As someone who plays alone a lot of the time (due to playing early mornings and not many people are on) it is hard to start groups and do a lot of the content. This has been hard to go up in expertise level. I can craft 600 gear armor but my expertise is sitting at around 520ish and I don’t know how to turn the gear I have crafted at 600 to 625. I have about 4-6 levels in each gathering skill past 200 and 200 on some trade-skills (except arcana, jewels and weapons). Crafting one notch for an aptitude level reward takes me around 5-10 minutes if I don’t have the materials on me. I spend the rest of my time after that trying to get a group to run some 60+ level zones but rarely get anyone and being alone at the top of shattered mountain usually gets pretty hard especially as I am running a focus build atm. outpost rush barely runs these days as most companies are just running the same dungeon over and over and no one ever does arenas or lvl 55+ corrupted breaches due to their lack of reward.
I need an alternative to up my expertise otherwise I will probably just log in for my 5-10 minute aptitude reward and collect my orbs from faction each week. If we could have more activities to obtain expertise it would be greatly appreciated. At least give us one each time we get a trade skill level upgrade (not just the first notch). I love playing this game but right now I feel like I’m wasting my time trying to catch up to all the people who constantly did the chest runs. If there was NO cap to the emerald gem per level ,(per day), and I could just farm materials and do crafting I would probably just continue but at the moment I would get the same upgrades from 10 minutes of playtime as i would from 3+ hours.