Newish/returner, is this playable?

[Crash]

I'm curious on how the community in this game is and if I can progress without having to sink tons of money into the game, I'm fine with it being a slow (but not unreasonably slow without paying) grind, but if the only way to reliably get anywhere requires me to sink lots of money into the game then I'd have to stop playing.

 

Mainly though I'm wondering about the community, I remember when I played during launch that one of the reasons I quit was because the toxicity in dungeons was on a whole new level, if people didn't instantly know what they were doing it just got really bad basically, I'm not sure how dungeons now are but I also remember that people just used to speed run the dungeons with mob skips etc that you had to know how to do I think as well, so how is it now? as a fairly fresh player will I be able to get into dungeons without being kicked upon gear inspect and not being OP for the dungeon? do guilds actually recruit non end-game players?

 

All I can say is that the combat on this game is still one of the best and I really want to give the game a proper play this time, but all of the things above still has me a bit on edge while I'm doing the story still in that I don't want to waste my time getting to the game dungeons and then find out I don't have a hope in hell of getting anywhere without being a god at the game and already geared for the dungeons I need.

[Hungibungi]

It depends.
I play on EU, so dunno how NA is like, but...
Here's what you should do:
Do story (REALLY BIG WARNING, ONCE YOU SEE A SOUL BOOST ICON UNDER YOUR MINIMAP, PRESS BOOST CHARACTER!!! or you will miss out on xp and it will take like a week longer to finish the soulboost) -> do every purple quest -> do every orange quest (don't worry if it says that u should kill the raid boss, the point is to just unlock every raid).
Once you are done with those, great! Now you can actually start doing end-game stuff.

In EU if you are a new/returning player, I would recommend you to use F8. In there you will find a lot of people posting team searches on your left, but you can always just press the LFP button. Easy mode Heroic dungeons and stage 1 demonsbane dungeons are braindead content even if you get 4 fresh story characters, just will take longer. Try to learn dodging attacks and your class/spec attack rotation, you will need those later.

The first challange you will find yourself facing will be inventory management. You will need to learn what's useful and what's not; that will take a while and don't think there's any guide for it either. Main takeaway is that if it drops from dungeons listed in F8 then they are probably useful, if they look like scales will be useful (I think you will only need yellow/orange/purple ones, rest are useless, but rather keep them to be safe).

Keep doing soulboost as it will give you much better gear and while you are at it, you will need to get the soulshield set (with crit + accuracy on them, exceptions are 1,3,7 as they only need crit; and you will need to add the extra crit from those weird looking purple rarity soulshields that soulboost gives you) and the starcross earring + ring from grim nexus stage 1 / halls of trials easy mode. At this stage the only bidding you should do are the soulshields (max like 50 gold) + starcross material chests (max like 100 gold) + starcross earring/ring (usually free, don't pay over 100g).
You will need to feed the soulshields into each other to improve their stats + upgrade the starcross ring and earring to +11 + finish soul boost.
As a sidenote, in this stage you will get a lot of unity stones + etching stones + insignias + portaits. You can find those if you press ctrl+h ctrl+k ctrl+m and shift+p. Imo you shouldn't worry about portaits, insignias and etching stones yet, but unity stones are important even early on. You will need to refine them until you have all of them at the orange tier (awakened stellar). It will most likely take longer than you getting the soulshields + accessories + finish soulboost, so just keep refining them. Also, you can salvage starcross accessories for their essence, with that you should aim to get the best mystic stat on your ring and earring (you will see what I mean once you get there).

You have all of the above done? Nice!
You can start doing normal mode and stage 5 dungeons now. Please note that you will need to look up mechanics for every dungeon as it is pretty easy to wipe here (unless you have someone strong who can solo the whole thing in 1 minute).
Tbh I think normal mode is a waste, don't really see groups for it either. Just farm easy mode for materials as it is way faster.
I would recommend you to ignore shrine and altar stage 5 for now, focus on poharan and grim stage 5. From grim you will need the upsurge weapon and the oculus ring+earring. You can get the ring and earring to +6 with your starcross ring and earring, so do that (at least I think you can? haven't done it myself, but people say you can). Once you have these 3 things you can keep farming grim st5 for upsurge essences to upgrade your weapon / oculus essences to reroll your ring and earring. From Poharan you will need to farm out the True Poharan soulshield set. Dunno exactly what stats you need on them, I am sure someone else can tell you. I am still farming this myself 😄

Once you have the upsurge weapon at a healthy + level and you have both oculus accessories you can start joining shrine and altar stage 5 groups. They are usually quite picky and there's a reason for it, so you might need to make a group yourself. Either use F8 or try to use faction chat for it. They can wipe the whole team pretty easily, so read a guide on them for sure! From here you want to farm starcross accessories. They will drop ones that are not for your class as well, just salvage them. You can exchange 20 essences for an accessory for your class in Mushin's Tower somewhere, but only once per account, so might want to use it on an alt to make your life easier.

Speaking of alts... You should make 3 alts, as doing one of them daily (takes like 30 mins if not less) will give you 6k gold a day. 🙂 There's a rest reward for daily challanges, so you only need to do them once every 3 days to get all the rewards. That 6k extra gold daily will help you a lot *wink-wink*

As to what to do after you have all these? Good question! Dunno yet, I am a returning player as well 😄

[Hungibungi]

  

4 hours ago, Crash said:

Mainly though I'm wondering about the community, I remember when I played during launch that one of the reasons I quit was because the toxicity in dungeons was on a whole new level, if people didn't instantly know what they were doing it just got really bad basically, I'm not sure how dungeons now are but I also remember that people just used to speed run the dungeons with mob skips etc that you had to know how to do I think as well, so how is it now? as a fairly fresh player will I be able to get into dungeons without being kicked upon gear inspect and not being OP for the dungeon?

I haven't seen any toxicity, but you do get kicked out of groups if you join one that says 4k+ bap while you only have 2500 😄 Also if they want a grab and you can't grab. Also yes, it is quite common for people to assume you know the mechs, because it is really easy to screw over the whole team. It's enough if you watch a few minute long video tho, just know the basics and stage 5 will be okay 😄

[Crash]

Damn, that's a pretty fat response, I appreciate the effort writing it up, I may carry on playing it then especially if there's not really any toxicity, a couple other questions then for anyone willing to answer, how easy is it to join into guilds on here to do PvE stuff with and just chat away etc? and if I join into an instance through matchmaking, is there a kick function? and do people abuse it? essentially as long as I know I won't be queueing and waiting to do dungeons much later on and then getting the boot because of my gear then that's brilliant, I played an MMO that had many players that did that before, safe to say it wasn't a fun experience lol

 

[Hungibungi]

They can only kick you while they are in F8 (the cross-server dungeon finder), once you enter the lobby/dungeon you are safe. They can't steal your loot either, it's a bidding system where the winning bid gets the item and the rest gets the winning bid's gold distributed among them 😄 I think they can kick you from raids tho, but never seen that happen unless someone was AFK and taking up a spot from someone

*Edit:
Dunno about clans tho, I am not in one.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Hungibungi