Zone into Pagos. Fresh instance. Form a chain party. Get to the Yukinko spawn area and start killing. About 5 minutes pass and Taxim spawns. Go kill Taxim. Great start.

PROCEED TO SPEND 90 MINUTES OUT OF OUR 180 MINUTE LOCKOUT TIMER BEFORE ANOTHER NM SPAWNS.

I get that a lot of people like the "mob camp" style of gameplay that Eureka provides and dislike the "run around as a massive group and murder everything" style of gameplay that became prevalent in Anemos. If those people want to play like that, nothing is stopping them from doing it in spite of the NM train.

But man, it really seems like they completely axed the NM spawn rates in Pagos, and in doing so kind of destroyed why the majority of the players who did it found it tolerable. The NM train turned it from an overly tedious grindfest into an odd but really fun casual-social piece of content that let you advance your character in a meaningful way. That's part of the reason that I loved it so much and I'd bank that's why a lot of the people who did it found it at the very least tolerable. NMs should be the feature of the zone and the primary method of advancement, not an added bonus on top of incredibly tedious method of advancement. Tedium does not make content difficult, it just makes it frustrating to do.

If you disagree, that's fine. I don't expect everyone to agree with me. But to me that's why Pagos feels so much worse than Anemos ever did.