Essences by playing the game - not by paying the Store!

[Gunhard]

The idea behind the essence system had a huge potential and was (theorically) a good addition to the game - and the gameplay.
It should have allowed the ppl to have full control over their builds, letting them experimenting, fleshing out and optimizing their gear, instead of forcing everyone to just accept the standardized top gear and giving up one of the best classic features of the RPGs: customization.

Essences for embers, essences from quests, essences from ah and now essences from instances. If you want to get them - you will, talking about paywall in ftp game is laughable in the first place. Oh, also depends how competitive you want to be coz you can get essences in drops and still be good. Best in slot gear and best builds are something that existing in many rpgs, so if you are talking about huge potential but keep looking at the same builds on the same class and get frustrated then its time to come down from heaven to earth.

expac that should have been free

Yeah, they should coz you said so of course. Free quest packs and xpacks except Mordor and MM isnt enough for you, gotcha. I guess you also like to work for food.

[Forgotten_Legend]

ONE thing that would go a long way to "lessoning the burden" of the essence grind.... is that every piece of gear with available essence slots, should include essences in all empty essence slots.

i essentially quit playing the game when i saw that the essence gear essentially had no stats. (3,4,5 empty essence slots makes the gear worthless. it's worse than yellow rarity gear stat wise.) it made no sense to me, to buy a piece of gear with no stats, and then have to grind out each essence as though it's a whole another piece of gear. so, instead of equipping 12 pieces of gear, now i'm essentially needing to equip 50-80 pieces of gear.

now, when i say that i essentially quit playing the game, i admit that i log in maybe every 6 months or so to continue questing a wee bit. and to give you an idea of how often i play now, compared to how often i used to play: i had 3 characters with top tier raid gear for every raid before Rohan. then i finished the Rohan expansions before the first Gondor release, played the first Gondor release, saw the essence gear, and then my playtime slowed down to the point that i'm currently doing the epic quests in Minis Tirith, but skipping the Minis Tirith open world quests. PRE-Pelannor Fields. so yeah, you can see my lack of motivation to keep up with the content. we're now at level 130 content, and i'm still meandering with level 100 content. all because the essence gear grind destroyed my motivation to play this game.