Man I'm late to this necro...

I'd rather have the higher-tier Shard items (not Crystal/Cluster) have reduced Shard costs. Mostly the Refined/Component recipes - change the costs to 1/1/2/2/3 instead of 1/2/3/4/5 or something.

It feels like the system was intended for lower tier items to be leveling gear while the higher tier stuff was intended as progression jumping, but currently the shard costs on ~i30 - ~i50 are so steep that you end up getting bottlenecked horribly, even if you're just trying to solo Leve n' Log your DoH. I mean, I cleared my Main Scenario, decided to level up BSM, and got bricked at around Lv 35 because I ran out of shards. Thankfully, at the time the shard farmers were still around, but with shard costs at 10x those times and a swarm of new players due to the free trial...I don't think I want newbies to get spooked by mere leveling.