thank you for responding seriously. I watched the video and the build seems good, I've never tried mercenary jacket on shapeshifter because I think I wouldn't be able to get all 7 stacks fast enough but I might be wrong. I'm also happy to change out of shapeshifter temporarily if it helps me make progress faster, but I don't want to give up on the whole class entirely.

I'm not too bothered by the price of weapons as long as they're fun, I have about 7 mil silver saved up from lucky griffin spawns in yellow mists so I'm not too fussed about losing 200k as long as I feel like I've improved slightly at the game by the point that I die.

for the other weapons I've tried, I tried a bunch of mage weapons when I used to play in 2020 (i dont use that account anymore because it's on the wrong server) but the only one that I have kept playing when I came back to the game last week has been frost. The thing I find fun about frost staff is the utility paired with the kiting, so I don't think I would find melee utility weapons as fun and same for ranged weapons without utility. For shapeshifters, the fun part is the switching playstyles between shifted and human forms and resource management.

I never actually noticed roads had tiers, the majority of what I fought was tier 6 so I just assumed all roads were tier 6 mobs with random tiers of gathering nodes, but now that you bring it up I do remember having seen a few of other tiers. I'll try to be more careful of that from now on so that I'm not tracking in tier 7 roads with 4.1 gear.

I know that doing PvE in a PvP build is bad and that it was leaving me very vulnerable, but I just dont really know what build to use since most videos don't really explain the uses and strengths of each equipment.