Pilgrim's Traverse feedback - veteran solo experience

[ThurinTurambar]

Hello there!
I have just got the PT title, so i feel like its good time to share my thoughts.
Bit of background for perspective, i have cleared all 4 deep dungeons solo now, but i stayed longest in PotD where i do a lot of scoring (chaos leaderboards for my exploits). So its safe to say i came into PT with a lot of experience.

First impressions:
The dungeon is visually stunning. Floor sets have many nice details, arent overly depressing or monotonous. Early floors are begginer friendly, allowing to setup runs easily.
Votives are a very cool idea and are fun, but i'll talk about them more below.

I'll tackle the floor sets and mob design first.
Stones 1-50 i would say are very pleasant and raise the difficulty bar very linearly, predictably and in overall decent way.
I can think of 2 notable gameplay things in this section - 1 very clever and well designed mob and a few mobs that are problematic.
The best mob of this section is Traverse Troubador (the turtle). Heavy vuln that eats your steel and makes auto attacks a threat, while being very slow and avoidable is great enemy design, and i mean it.
There are, however, mobs that i dont like at all, for example Forgiven Petulance - tentacle lady, this mob takes forever to finish its casts and laggs behind when you want to gather mobs to aoe them down, often to the point of deaggroing, even without sprint.

Stones 51-60 is in my opinion one of the more fun sets, where mobs start to have more interesting abilities, especially Saichainia and Gigant with their CC skills. This set is also part of the 41-80 layout, which is insanely huge on the sheer distance you're exploring. Rooms and corridors are just soo long, making that by itself a challenge for scoring.

Stones 61-70 are notable for 1 thing - Forgiven Doubt (chameleon). The best mob in this whole dungeon. Their invisibility forces you thread very carefully through the rooms and count how many mobs have spawned, have there been any patrols originating in the room. Not really threatening mob by itself, but punishes carelessness. 10/10.
Rest of the mobs however are non noteworthy, basicly back to EO crap.

Stones 71-80 offer the last positive highlight - Foregiven Unbelief (croc). Seemingly 'harmless' at first, but they go into 'enrage' mode when low hp, spamming 'double auto attacks' as we call it, and becoming an actuall threat if conditions are right (aoe pull, strong debuffs)

Sadly, thats where the positives in mob design end. After croc, the dungeon becomes very onedimensional in terms of the difficulty: Dodging hidden telegraph aoes, which basicly mean LoS. 81-98 feels very undertuned in terms of mob damage and hp. Add to that overtuned droprate of incenses in the last 2 sets, and you're stomping the mobs.
By comparison, PotD offers several difficulty problems: high auto damage/ double auto attack, crowd control skills, DoTs, time consuming mobs, area denial (sasquaches)

I'll tackle Bosses, items and votives in comments

[ThurinTurambar]

Bosses in PT have been mostly pleasant.

Stone 10: This boss is noteworthy for the adds, which are basicly "are you using items" check. Otherwise its pretty simple, fast and overall decent.

Stone 20: Cool mob design, understandable mechanics.

Stone 30: Epic visuals, not too demanding mechanicly, but decently fun.

Stone 40: I dont really like this boss, seems to me like the adds spawn a bit too often. Not really memorable either.

Stone 50: This is my favourite of them all, very fun gimmick, great arena and satisfying fight pace. 10/10 dd boss!

Stone 60: I like the design of the boss, mechanics i dont find that interesting, but arent bad either, just OK.

Stone 70: Fun iteration of the cyclops archetype, decently fast "use your eyes" mechanics. Especially the 4 direction swipes are more random this time, making it more fun! (In EO the minotaur had 2 patterns)

Stone 80: Bit gimmicky, but i dont mind it. Decent encounter. Messages on screen on the doom mech are helpful.

Stone 90: Cool fight at first, but with its high hp, the short mechanic loop gets very repetitive.

Stone 99: Harder than f99 of EO, but with practise mode it can be overcome with relative ease. I kinda miss the threat of PotD/HoH late bosses and the possiblity of being sent back to 1 if you're not attentive enough.


Overall the bosses seem to me like an improvement over EO, hp pools are bit less bloated, but still high enough to warrant using barkbalm incense or strength.

