Well here we go, another post about this.
I just wanted to share my two cents on what I see is the issue and the frustration here, I cant speak for everyone, but at least for my company and those I know in game.
At this point its getting overly complicated for the casual player, to many systems to keep track of. For the Casual player this change is going to demoralise them into the ground because they will never catch up or even have the time to get to know all these systems to lvl up their gear. There needs to be a way outside dungeons to earn a steady income of Umbral currency because honestly the dungeon keys are stupidly expensive and such a weird mecanic.
For real, I play every day for 3-4h (more in the weekends) and even I strugle to make my keys. If I want to farm the materials (or the money to buy them) I need to invest all my playing time to gather the reasources (Mangled hights, Melevolance, Portals, mote farm etc.) I WANT TO DO OTHER STUFF. And I can just imagine how it feels for a casual+ player, its honestly a mountain they cannot climb. At this point I would even be happy with timegating on dungeons instead of these keys that cost an insane amount of gold or time to craft. Just decide that we can do x number of dungeons a week or something, please…
In terms of the gearscore increase I just think it looks bad from the communities perspective. I do understand there are teams working on different areas of the game and that it doesnt mean there isnt anyone working on bugs. What I personally wish is that it would be more focus on QOL changes instead of gear increase tho ( Gear sets, inventory/storage management, TP sorting, luck gear, housing tax, gold distibution of owned settlements etc.)
I really like the game and is not in the “Do this or I will quit” category, but the amount of systems that are in place now is starting to be overwhelming for even active players.