a good incentive for casual players to repeat floors, especially as they can contribute a large chunk to the "complete x challenges" objectives that give extra gil. Overall I'm very happy with it currently, although not perfect it'll keep me interested as a deep dungeon enjoyer for the rest of the expansion

[Valence]

Not to be negative nancy, I'll list the points that I find very positive with it:

- More checkpoints of access. This is good because the classic challenge of the mode is on solo runs anyway, and they can't use checkpoints. For anything else (especially casual play) the progression feels a lot better as a result.
- The visuals and immersion, it's a lot less claustrophobic and repetitive than previous ones, even though the underlying pattern is still the exact same series of square rooms.
- Candelabras are fun, but more importantly the incenses are a net upgrade over the EO demiclones that were absolute garbage, and the HoH magicites that were just absolutely overpowered. I do appreciate that each incense clearly does something very different, and their bonus are strong.

I didn't bother with EO after the 30 story floors so can't really give great input on "being like EO", but from my own experience I'd place things as such:

Floors 1-50 on par with PotD floors 1-50
Floors 51-70 on par with PotD floors 51-100, HoH floors 1-30
Floors 71-79 are an obscene difficulty spike with a lot of overly large OHKO aoes and luring traps all over the place, by far the most difficult part of the entirety of Pilgrim's Traverse
Floors 81-98 gets a bit easier, on par with PotD floors 101+

All the bosses(including the floor 99/TFV boss) feel reminiscent of Bozja and Second Walk bosses, a step up from "normal" but still a decent bit easier than "extreme".

Unfortunately I've heard from a friend who recently did the minimum 15 offering version of Quantum that it starts out already on par with savage floor 3/4, so it seems like there won't be much actual difficulty variance after all.

So far I have only done up to floor 41.

- Stones 1-10 behave exactly like extremely squishy dungeon mobs. They are NOT like potd mobs because potd at that level is within the range of lvl1-15, and it still has bees with final sting. There is nothing like this in Pilgrim's.
- Stones 11-30 behave more or less like dungeons, with extra traps around. You can facepull everything and you'll be fine, but enemies have lost the extreme squishiness of the first series above.
- Stones 31-40 aren't much different but some mobs are starting to see some harder mechanics like mobs that charge you, or start casting buffs on themselves. So far I like it. Looks like from what people are saying that it stays similar up to stones 70+.

If you haven't played Orthos, then Orthos can be summarized in 3 stages:

- Floors 1-30: standard dungeon mobs but with cranked up HP pools, especially since the aetherpool sync is low and doesn't allow to overcome this.
- Floors 31-70: everything that has a ground AoE of some sort is untelegraphed, and one shots no matter the aetherpool level or defensives. As you start at 31-40, very little mobs are like this and the rest is non threatening beyond perhaps auto-ing solo players to death because again, HP sponges. But the more you climb in floor series the more OHKO mobs there is.
- Floors 71-99: same principle but cranked up so that a lot more of those AoEs can be extremely threatening (room wide, half cleaves, donuts, or specific mob mechanics), and luring traps appear everywhere and will often spell the end of a run (enjoy having 3 mobs spawning at once and all instantly casting one of those OHKO AoEs overlapping everywhere).

Bosses are also no joke especially at higher floors, but I feel like Pilgrim is following the same pattern so far. Imo they probably just fixed the HP level of mobs and toned down the threat at lower floors but that's essentially the same design.

[brinn12]

Another copy-paste that still managed to downgrade its previous iterations even further.

• No threatening auto-attacks.
• Most mob AoEs are stunnable or interruptible.
• A lot of "just dodge by going behind the mob", lacking creativity.
• A huge nerf to mob HP pools. This is good for the earlier floors, but it makes time a non-issue later, while the floors still keep a relevant drop rate for good chests.

They're completely lobotomizing the solo experience in an attempt to put everyone into raid fights as quickly as possible. But most of the players they are appealing to would rather queue into Q40 directly, than going through a multi-hour journey they've never enjoyed to begin with.