[ThurinTurambar]

Item/Pomander talk:
This time the pomanders themselves were on the weaker side.
Before i go to the new pomanders and incense, i'll mention how the ones that all deep dungeons share are:
Witching becomes a very powerful pomander, pretty much a floor wipe for most of the dungeon. Serenity is more of a convinience pomander instead of crutch like it is in PotD and HoH. Strength and steel are very strong and allow for a lot of aoe options.

Now the new items:
Pomander of Purification - lets address the big one first, what the hell is this? Borderline useless pomander, aside from like situational mistake of stepping into silencing trap. Other niche usage is protecting your haste/steel from literally 2 mobs in the whole deep dungeon. If you're giving us a pomander of this type, please add debuffs, dots, negative effects or whatever to match its usage! (apparently eye mob on 90s has gaze that applies doom, but at this point if you get hit by that, spare the shame and wipe it)

Pomander of Haste - its a nice "convinience" pomander. Tiny bit more damage on demand, at the cost of losing haste enchantment on the floors. Decent, balanced.

Pomander of Devotion - would be nice to know on the description of the item that votive spawned from this guaranteed godmother / mud ball transformation (floor wipes). Otherwise, good item.

Incenses: They are very strong, each has its own niche and usage, much more pleasant than EO's demiclones. Additionally no animation root when using those is amazing quality of life.
The only issues i have is that sometimes Mazeroot has problems with aiming or does the transfiguration spell inconsistently. Another one is the drop rate in 81-98, which is way to high, allowing you to basicly not prepare for those floors at all.

[ThurinTurambar]

Votive candelabras:
I really enjoy the whole random effect idea, very fitting to the roguelike style of this gamemode.
However there are issues with it. Most of them have to do with the negative effects.

Firstly, treacherous ground effect - we were promised "more traps". When i hear that i think "2-3 traps per room". However that is not the case. The effect guarantees a trap will spawn in every room but the spawn area. Technicly true, it is more traps because they not always spawn without it, but it is very dissapointing that it doesnt put multiple traps in rooms.
Edit: Apparently its not even guaranteeding 1 trap in every room, so its probably just bugged. Made a report on it already

Next one is gloom. It barely matters with all the threat coming from mob aoes, not to mention it is just a 'guarantee gloom will happen' instead of adding additional gloom on top of other floor enchantments. Easily counterable by mazeroot or serenity.

No map debuff really has potential, probably my favourite of them all. Really makes you look around the rooms more in case you missed chests or exits. However, i dont think pomander of sight should completely negate it. I could see mazeroot doing that, but not sight.

I think that there should be at least one more negative effect in the pool. A simple example is enabling crits for mobs or spawning more mobs per room (switching from 2-3 per room to 3-4 for example). Another cool idea would be to have effect that makes mobs identical to each other and you only know what you pulled when you pull.


On positive side:
Mud ball is amazing
Rapid Recitation has some really cool interactions (Double enkindle dreadwyrm trance or double salt and darkness salted earth, not to mention picto shield). Only complaint is that some jobs benefit from it much more than others.
Other effects are also very nice, if not too strong on the healing side.

[ThurinTurambar]

And final comment (enchantments, traps, stuff i wished was in the dungeon but isnt and final verdict)

I'll add some positives before the negative rant, here u go:
I like that the casting animation of certain mobs is much more visible now, as well as certain debuffs (for example the Traverse Monitor, having blazing scales surround the mob with fire, really cool and quality of life improvement)
Potsherd and potion situation is pretty much solved in PT, giving mid floors more purpose as well.

Rant time:
Enchantment pool got totally gutted in PT.
Missing from previous dds are Haste, Amnesia and Blind
I could understand removing amnesia, that stuff was cancer in EO, but the other 2 i dont see a reason to remove. Imagine how fun double haste would be! (unless it broke the game or something, i remember having 1.49 gcd in EO in some extremes)
And overall removing them would be fine, however there is nothing new in their place. Its honesly a great shame, there was a lot of creativity to be had here!

Traps are a dissapointment.
There isnt a single change in traps. Changing transformation from otter/owlet/frog to pixie is not a new trap. We're in god damn faerie place! Tricks and traps are in the theme of the place!
Where is my random teleport trap? Thats just one example, again lots of creativity that could have happened here, but it did not.

