Change Dunas 1's level to 168

Here are the levels of the Neotokyo bosses in order of the questline:

Bergamot - 168
Dunas 1 - 174
Nibelung - 168
Nameless Beast - 174
Dunas 2 - 176
Core Blaze - 178
Aufheben - 180

While most bosses naturally scale in their level as the questline progresses, Dunas 1 is the outlier, being 6 levels above the previous and the next boss in the questline.

My suggestion: Drop the level from 174 to 168 to make it consistent with Bergamot and Nibelung.

The intended result: Increase the pool of available runners for Dunas 1 to include characters between levels 163-168.

Other thoughts: It may also make sense to consider changing Bergamot's level. There's an 8 level gap between 155 (Horntail) and 163 (Neotokyo) in which no new bosses are available. For many who can't commit to long horntail runs (usually 2-3h), the 18 level gap between the next available shorter-length boss fight (Jiaoceng at 145) and Neotokyo at 163 can feel substantial.

 

Adding more bosses would require a significant effort from the dev team. Whereas, changing the level of Dunas would require changing a single integer value. They're not mutually exclusive either. You can lower the level of NT content and add new bosses.

I don't see why they would nerf the exp and drops. It's not like the stats of the bosses are changing. We're just allowing lower-level players to run the content and receive a proper exp reward for the effort.

As for whether they're worth doing or not, the statistics on "Player Entry Per Day" from the February 2023 Balance Changes would suggest otherwise. Dunas 1, Dunas 2 and Nibelung run rates are low, but the changes from September 2023 Balance Changes should have greatly improved QoL of these runs, and likely increased run rates since.