Wipe wrote on Aug 19
th, 2016 at 4:23pm:
At what level if I may ask ?
If I get wrong info, sorry. Read that you can level just with essence and collectibles.
It's respectable. You can get to crafting level something 350ish on essences alone. And, in theory, that will allow you to craft most everything. The collectable choke-hold will stop you from crafting more than lack of crafting xp will.
Imo, the grind is more death-by-1000-cuts than anything else. Turbine never stops to consider overall grind. Or if they do, they pat themselves on the back over how much there is.
The blind stupidity of simplifying the system down to one essence type, only to counteract the effect by adding 20? 30? never-before-seen, yet must-have collectables is intensely frustrating. The new system is twice or three times as complicated because of that. I think people are focusing on PEBs because the recipes do call for a comparative fuckton, but also, the PEBs are familiar while the real fuckton of new collectables are not.
Compounding the PEB issue, Imo, are all the old collectables that still have zero in-game use.
Old frustrations + seeing the same frustrating behavior = What looks like an overreaction from the outside.
It also blinds players to many of the good decisions that were made. For instance, none of the recipes are tied to rare BTA collectables only obtainable from an end chain reward. (We hope.)
We no longer need to bother with crafting +1, +2, etc. The new system assigns an enhancement value based on the ML.
Reducing to just one essence was a fucking
great decision.
Changing the bind status to BTA was a fucking
great decision.
Increasing the collectibles stack size was a fucking
great (if overdue), decision.
Allowing unbound crafting to leave the item unbound instead of BTCoE was a fucking
great decision.
Letting BTC items change to BTA when the ML shard is added was a fucking
great decision.
Those, and other good decisions are overshadowed by fucking grind + a hefty "fuck you" to everyone who crafted their essences & collectables into old CC shards rather than store all those essences.
Not allowing those old CC shards to be deconned is a gigantic fucking middle finger. It gets one's attention.