Basically, an idea on what’s wrong, and my idea on how to fix it. The power grind is super slow, and this causes it to make time spent playing the game feel unrewarding. I love the idea of being able to gain power from any given activity in the way that the portal allows us to, but this is where the main problem simultaneously occurs. The higher your power level, the better the rewards of course, but the problem is that the stuff you play never changes, leaving much less of a concept of being good at the game and doing the most complex and prestigious activities getting you the best rewards, and now instead only grinding is important. Of course higher power levels unlock more modifiers to add, but these are still too limited, and right now, the problem still lies in that the power grind is too slow to get there anyways. The way it’s currently setup is like an endless spiral staircase to the top. It’s too similar for what you do to get rewards(farming), and takes so long. Since it’s just a spiral staircase, people will never be happy farming for gear and god roles in their current lower tier when it’s just as hard as the highest level is, with the only difference being power level. The problem is that we don’t have a clear way to get actually better gear without playing anything that shouldn’t have anything to do getting better gear in the first place. I think a better system would be a mix of our old system with the new one. At all levels, the grind should be faster, as this is fundamental to making a better power system, instead of how grueling gaining both xp and power used to be. The solution is to not make it feel like a spiral staircase, while keeping a way to incorporate grind and level into how good your rewards are, and also introducing a way to involve more skill. For the spiral staircase part, locking activities behind power level is smart, but only if you make the power grind much faster, where the better the modifiers, you get much faster the climb in power. The power system should only be in place not so players have something to do, but rather as a guide line on what to play, and I feel y’all’ve lost sight of that. That’s why we should incorporate gm’s and raids and a handful of other activities(coil, seasonal missions, maybe even reintroduce the pantheon for multiple types of activities, all with the same custom modifier system newly introduced but with even more modifiers. That still makes endgame not dynamic enough, so maybe the way you incorporate a dynamic endgame with skill is to narrow how tiered weapons are given. The tier one and two phase for players should be short, tier three is standard, tier four is adept, and tier five is the new highest standard. Now, within the scope of the endgame, this would mean a regular clear is just tier three, but your modifiers, whether that be you picking from anything on our current customizable list, adding some raid encounter challenges, and maybe some more crazy (fun) ideas will determine how good your reward tier is, and likely hood of getting that reward. This would need y’all to update raids though, and maybe also add just a flat modifier that adds power level straight up. I think modifiers on activities should be unbound from a set number you can add. These are just some rudimentary ideas. I get that they are trying to get longer player engagement through farming instead of new activities, which makes suggestions difficult because it’s hard to say “Just update every raid loot table”, and “Make tons of new story content”, but it’s better in my opinion than adding slight variations in every activity to make it work for the portal(mostly time cuts). Just regularly add all activities to the portal, bring back the destinations tab alongside it, and make them both prettier. I’m not trying to trash on what we currently have, just a suggestion based on my experience so far. I did like the campaign, and it does seem like they’ve done a lot in this update, so hopefully going forward they can concentrate more people towards straight up new content after they fix and shore up the new systems.