Quote Originally Posted by Maeka View Post
With crafting you have....grindy, grindier, and most grindy? There was no in-between. You got to the current expansion's content and you hit a brick wall of needing lots of money to buy tools from people who were able to start the expansion with the ludicrously powerful maxed out stuff from the previous expansion. These people started with an unfair advantage, and they were already waaaaaaay ahead of you before you even started. What was the point of even trying at that point, unless you didn't mind blowing several million gil on stuff to get you started.... and even then, it was a painful slow grind. Wasn't "difficult" as far as skill goes, just took forever, grinding away.
Which expansion are we talking about here? I found the jump from ARR to HW to be moderately challenging for a few classes, but I think that was partly due to my own boneheadedness of refusing to craft myself gear that would have made the quest rewards obsolete. Eventually I found a class whose quest didn't require a HQ item and was able to work up from there. HW to StB was a breeze. Quest items were easier to craft so the basic Lv60 unstarred HQ gear was easily enough to craft them. During StB I caught up with the game and crafted myself a set of endgame gear and overmelded it. As such I don't have direct experience from the StB to ShB threshold, but looking at the numbers the ShB entry-level gear is only a little bit more difficult to craft than the basic Lv70 unstarred gear (3149/14071 vs 2952/13187 progress/quality). It's easily the smallest expansion gap so far. You should be able to cross it without having to buy any gear.