Took the semi-casual route to get to 50 (mixed in some side quests whenever they rewarded a larger amount of XP or the few that offered gold early on). Just the main story quest however still does get you to combat level 50 somewhere in the Arthetine quest chain (I hit it fairly early in the storyline there).
Unlike KR where I was actively also gathering mokoko seeds, I only went after the ones that were obvious (and will go back to the earlier zones to get the ones I missed once I’ve completed the Shushire part of the main story quest), so I’ve collected only a hundred of them by the time I hit Bern/Vern (there is now over 1200 based on our current patch).
Lot of the old KR “start of the endgame” routines no longer apply; some of the gearing system has changed including the entire engraving system (I bypassed this during the closed technical beta and only did the honing portion). I’ve also completely forgotten the island routines including the songs, emotes, and giant hearts, and probably will use guides for them so that I’m not spinning my “rotors” sailing aimlessly. But there are a lot of new things to learn going forward and can now settle into a comfortable playing pace.
Does Lost Ark finally releasing (in the west) scratch that itch that I’ve been missing since Devilian closed nearly 4 years ago? In some ways, it does (like the overall refinement and the amount of content available), but in other ways, it doesn’t (like nothing has come close to the fun mobility that the cannoneer had except the ninja in TERA). But my time in TERA itself was already nearly down to nothing (the recent patch had me checking it out, but I played it no more than two hours), and will be turning into a once a week/month thing soon. ArcheAge Unchained is sort of just maintaining my properties and doing whatever seasonal events for festival tokens, while Genshin Impact is what it is with its clockwork cycle of events and then major updates which I’ve been playing at my own pace (I’ve finally gotten the 5-stars I wanted on my main account); but it’s more than filled my open world exploration itch by doing that exceptionally well (better than Guild Wars 2 IMHO).
Thus for the foreseeable future, Lost Ark is going to be my main MMO for awhile (Guild Wars 2 End of Dragons is something I’ll pickup but maybe not get into hard like the way I did back in 2019).
