Yeah, the time required to invest to farm like you used to keeps going up. I've given up ever hoping of being "rich", I'm sitting here at 20ex after just picking up a 20ex watchers (sold a wand for like 13ex which is most of it) and I'm feelin comfy and rich.
Related on crafting, I feel like anything that's not harvest crafting is pretty much a waste nowadays. Sure I can just throw essences at an item, but farming to keep that up isn't reasonable, buying them is a pain, and the rolls are usually pretty garbage. I'm crafting a very specific hat traditionally (alteration spam for mods I want, regal for a good third, if not then start over), but even then I've frozen it and am just waiting for harvest so I can craft the specific mods I want on it. Like, I hate how harvest breaks up maps still, but I'm to the point where I'm spamming Zana missions with the atlas points for more maps just in the hops of getting harvest missions and I hate it. It's boring AF to repeat and I dislike focusing on a single mechanic in the game to the near exclusion of all others.
ON AN UNRELATED NOTE, I still loathe Sirus and how he's constantly bugged. If you ever die, like I did by making a stupid mistake, you're rolling the dice on if you're gonna eat an off-screen DIE beam with literally no warning. Like, I ran to the edge of the arena but stayed outside the placed AoEs and was getting to a spot where I'd be able to enter at an angle SPECIFICIALLY TO AVOID JUMPING STRAIGHT INTO A DIE BEAM, and while I was still outside and starting to run around bam...DIE beam straight to the face with no warning. No message in text, no audio cue of "DIE" prompting me to hit my panic buttons and leap in a random direction to hope I'll avoid it. Just to the face.
I was fine losing the 10% XP at 96, only 72% of the way into my level and I was factoring in that I might die once so it was acceptable. I'm not cool losing what is a few days worth of play for me to some absolute bullshit, and it just kills my motivation to log in and play.
I don't mind dying if I know I fucked up, I can accept that I made a mistake and it's my fault. I don't mind dying to literally what the fuck, because I have no way to improving my play to counter it. I have no way of knowing if it was my mistake that killed me or something else. And that Sirus has been a buggy mess ever since he was first introduced infuriates me.
It's not like my ancestral chieftan chieftan is weak, even. 8K HP, good defenses, 15M+ DPS easy, melts every boss damned quickly. I've got a few more upgrades, but homeboy may be my strongest (though not tankiest) character I've ever made.
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That's a terrible reason to leave an awful user experience alone. Pretty much nobody I've ever interacted with actually likes trading, between spamming for currency for ages to hoping that one guy with that one item you want logs in for the first time in 5 days while you're online to the scammers left and right, it's kinda awful. Like, I genuinely prefer to interact with trade bots instead of people. Why? Because it's generally a much, much better experience.