How are you liking Pilgrims Traverse?

[Supersnow845]

Unsure about SGE as I haven't actually played it yet, but I'd argue that the rest of the healers do have at least a little bit of unique use; AST card buffs exist, Expedient can help cut backtracking time, Holy provides an on-demand aoe stun, and even Thin Air can be useful for rezzing in a pinch.

Card buffs and expedience are far less useful than just doing more damage to cut down on time. Holy can arguably be a downside because it reduces the tanks ability to stun and you never want to pull multiple mobs in the deep floors anyway so you are better off using glare while the tank stuns

[Cidel]

I'll preface this first by saying Deep Dungeon has been one of the content I tended to enjoy more, simply because it is one of the last few "dynamic" and exciting things left in the game, being largely unpredictable and asking more from the player in terms of awareness (the other being PvP, as much as people try to rag on it). Because everything else just turns into a scripted boss fight demanding rote memorization after you've seen the "gotcha" mechanics that gets stale after the third or fourth repeat of it (yes, even Arkveld).

PT improves a few things from past DDs, namely the accessibility, environments and giving a few more rewards and making potsherds/aetherpool glass not feel useless. Aside from that, complaints about how everything one-shots is valid, even if I think it's mitigated somewhat by having numerous higher floor checkpoints. But that only highlights how binary fight encounters are always designed by the devs: either healers easily mitigate and heal you back and basically trivialize/carry everything, or they are a nerfed DPS with a raise outside of fringe cases. Either way, it highlights for the umpteenth time how inept the devs are at designing their healers in relation to their encounter design. It feels cheap, but I also can see why it's necessary.

I also acknowledge why people would complain about how untelegraphed these lethal attacks continue to be until it's too late; but that's by and large the devs' bread and butter at this point as "gotcha" mechanics seems to be what they have to fall-back on to artificially inflate difficulty. The cyclops boss on (was it, floor 70?) exemplifies this with the white orbs that, in the past usually meant some kind of exploding AoE, but no, here they are donut AoEs and you have to stand on top the orbs this time and you can die for not knowing that ahead of time, nyah nyah! But again, I acknowledge why they probably feel the need to do it; their battle system pigeonholes them into it, but it's disappointing because they have been showed to be able to do it better in the past. Rather than this rather spiteful design of "Hah! I bet you didn't expect the Talos' 1st AoE to be followed up with an outer AoE!/ I bet you didn't know the godzilla mob would cleave both sides!, etc."

Oh, and I find the weapons to be incredibly underwhelming and akin to something crafted levelling gear would look like. If you like them, more power to you, but I feel like even less people would be motivated to farm aetherpool and grips this time around.

[caffe_macchiato]

Having one-shot party wipes in the first half isn't a good way to fix the loss of players. Without this deep dungeon, there'd be no reason to subscribe, and yet there seems to be little reason to play the new content. Normally the CEO of Square Enix would have a stern talking-to with Yoshida about this, but he's just as bad at running the company. What are they going to do once Midnight releases?

[Fynlar]

More palatable/approachable version of Orthos overall, so I dig it.

Every DD gets 1-shotty eventually with late/untelegraphed mechs, so I don't really feel like that's a good argument against this one. It's par for the course at this point. Orthos was doing it right out of the gate and that was a bit mean, so in EO's case I could see the complaint being at least somewhat warranted -- but "die until you learn" has pretty much been a staple of this whole game, not just deep dungeon, for a while now.

[Myotis]

Having one-shot party wipes in the first half isn't a good way to fix the loss of players. Without this deep dungeon, there'd be no reason to subscribe, and yet there seems to be little reason to play the new content. Normally the CEO of Square Enix would have a stern talking-to with Yoshida about this, but he's just as bad at running the company. What are they going to do once Midnight releases?

we already see the diffrence WoW is getting more accessible than ever before - letting people do vast majority of the content what keeps casual players attached and game alive.
yet they decide to make the game for 3-7% of top playerbase and there we are.
Lack of innovation,change of the mechanics , and very punishable gameplay in the endgame is simply not atractive to people who spent most of their day in their jobs as the markets worldwide are having a downfall.

[Wice]

Card buffs and expedience are far less useful than just doing more damage to cut down on time. Holy can arguably be a downside because it reduces the tanks ability to stun and you never want to pull multiple mobs in the deep floors anyway so you are better off using glare while the tank stuns

To add to this, I did floor 71+ on WHM because that's what the party finder group I joined wanted, and it's not just the AOE of Holy that makes it an issue here. It's slow. Much slower than the stun Tanks can give out. It's not always fast enough to interupt those nasty cast bars. Sure, it came in pinch when we had some nasty patrols and I could stun all of them at once but that happened once in 30 floors. I felt more useful as a healer on my runs as SMN, as I could put out all the healing the party needed on that job (i.e. raises) while doing more damage. Expedient is, for the purpose of cutting on backtracking times, strictly worse than jog or peloton. And as Supersnow points out, AST buffs are not bringing more damage than replacing that AST with a tank or a DPS. That is, for all of these "unique uses", other roles can do the same thing better.

[Asari5]

you can start it anytime you want at floor 80(?), right? is there an additional reward if you do 1-100 without whipe? or at least on the same safefile

[Desertstriker]

i like it, but its a bit lame of design. i hoped they show a bit more from the other parts, but only desert area and the church part isnt very much
i think its the easierst of all dd, bosses with only 3 different attacks even in higher parts of it aren´t very hard.

they can do it better, but it´s ok. give it a 6/10

[Luluna]

I am enjoying it but I am just there to farm but this week had just crap like potions and nothing more where as last week I was at least getting something worthwhile for my time. It is fun and mid core I would say so overall happy.

[Esmoire]

you can start it anytime you want at floor 80(?), right? is there an additional reward if you do 1-100 without whipe? or at least on the same safefile

You can only get the solo title by playing from 1 until 100.

That aside, they were smart with the loot distribution. Challenge logs for the most valuable items favour starting from floor 20 (thus you need to start at floor 1), good loot starts from earlier floors, and bronze coffers are at their best 21-69. They actively suck at 71+, which was probably intentional. Lastly, while you do get the clear item at floor 100 no matter what, you need way more of them to get the main reward. Having solo clears from both the start and from 71, I can say from experience that if you start at 71, the 70s set can be really painful especially if RNG is unkind. Got really bad no item, gloom, HP penalty floors as a solo DPS, with no resources to spend to help make it go faster. I survived, sure, but it's so much faster if you come into with a bank. Think they wisely made a better reason to start at floor 1 over and over better than any other DD prior.