How are you liking Pilgrims Traverse?

[Valence]

Pretty visuals, accessibility through the roof. Some fun ideas.
But ultimately extremely undertuned in endgame, combined with shallowness of the difficulty type (basicly only "dodge the hidden aoe lmao").
This drasticly diminishes replayability value, aside from some odd eggs like scholar, the dungeon plays almost the same on every job/role.

For comparison Palace of the Dead presents several problems to overcome (problems in good sense):
High damage / double auto skills
Damage over time skills
Area denial
enrage mechanics
time consuming mechanics (high hp, slow, paralasys)
Crowd control
And lastly, the shared one - dangerous aoes.
Add to it that potd mobs often combine several of those: Sasquach is both area denial and high damage, Claw is high damage, cc pull-in and a time risk due to slow. There are also some distinctly easier options to 'farm' but you never have enough of them to progress without tackling one of those obstacles above. (ofc im talking deep potd)

PT endgame basicly only has the last one, add insane incense drop rate, making it a very underchallenging experience for solo player.

Also such huge focus on aoe isnt really casual/party friendly either. Someone pulls a mob behind you? Someone steps on luring? Recipe for disaster
If instead the dungeon was blanced damage/hp/mechanics towards a standard comp light party, it would be the best of both worlds - solo players would find the challenge they are looking for, and parties can clear without 100-0 situations and feel good about it.

Cannot agree more with the reasoning.

[Supersnow845]

Problem is not job design, but mob design. Id argue that tanks and healers have their strong suits basicly invalidated by one shotting aoes. Which means the only thing that matters is how high is your dmg output. Thats why mobs with irregularly high damage, double autos and dots matter. Same reason why mobs with higher hp pools / slowing mechanisms are important. There is no better way to scare a tank than a mob that plummets your dmg output if you fail its mechanic.

Here is proof of my ideas: https://youtu.be/PPKXHZcgg_Q
I shouldnt be able to do this on mch, but with Pt design i am

You are both saying the same thing, the only way to deal with how overpowered the tanks are and how bloated the healers are is to make literally everything a one shot on every role otherwise you can just tank and heal through it with minor effort. It’s the same reason savage has leant on body checks for so long. Because the only way to balance the raw bloat of the kits is to take them entirely out of the equation

[Oizen]

I think it ended up that way because both HoH and PoTD's high auto attack damage and bleeds basically shoehorned most players into two paths: Tanks or Kiting on MCH. Soloing on anything else felt like a challenge run

Orthos was the first big shakeup where autos didn't matter but respecting mechanics did, and it resulted in tanks and healers feeling awful because the HP pools were so bloated and unfun to deal with the content just died on release. Selfish DPS reigned king here.
Pilgrim's Traverse feels like it was designed with the Orthos mentality in mind but they scaled back the mob HP to be reasonable for support jobs to deal with. The removal of Amnesia and Blindness felt like it was done trying to balance out the feeling of jobs in this content as some were just completely crippled by those effects.

This is probably the most balanced a DD has ever been for job performance, but it came at the cost of making it the easiest DD.

[SkankyRoe]

Card buffs and expedience are far less useful than just doing more damage to cut down on time.

I'll give you the point on card buffs, but your point on expedient makes no sense; you can't "do more damage" when you aren't fighting anything, and expedient can save time spent backtracking through rooms.

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

You're not always gonna have a Paladin in the party, and the deep floors also have patrol groups that are somewhat unpredictable and can be very deadly. I can't count the amount of times in the final two sets of floors where a well-timed Holy saved my group from sudden patrols sneaking up behind us, or a group of Sawtooth and Demon patrols converging onto the party from multiple directions, there's even been a handful of times where Holy spam allowed us to survive accidental extra pulls and luring traps.

I do agree that it's still much more efficient to bring a SMN or RDM over a healer, but it's outright false to say that healers don't bring anything uniquely useful, particularly SCH and WHM.

[Supersnow845]

I'll give you the point on card buffs, but your point on expedient makes no sense; you can't "do more damage" when you aren't fighting anything, and expedient can save time spent backtracking through rooms.



You're not always gonna have a Paladin in the party, and the deep floors also have patrol groups that are somewhat unpredictable and can be very deadly. I can't count the amount of times in the final two sets of floors where a well-timed Holy saved my group from sudden patrols sneaking up behind us, or a group of Sawtooth and Demon patrols converging onto the party from multiple directions, there's even been a handful of times where Holy spam allowed us to survive accidental extra pulls and luring traps.

I do agree that it's still much more efficient to bring a SMN or RDM over a healer, but it's outright false to say that healers don't bring anything uniquely useful, particularly SCH and WHM.

