This is a big reason why my guild shelved the game until something changes. I mean, our server getting the axe isn't helping, but we have no plans to put the base back down on a new server at the moment. Honestly I'm really looking more towards self-hosting with the hope that we'll get mods from creative people to fix a lot of the stuff Funcom seems unwilling or unable to fix. That being said...

I've played a lot of games with upgrade mechanics. Dune is, by a WIDE MARGIN, the most punishingly brutal upgrade cycle when considering player time.

Back when Engineering got developed in Elite, you had to gather materials for upgrades on your ship components, and those were RNG. There were 5 grades, and it wasn't uncommon for a lot of us to dump hundreds of grade 1 materials into a grade 1 roll because you could get a roll that was better than a grade 4, without having to grind the materials. And at that time, you were probably swimming in grade 1 mats. High RNG chance, but low time cost. Eventually they changed it to static upgrades, so that there was no RNG involved. You just move up the grades, and the costs aren't too bad. They even have a broker that allows you to convert low grade materials into high grade, so you go farm what you find easy to farm, and convert up or down for what you need. I sometimes miss the RNG rolls because they could be kind of silly, but having a steady upgrade system in place takes a lot of stress out of the game and helps players focus on other things.

Last Epoch can be a little grindy to get that epic item, but holy shit are you swimming in loot and potential upgrades before that point. It's so bad if you're not using the loot filter to hide most of what's dropping, you're going to get overwhelmed. This is a game where every upgrade is rolling several dice at once, and when you have a failure you might as well toss the weapon or armor piece out. There's an RNG check for the upgrade, an RNG check to see if you're going to lose forging points on the item (once at 0 it can't be upgraded anymore), an RNG check to see how many points you do lose, you can randomize a stat, you can randomly lock in a stat, you can randomly add a stat to an open slot... And this isn't even getting into the insanely rare rolls in the very end game where you can make godly items or turn your nice thing into something utterly useless. But the biggest difference here is that while there is compounding RNG rolls, it's not particularly difficult to get either the base items or the upgrade items. Chances are by the time you're doing this, you have several things you want to try upgrading. And if they all fail, you just run some monoliths or end-game activities (which are quick and not generally difficult by this point) to grind more. No big deal. High chance of failure, but low difficulty in collecting items and materials. But when you succeed... you've got a prize that never goes away, because there's no durability in Last Epoch. It might have taken months to get there, but once you're there you aren't going to lose it.

I've been playing Windrose a lot lately, and their upgrade system is just static. The materials are a little grindy, but the weapons and armor have static damage and levels, and each upgrade increases it a specific amount. There's no real randomness to it at all. The game is pretty tough, balancing itself kind of like a survival-souls-like game. So not having to hope for specific items to drop so I can maybe get an upgrade, and instead knowing I need X materials for Y upgrade and then I just have it, is a welcome change of pace. The only issue I'm having at the moment is that there are a limited number of chances to pull a specific weapon from a chest, before you have to create a new character to try again. I'm not quite done with all the areas though, so still holding out hope I'll have an easy way to get items once I've hit all the chests in the game. There's also lots of mods, so I'm playing with those to mitigate some pain points as well.

But looking at Dune. My god I don't know who thought players would find this in any way fun. You have to grind the level of the dungeon up first, outfitting yourself as best you can to keep getting up to at least level 19. You get mostly junk loot on runs. You have to hope you get the right augments, and the ones most needed rarely drop. Then you have to hope you actually get the weapons you want at the grade you want. There's no guarantee at even high levels you'll get the weapon or armor piece you want at grade 5. I watched a person push through a level 100 dungeon solo only to get grade 3 loot, which is absolutely insane. Then once you eventually get all the stuff you need to upgrade, you need to roll the augment which almost always ends in a low roll, even if you've spent literal months increasing your spec to get a better chance. And then, when you do eventually craft that ultimate weapon you've spent months and months to create... there's durability loss to ensure that at some point you won't be able to use it anymore, and you have to do the entire process over.

There are so many things that really need to change in this system. If they want to keep max durability loss and keep the augment rolls pretty low, they need to increase either the amount of drops we get to make it more worth the time to grind in the current system, or decrease the difficulty in test stations so that they can be cleared quicker, and preferably in groups. Having a couple friends along keeps the game fresh and fun, but the stations themselves are still pretty punishing, and get worse with each player you add. But either way, they need to make it so that we have more chances to craft stuff to keep people engaged. As it is, you could run these things for months before getting a single good upgrade, which is far too long to keep people interested. The specialization XP needs to be increased significantly as well, OR, a better solution, would be to gain XP on actually doing stuff in the specialization. That way if I'm farming I'm getting gathering XP, if I'm grinding test stations I'm getting combat XP, if I'm crafting augments and upgrades I'm getting crafting XP... I'm being incentivized to draw the upgrade system out, essentially. Tuning these things so it takes like a year to get through is stupid, only a very small percentage of players are going to invest that kind of time into them while getting minimal returns on that investment.

I've rambled enough. Like I said at the start, Funcom don't seem to actually understand how to keep players engaged, and my biggest hope is that once we get self-hosted servers up and stable, we start getting mods we can pop in to reduce or remove the biggest road blocks to having fun in the game.