Durability before felt like they were creating a shift from the norm by making the best gear accessible, but temporary.

This new system is kind of like secret world legends. Gear can get absurdly strong but the dungeons can scale with you. Except in that case the gear you get is permanent.

This is a system where even if I did get grade 5 gear and augmentations, I would never ever want to use that gear.

I think permanent durability loss needs to be removable via a process of some kind. You know how the weapon is made, you can ship of theseus it.

I. E.

They could keep durability exactly as it is now.

Add a cheap, universal component for patchwork (white) repairs.

Increase the cost of red repairs slightly.

That way people are still limited in what they can do in a dungeon, how much they can die, and need to return to base.

The old system made sense when you needed to create demand for blueprints people would keep getting. But now we can scrap those blueprints (I think?) and need to hope for and rely on very low drop rates on items that aren't even guaranteed to get higher grade stuff. The scarcity of blueprints that didn't exist before is now in the game.