Thank you for inviting Asmongold to the media tour!!

[Ronduwil]

Also, if you need some basic essences, you can always just go inside Bozja and farm some rank 1 enemies near the entrances to the 1st and 2nd zones. There's always a few people willing to party up for essence farming, so you can have well over 100 essences in 30-60 minutes of farming. Turn on some relaxing tunes, turn off your brain and just watch as the essences pour in.

The fact that this advice isn't available in the game itself or even as a pre-req for running DR is a failure on SE's part. If this is really a prerequisite for successfully running that content, they should have a quest where you provide the proof that you have those essences.

Be that as it may, the irony is that the people complaining the most about wanting harder content are the same ones who complain about players making the content harder by not using essences, on the grounds that neglecting to use essences is making the content harder for them. It's seriously a case of "I'm making the game too easy for myself, so you need to make the game harder for everyone so that I can continue to experience a challenge." The game already has difficult content. As many players have stated, if you want to make RD hard, just run it in savage mode without essences. But they won't do that because they really want the game to be easy for them. They just want it to be hard for everyone else who isn't in the know like they are.