I think there are a couple of artificial gates in this game that purposefully pace your progress no matter how 'agressive' you are in playing it. And I'm probably wrong but nevertheless...
- Gear drops - Got a red or a purple from hunt/abyss/crafting? Great! But that just means you now have 4-5 RNG stats with almost (if not just) as high odds of flat values as with a blue/grey one. Got lucky and a solid one dropped? See below.
- Gear levels - You need charms. You can use trash equipment to get a few in, but it gets obnoxiously expensive after a point, and unless you're swimming in gold, you're going to need charms. There's only so many the game reliably gives you and only so many you can buy in a day (arena/lab access/missions gated to a set amount per day/week).
- Gold - Even if you have both a good piece of gear and enough charms to level it up, you're going to need gold. For an 85 piece, we're talking over a million gold. Times that by 6, times that by your team and anything outside of it. We're talking a lot of it. And this game is NOT generous with its gold (because inflation fears).
- Molagoras - You're getting only as few as they want you to get per week for free (hint: not nearly enough).
The sense of 'reward' Epic 7 gives you in the end game drops off a cliff pretty hard. We're talking serious grind for very little pay off. You will definitely want to slow down, pace yourself, and become more deliberate about your goals in order to get that feeling of achievement. If you try and force the progress to be faster than the game wants it to be, it will leave you without resources fast, because they want your money, period.
Also, the chat feature is obnoxious. It just feels like another way for the game to announce 5* pulls without being able to turn them off - especially since you start off in a random channel, and not guild chat.
And that's my Sunday Soapbox moment. How about that Tamarinne, though!
