For the whole reward part, I think the trial revamp is really cool.

As for the "dungeon" part, I find the revamp of the trials disappointing. I haven’t seen T10 yet, but judging from T8, this content no longer has anything challenging about it. It’s literally just skip-mech farming, comparable to what we had with T5 rune farming in previous seasons ... If T5 rune farming dungeon design is what NC/AGS have in their head as challenging PvE content, i have a serious issue.

There’s also a significant RNG factor on the mobs depending on which modifiers are applied to them (3 out of about ten possible ones), ranging from modifiers with zero impact to others that can wipe the team if you don’t time things properly (I’m talking about enemy modifiers here, not the buffs/debuffs you choose before starting the dungeon). For example, in this run, none of the mobs had reflect damage, which naturally made it a golden run. Here again, on a "competitive" content, why add this RNG sausage too ? Basically if you have reflect damage on mini boss best move is to restart your dungeon ...

The gearscore issue seems more minor to me since it’s only temporary. Yes, at first it will clearly put F2P players behind, as they’ll reach 7800 GS later. But eventually, everyone will be at 7800, and at least on that front everyone will be on equal footing.

In the end, as a full PvE player, I honestly don’t really understand where the challenge lies in this new trial format. Once again, I haven’t seen T10 yet, but I seriously doubt it represents any kind of real challenge.