At this point I just resigned myself into thinking that I will never reach max soul, max pet, max heart, or max anything, and this is fine by me.
I've been playing for 4 years, slowly working my way up to 2K AP, I barely reached Awakened Tiger Soul stage 1 and my heart is still in Virtuous stages. I could progress faster if I were a die-hard whale, but I'm not one.
Do you know how many vials I need to reach max soul? 290. 290 freaking vials, and I only managed to score 1 in the last 13 days thanks to the sh*t events NC$oft keeps throwing at us.
I'm gated behind the P2W walls that NC$oft put between me and the game. But this is fine, I can pretty much clear any of the current content, I'll just never play the Iron Ark raid unless I take out my credit card. Which is never going to happen, given NC$oft's track records over the last few months.