The problem with Eureka Orthos

[Teno]

As most people have said, you have to spend way too long to get to the interesting stuff. It's all mindless and unrewarding grind until the good floors.

[AceNoi]

EO is frankly just a miserable experience for casual play. My partner and I cut our teeth doing full duo clears in POTD and HoH and were both looking forward to the new deep dungeon a lot, but our time spent just farming aetherpool was incredibly unfun with how even basic enemies took way too long to kill + the sheer amount that could spawn at once, to the point where new enemies spawning in before we could even clear out a room was a regular occurrence. Trying to level alt jobs was twice as frustrating, since the highly punishing mechanics and bloated hp on enemies left no room for error on jobs we weren't as comfortable playing. We both ultimately decided to cut our losses and give up on the whole deal.

While I'm at it, I'd love to know what they were smoking when designing the layout for 20-30, the set of floors most frequently run by everyone whether for EXP or early aetherpool. I like Allagan nonsense, but they're so visually busy that everything blends together (even the enemies!), the dumb curved hallways makes scouting room harder than it should be AND the uneven terrain makes it a pain in the ass to even move around in, let alone dodge the billion AoEs enemies throw at you.

[Toutatis]

EO is frankly just a miserable experience for casual play. My partner and I cut our teeth doing full duo clears in POTD and HoH and were both looking forward to the new deep dungeon a lot, but our time spent just farming aetherpool was incredibly unfun with how even basic enemies took way too long to kill + the sheer amount that could spawn at once, to the point where new enemies spawning in before we could even clear out a room was a regular occurrence.

This is my biggest problem with Orthos. I love PotD and HoH but the amount of HP low level mobs (<40) have in Orthos is ridiculous. You hit like a wet noodle and so do they (unless you stand in stupid). In HoH and PotD I can go in solo at 0 aetherpool and start farming it by myself without any problem within a reasonable time. In Orthos, even at 99 aetherpool they take way too long to kill. If you move to the higher floors where things start to become interesting and happen to die, you have to clear that trash again. Just cutting the HP of lvl <40 mobs would go a long way for me. I prefer the attacks of the mobs in HoH and PotD vs the AoEs of EO.

I don't think the mechanics are hard though, you just need to know what kind of aoe the mobs do. Mobs do very little unavoidable damage.

I am ok with the layout and I find the bosses better than HoH and PotD.