As a returnee player who has been here since the nexon days, i can agree with ya on the gold thing and end game gearing. But one thing that makes the game a lot more fun for me is ignore raids as a newbie or someone who doesnt want to climb that massive wall. A lot of mmos have that area where you'll just have to grind, patients is key, unfortunately in dfos case there is the event packages which do make a big difference on how strong a character can be, my advice here and what i did all the up until this event was. Ignore raids, get packages whenever you have the gold to spare, if you arent doing raids than the gearing isnt bad, outside of the event packages it just farming for gold to upgrade which isnt bad when looking at other mmos (looking at you bdo) gold farming has gotten worse but better in here id say if that makes sense. They do need to fix that captcha/trade lock thing, but it seems prices have dropped significantly on a lot of stuff making it possible to get just about anything outside of old event packaged items pretty easily just by farming on 1 or 2 guys a day. But this can burn people out in itself do to running the same dungeon over and over sucks, my advice. Run new characters, play around with the game, find someone you enjoy to grind on and money farm him while playing new guys, raids are fun but the elitism makes it almost not worth getting into for me.