[Burmecia]

I like it. Been on general Deep Dungeon binge lately so this came in just right time for me.
+ It's always nice to have reason to go back to Norvrandt.

[DoorMattFE]

Another copy-paste that still managed to downgrade its previous iterations even further.

• No threatening auto-attacks.
• Most mob AoEs are stunnable or interruptible.
• A lot of "just dodge by going behind the mob", lacking creativity.
• A huge nerf to mob HP pools. This is good for the earlier floors, but it makes time a non-issue later, while the floors still keep a relevant drop rate for good chests.

They're completely lobotomizing the solo experience in an attempt to put everyone into raid fights as quickly as possible. But most of the players they are appealing to would rather queue into Q40 directly, than going through a multi-hour journey they've never enjoyed to begin with.

There is "pros" to auto attacks hurting, but also it made people kinda stick to just the same jobs. There is of course, always going to be a stronger/weaker classes when soloing. But in EO and now PT I think that a lot more jobs can do well on solid runs. Running healers was just, BAD in PoTD/HoH even if autos hurt a lot. Killing is a form of mitigation. So they are just doing even less damage because they need to heal. That isn't... enjoyable? Overcoming it can be great but its not something people WANT to do because people are intimated of deep dungeons cause people never go to floor 100 in the first place, but doing it solo is even harder. So if they can't even play their favorite classes then it SUCKS. I main RDM then GNB so I'm thankful they've always been meta and I had that comfort of knowing my job. There is a balance and I'll be honest I'm glad they swapped it up with EO and now PT, if it was just autos being the biggest threat then thats boring. Deep Dungeons are just, knowledge checks. So knowing what each enemy does makes floors more memorable and I feel good when there was a new enemy and I know how to handle it.

I do think TOO many mobs are stunnable. Back to the knowledge check point, knowing when you could use it felt like a powerful tool in the back of your mind to help things. This doesn't suddenly make things bad. But on points with enemies being so easy to melt, I think this is on par with EO or at least just under. Because people did NOT like how enemies were just sponges there. For some enemies that didn't do any mechanic it was just boring

But all in all, you say those are negatives and just worse copy pastes but this dungeon does a lot better in some things and a lot more new things so where is that in your post? These aren't even pure negatives its pretty subjective? I DON'T think people will only want to do Q40, I think people will just do the deep dungeon since its 10x better than before where if you weren't doing it solo or had a group to commit from start to end, you just have to do the same floors. It turned people away and as someone who loves Deep Dungeons I think this is just the best version we have for me, but it is not even a QUESTION for people who were intimated by it before.

[Valence]

Another copy-paste that still managed to downgrade its previous iterations even further.

• No threatening auto-attacks.
• Most mob AoEs are stunnable or interruptible.
• A lot of "just dodge by going behind the mob", lacking creativity.
• A huge nerf to mob HP pools. This is good for the earlier floors, but it makes time a non-issue later, while the floors still keep a relevant drop rate for good chests.

They're completely lobotomizing the solo experience in an attempt to put everyone into raid fights as quickly as possible. But most of the players they are appealing to would rather queue into Q40 directly, than going through a multi-hour journey they've never enjoyed to begin with.

- Agreed on the auto attacks. Everything in their design doesn't care about the battle system anymore. It's all on DDR or mechanic solving.
- AoEs being stunnable and interruptible is good as it makes for skill play. However, I'm not even done (stone 70 so far), and I've already encountered plenty of mobs that are not stunnable, for example those big lizards that do left cleaves followed by right cleaves, or the taloses. You can only respect their mechanics or they flatten you. I have a feeling that's gonna be like Orthos, some being stunnable and interruptible, some not.
- HP sponges were shit, especially for undersized parties. They've been a big complaints about Orthos. I'm glad they nerfed this. PotD and HoH didn't need HP sponges to be fun.