I would have liked to see enviromental hazards as well. Pools of lava/acid, mud that slows you down, protective crystals like in dzamael darkhold etc. Sadly, none of this happened.

Now overall my thoughts are that the dungeon, while pretty and fun for a bit, is very shallow and will not have a lot of replayability value.
There is very little challenge soloing this, there is no difference in how different jobs approach the encounters (aside from lots of anti melee mob aoes). Heavy reliance on one-shotting, barely telegraphed aoes means that once again, the only thing that matters in this dungeon is how big is your damage. Defensive capabilities of healers are a non factor, neither tank's defensive aside from occasional invuln.
My first clear i have killed every single mob, sparing only some luring traps. That is 1455 kills, with 5 speedrun bonuses (floor set under 30 minutes).
Please design the deep dungeons to actually fight back, PT in current state will be relentlessly bullied by scorers, easily cleared by most people and will die as content in a month.

For now I will savour the time that the content is still fresh, improve my score and ranking a bit, but after that i will be returning to PotD, which, despite the slow early floors, is to this day the best deep dungeon experience on late floors (im biased ofc).

[nemoxxo]

I agree mostly with what you said, i have also solod this dd, though i would say 1-31/41 is the most boring set of floors in any dd, the mobs are not low enough hp to just run through (like hoh & potd), but theyre also not mechanically challenging enough to need to actually pay attention (like eo), which results in just full pulling every floor then taking a while to get them killed. I think the bosses are lacking substance also, for example the 70 boss on the octuple swipe it becomes painfully simple when you realise he never hits the same place twice in a row, so you can ignore the mechanic as long as you know where the first hit was, and then the other bosses feel like its a couple mechanics that just loop, even the 99 boss is 4 mechanics that just overlap a bit for 10 minutes and the 90 boss feels like they just thought "cba making another mechanic just throw in a knockback". There is a lot i like about this dd most of which you outlined in your posts, but i think it could be made much better with a few relatively small changes. And this is just from a solo pov, in groups its like half the mobs dont have mechanics since they die before they can even get a cast off

[Valence]

Thank you for the recap, I like seeing how deep dungeons are being approached within the solo mode.

If anything, the negatives as far as I can tell are once again tied to every challenge being systematically coming from DDR and OHKOs instead of battle mechanics, which completely nullifies the job you choose (unless specific unicorns like PLD).

[Oizen]

I think you made some very good points here. I completely agree about the Candle's balance being very strange. On my own personal solo run I was able to chain positive candle effects so frequently that I ended up with 2 incenses left for the final boss, one of which I forgot to use entirely.

I think a big issue with the candle's positive effects is that they exists independently of everything else. Previously it was very important to keep Serenity to ensure strong pomanders/demiclones/magicites could resolve, this was the first DD I've soloed where I made it to the end without even using all my serenity pomanders, it just wasn't necessary, and with lucky candle chains I was able to get 3 bombs, 1 mud ball and one floor nuke incense reducing the number of floors I actually had to try by 4, the rest were easily dealt with with Flight + Strength + Haste.

EO's top floors felt specifically designed to be done with demiclones in mind, so they dropped a lot, this feels very similar to that except Incenses are a lot stronger than demiclones, and exist alongside the candle system which allows even more floor nukes.

My 90-99 run of EO finished with ~5 minutes left on the clock
My 90-99 run of PT finished with 30 minutes left on the clock
and I play tank so its not like I'm chewing through mobs very fast.

[Darkstride]

Pomander of Purification does feel pretty underwhelming. I couldn't find a use for it, so I thought maybe it would work on a vulnerability stack even though it's not a curable effect. It doesn't work, but I feel like that might have at least made it usable.

[ThurinTurambar]

Pomander of Purification does feel pretty underwhelming. I couldn't find a use for it, so I thought maybe it would work on a vulnerability stack even though it's not a curable effect. It doesn't work, but I feel like that might have at least made it usable.

My theory is that at some point in development they either had more negative effects or purification was status immunity for the duration, but they decided to cut those and left purification as it is.