I'm enjoying the area but I'm at a point now where doing harder CEs is dangerous because I lose 900+ mettle each death. I enjoy the harder fights, but it feels more productive to just wait around doing skirmishes then go in the easy ones at this point if I want to reach cap on the rank (15).
Instances also die WAY too quickly imo. Last night I was catching up a friend with their rank and we weren't even an hour in and when the math robot CE popped, there were only 28 people in the instance (we passed it barely).
I'm hoping more people get to rank 10 soon as well, I just want to do the Castrum CE but the one time it popped only 7 people went in.