Ok so I get that this great shield should be hard to come by, I really do, but what I don't understand is why it is so horribly difficult to get. Now hear me out before you write this off as pure pissing and moaning.
Four of my ls mates and I went out to farm Iron Plates yesterday, and again today in Aby Ulegureand, and spent about three and a half hours each day farming them, and ended up with a total of 13 Iron plates over the 7 hour period involved involved. The problem wasn't the nm, with the terror, and stun, invincible and his other moves it was actually a fun fight, the problems came from the horrible drop rate on helical gears, which was followed by an equally terrible drop rate on bevel gears and gear fluid. Why does SE do this kind of crap to us?
While we were farming Iron plate we were also camping Chione in the hopes of upgrading our colorful demuline abyssites, (against another group that was trying to do the same thing), for one of our members who is working on stage two of his Daurdabla. In that 7 hours we got Chione 4 times, and of those 4 times we got exactly 0 of our abyssites to upgrade, and we only saw the other party fight Ogopogo 1 time, 1 time in 7 hours. Wtf is that? It wouldn't be so bad I geuss, except there are only 3 mobs in the entire game that drop colorless souls, and they are all camped around the clock, which would be fine if people could actually get what they need and move on, but the drop rates on pop items, and colorless souls upgrades is just... Wow.
Believe me, I don't want anything just handed to me in this game, but I would like my efforts to be rewarded, and 13 iron plate coupled with 0 upgrades is definitely not what I would consider a reward for 7 hours of mindless farming. I don't find it appealing, I find it boring and a complete waste of my precious time, and it becomes even more discouraging when I think of all the people who will be fighting over a drop that only comes from one nm in the whole game after they actually get their colorless souls.
It's like everything else in the game I guess, it's either so time consuming you don't really feel like doing it, or it's so easy you only want to do it once. I would much rather have a challenging fight with good rewards, than all these boring time sinks SE seems to love to create.
So how about it SE, what would be wrong with improving the drop rates on pop items for mobs that drop Iron Plates, increasing the upgrade rate on colorless demuline abyssites, and actually giving us more mobs to fight to get colorless souls, or just getting rid of the need for vwnms for colorless souls and making them drop off the avatar mobs you have in every zone in abyssea? And while you're at it give us more than one mob to get Apademak's horn from, I mean you could rename it to Khimaira horn easy enough and then put a Khimaira nm in multiple zones in Abyssea.
Enough with the time sinks already let us do things and move on because quite frankly I'm finding it harder and harder to even log in anymore, and it's becoming more and more difficult for me to justify even paying to play a game that bores me so badly.
Edited to make it readable lol, the post had so many grammatical errors I got confused when I tried to read it, and I am the only one who knew what I wanted to say