I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way, but after coming back the game seems to have a problem with telling the player what they should be doing instead of letting them decide what they want to do.

To elaborate, the game has an expert roulette composed of two dungeons that reward lore tomes. Lore tomes are used to purchase the highest level gear outside of pure raiding in the game and the dungeons are the easiest way to get lore. Furthermore, a lot of the end game "keys of the castle" content require a certain gear level or push the community to enforce a specific gear level, so there's a lot of incentive to stay on top of gear level.

However, that expert roulette has a total of two dungeons in it and it becomes a slog every patch to have to go through the motions. Void ark is very much the same as a catch up instance: Everyone is going to run it to the point of exaustion instead of getting to go around and do things that are actually enjoyable, like EX / Savage, older content for glamour, etc.

Also, something just seems wrong if the community has to set it's own gear level restrictions just to try and make a hard fight more passable and to accomodate people who may not have run the content as much and thus turn a clear party into a learning group for the night. Usually it just turns into a game of "how high can I set this to keep noobs out?" sort of deal.

Yeah I don't know, it just feels like the designers want us to do a dozen things, but then have emphasized just one or two of them as being the absolute best choice that needs to be done first all the time thanks to tome farming. Anyone else feel the same?