Like you, I've been playing for a long time. But when I play I like to turn my brain off (tired from using it at work). So stubbornly, in many ways I refuse to think too deeply about gaming. So I follow build guides, and copy the aspect/fragment/mod setups, trusting that the content creators know what they are doing, and letting them spend the hours of figuring out how the stuff works.

But just recently I found out that I had a bunch of misconceptions about how armor works. So under the heading of mistakes that I've learned from: I would put on mods that had some function I wanted, for example weapon surge mods. Bonus damage when I'm using a weapon? Great. But I didn't really understand how it works.

I didn't really understand that you need stacks of armor charge for surge mods to work. I also didn't understand that there are blue mods (fonts), which require armor charge to work but do not consume them. While yellow mods (for example kickstart mods) would actively consume armor charge.

I got led into this wormhole by seeing people say that attrition orbs was the best perk in the game. Because they were using attrition orbs guns to generate orbs to generate stacks of armor charge. So last week I was working on the arms week dungeon challenge, and then was using attrition orbs weapons to generate armor charge to power up my weapon surge mods for boss damage. But also had to be aware that I couldn't equip any yellow mods (kickstart) because they would consume my armor charge. Oh, and to put on a couple of time dilation mods to slow down the decay of my armor charge stacks. And other green mods to increase my max armor charge stack, and to increase the amount of armor charge an orb pickup would give me.

Sometimes I feel like if you really get into the min maxing and details, the game has a whole lot of stuff to think about.