How am I supposed to level in Pagos?

[Tint]

Yeah it's way too difficult to catch up, wich is a shame when in the rest of the game they made sure that new people and casual players can catch up easily.

Reaching 21 in Anemos is kind of important, because you have to be 21 to unlock the southeast aetherite in Pagos. In the first part of the map are no NMs at all, with the aetherite you can skip that part and just teleport to the low level NMs.

The only real option to level is to ride the train, because you will have a really hard time to find people on your own level to chainkilling stuff now. Sadly the map design is horrible, you have to go through a bottleneck canyon in the middle of the map to reach the NMs in the upper half of the map. And that bottleneck is filled with enemys wich will oneshot you, especially these nasty dragons wich have sound aggro (so you have to walk slowly to not aggro them).

But! It is doable. When the train moves to a new location to spawn something you will have enough time to reach them. But when something spawns on the other side of the map you will likely not reach it in time, except it's in the southeast where you have the teleport (use /return to go back to the entrance and then teleport from there).

If you can play a job wich can raise and don't tell people your level when you shout for an invite. But the most important part is that you don't die in that bottleneck. Sleep helps with that a lot, so WHM or BLM are preferable jobs too. Just sleep everything wich blocks your way (even the nasty dragons) and just run through.