Citadel finding insights?

I'm curious if anyone has identified any rhyme or reason to finding citadels. I've only found 1 I could attempt so far. I've done all map tiers and can clear T18 maps, level 89 now and stuck at 8/10 on the first boss atlas tree, so I believe the last 2 points come from killing the big boss where you need the 3 citadel crisis fragments.

So there's the problem - citadels are nowhere, and I'm starting to get tired of running zillions of maps looking for them. I found 1 relatively early on, and invited my friends to join and try it (not realizing it locks you out if you die), and we did die and fail, so no crisis fragment from that one unfortunately.

Probably about 100 of maps later, I think see another in the fog of war, but alas, the generated atlas somehow did not make connections towards it and going around will probably be another 100 maps (check this image lol):



I'm wondering if I am just getting bad luck or if I am doing something wrong. One thing I started doing is just dropping in tier 1-5 maps into Lost Towers and non-notable map nodes so I could Leap Slam directly to the end to see further, and then choose a path from there, so maybe me running low tier maps is causing it to generate lower tier chunks of atlas with no citadels or something? Do I need to strictly run T15+ maps everywhere, even in poor nodes, to try to make sure citadels spawn or something?

I've heard some people are finding them everywhere, even multiple right next to each other, and then others say similar experiences to me, where they just can;t find any. Is it strictly RNG or are people gaining some intuition on maybe some way to find them more commonly?

+1
I'm assuming its just bad rng because endgame was rushed. But i've been running into the same deadends all over my atlas and have and still have the quest to find stone citadel after over 200 hours.
I just opted to buy crisis fragments to access the boss, but i dont think thats rewarding progression.

I'd be OK with the current state of things if arbiter actually dropped anything worth a damn at +0 or lower encounters, but ya... you are going to spend a week of nolifing in some cases just to get to a +0 encounter to get something 90% of the time worth less than you if you just sold the keys, basically just running it for the atlas points 4 times over.

Same things with all the other pinnacle bosses, you are going to run 4 breachstones just to get the atlas points to make mapping feel better, you probably aren't going to get shit from xesht at low encounter levels.

And to make things worse by the time you are spending 1 div on a breachstone, or 6 on an audience you overgear and overlevel the +0 encounters so much that its just another target dummy.

Damn, that's really disappointing to hear when I finally get to fight them (the low difficulty versions), it will probably be pretty easy and the rewards won't be that great anyway. I've got a decent budget build going where I am pretty much slaying any content I can do, but I can't really progress either and don't have time to farm these citadels/maps 24/7 to try to get more.

To put it clearly, the most Divine orbs I've ever had is 4, and I gave away or lent 3 of those to friends so they could try unique items required for the builds they were trying to make, so I only have a single divine orb right now and maybe a couple hundred Exalts. This means I can't just buy my way up the difficulty in the Arbiter tree :/ (maybe with the exalts I could at least get 1 run against the Arbiter?).

I guess this means for players like me I've "beaten the game" and there is no more progression available in any reasonable amount of time, despite me managing to create a character who is likely viable and capable of beating more difficult content. That seems like a real shame to me.

Went ahead and started going around the bottom, looks like there are no connections this way either.