[MakeshiftWalrus]

I agree whole-heartedly with Sarinpa's post. I dislike how easy it is to immediately get the most optimal gear possible in the game, via both the material change kits and the quality change kits. The former I've largely attempted to avoid for the reasons mentioned in the above post. There's no prestige in getting a cool drop at all, because chances are, the hottest PvP Chad has the exact item, but overtuned with all the most optimal bling.

It used to be that the ultimate dodge armour was a Good Fit Leviathan's Heart Breezecloth Ninja Armour, of which there were three in the entire game. Anything else was almost as good, but those were the best. The de-facto best item for the specific purpose. Not only could you not enchant a Levi Heart onto anything, the quality was random and so was the material. The chance to get it was absurdly low, to say the least. So you bet your biscuits those few that had them were the top dogs.

And I miss that. 10* are supposed to be rare, but they're about the most common items in the game now given how easy they are to get with any amount more patience than a hamster. It's gotten to the point where Insect Remains Armour of Eyes is just about the best armour in the game, giving you benefits like reduced damage from the occasional crit, a boatload of free, passive hit and all the benefits of Light Armour from the various classes that use it. Heck, with the updates to Evasion, it might even get to be staple in mages now instead of just basic-attack builds.

I also don't think LE'ing has lost its relevancy at all, quite the opposite. The meta right now is all about stacking as many stat points as humanly possible onto oneself as you can. You might only have 210 base points to spend, but God knows the most optimal builds approach 280 when they really want to. And that's not counting active skills like Ki Awoken and Death Knighting either. Hell, from Fugu Katsu alone, you get (effectively) 22 extra stats across the board, which is insane. Curry, a thing you can buy for like, 30 murai gives you 11 stats for the coming fight.

So filling out a book, you get +12 from all the inks and +3 from extra Trait points you get to spend. These take up no additional inventory spots, skill slots or the usual pool of trait points you usually spend.

These are just related to LE'ing, too. There are more items in the game that give extra stats than I care to count, of all slots and materials. Passive skills in classes that just give extra points in specific stats and then of course the active boosters like enchantments and religion. And as one of the abusers of this system, I think it's gotten stale when, as Sarinpa said, the most optimal builds are just copied down to a recipe and passed around like Fredburger's not-so-secret-secret-sauce.

So what can we do?

A good question. I don't think the game is, at all, in a state where it's possible to move back from. I don't even necessarily think it should, because I'm sure what the future holds will eventually leave this a dry memory. But what I'd like to see, is the game moving away from bonus stat Hell it's become lately. I'd also like to see items that can't just be created, or be changed into the most optimal versions possible within 10 minutes because you have 'That one friend with Alchemist level 6'.

These aren't changes that can happen overnight. And maybe they never will. But so be it.