It’s slower to bring a SCH who can use expedient for backtracking vs bringing a DPS that does more damage, you make up more time killing the mobs faster than you do running faster for 10 seconds was my point. Expedient isn’t making up for a DPS allowing you kill every mob in half the time

And that’s why I said that holy CAN be a downside, not that it always is. But its uses are niche and usually only for if you make a mistake. It’s not something you want to be relying on a lot. Though it is more useful without a PLD though I’d be using sleep on a caster on the situations you’ve described over holy

[BlisteringFrost]

The one shots are just another side effect of poor role balance and the game being completely overloaded with defense, healing and recovery tools. Tanks are overpowered and can do 70% the damage of a DPS while having 10x the survivability. Healer kits are overloaded and virtually incapable of running out of resources. DPS are littered with even more superfluous healing and mit tools because they removed every other form of utility but we still need to put up a flimsy front pretending this is an RPG. Not even to mention the infinite rezzes which they made even worse with phoenix downs. If there were no one shots it would play exactly like any other snoozefest dungeon in this game with zero chance of failure.

Worst part is DPS defensives don't even help.

Like.... anywhere.... lmao

[SkankyRoe]

It’s slower to bring a SCH who can use expedient for backtracking vs bringing a DPS that does more damage, you make up more time killing the mobs faster than you do running faster for 10 seconds was my point. Expedient isn’t making up for a DPS allowing you kill every mob in half the time

It depends on the extent of the combat vs the backtracking; a short floor with minimal backtracking sure, the SCH's tiny bit of damage could save a bit of time vs expedient. But most of the time you'll be avoiding as much combat as possible, and often you'll end up spending more time actually running through the rooms and backtracking, than you will actually fighting stuff. Most notable with this is when you use a Mazeroot and the exit is many rooms away. At least in my experiences I have found that often a good bit more time is spent out of combat, than in combat. The actual difference either way is probably minimal enough not to matter, but it's still something that exists.

Personally I've felt the most comfy doing my runs on WHM despite maining SMN and DNC. Holy is risky, for sure, but it's been a fun learning experience figuring out when and where to take that risk, and I've also had a few cool moments where a run was saved by using Thin Air+Swiftcast rez immediately after being rezzed myself. I feel like I don't get these sorts of neat little experiences in the standard battle content, it's nice to have something that honestly feels a tiny bit more fun on a healer than on a dps.

[CarlCarl]

It depends on the extent of the combat vs the backtracking; a short floor with minimal backtracking sure, the SCH's tiny bit of damage could save a bit of time vs expedient. But most of the time you'll be avoiding as much combat as possible, and often you'll end up spending more time actually running through the rooms and backtracking, than you will actually fighting stuff. Most notable with this is when you use a Mazeroot and the exit is many rooms away. At least in my experiences I have found that often a good bit more time is spent out of combat, than in combat. The actual difference either way is probably minimal enough not to matter, but it's still something that exists.

Personally I've felt the most comfy doing my runs on WHM despite maining SMN and DNC. Holy is risky, for sure, but it's been a fun learning experience figuring out when and where to take that risk, and I've also had a few cool moments where a run was saved by using Thin Air+Swiftcast rez immediately after being rezzed myself. I feel like I don't get these sorts of neat little experiences in the standard battle content, it's nice to have something that honestly feels a tiny bit more fun on a healer than on a dps.

I've noticed that too many parties generally lean too far on the "avoiding combat" side of things, if anything. In a party of 4, it is usually far quicker to just kill mobs that are in the way instead of waiting for them to move so you can slip on by (just for someone to not walk exactly like you did and aggro things anyway).

[SkankyRoe]

I've noticed that too many parties generally lean too far on the "avoiding combat" side of things, if anything. In a party of 4, it is usually far quicker to just kill mobs that are in the way instead of waiting for them to move so you can slip on by (just for someone to not walk exactly like you did and aggro things anyway).

The final two sets of floors the enemies get fairly dangerous with their mechanics and the patrols especially can quickly cause things to go south, so it's generally much safer to sneak past the static enemies, and often faster when taking into account the extra time that would need to be spent dodging the OHKO mechanics.

[CarlCarl]

The final two sets of floors the enemies get fairly dangerous with their mechanics and the patrols especially can quickly cause things to go south, so it's generally much safer to sneak past the static enemies, and often faster when taking into account the extra time that would need to be spent dodging the OHKO mechanics.

The vast majority of mechanics are trivial to dodge in terms of time-investment, and all but 6 enemies in 81-100 can be stunned (And of those 6, only 4 of those will realistically even have time to do a mechanic before they die).
From my experience in matched parties, sneaking is often slower instead of just killing most mobs in the way as there are plenty of people who hesitate too long, accidentally aggro a mob anyway, or step on a luring, instead of just killing said enemy in <20 seconds.