They are not expensive. You can earn about a million or two a day by doing Saalus & challenge mode only.
On the weekends, you get another 1800 attribute points via daily questing (Friday,Saturday,Sunday).
You’re not supposed to maximize all attributes asap.
Until level 80 they are fairly cheap, even at Rank 8, and the best progression is by starting with your lower Rank skills for enhancing. Rank 1-2 skills cost about 20m to max. That’s about 2-3 weeks per attribute.
In my opinion that’s not very much considering the lasting effect that attribute improvements grant.
Gear will be replaced one day, but attribute effects are everlasting. That’s why it’s a good choice to not make them too cheap, looking at how people are handling investments of several dozens or hundreds of millions already.
By the way, those people with much $$$ in the team storage are either:
- playing like an addict with several dozens of chars every day
- botting or RMTing
- extremely lucky early on with new content, selling items for many millions to whales while their price is still high
- people with much silver that manipulate the market and/or invest money by buying, crafting&reselling or upgrading&reselling
- simply whales who spend a lot of real $$$ on the game