It should be much easier for a newbie to gear up now than before the r9 patch.
First of all, money making methods have opened up vastly. They can run the 300 dungeon for the silver farm, and the clear time isn’t significantly affected by their own gear/class choice, as long as they have a few decent party members. Before, unless you’re a Schwarzer or well geared, your best silver farm was maybe clearing the 140 dungeon in 15 minutes for that 250k gold. Now, you can party up and clear 300 dungeon in half the time easily on any character for that 220k. They could also do Challenge Mode with auto-attack based or support classes, which are not dependent on gear. There’s always Saalus, and people are more than happy to carry multiple characters through it.
Then you have Unique equipment that are very easily to get (although ones with perfect stats are much more difficult than before). They can grab a cheap, okay-stats, red 350 weapon for 2-3mil and work on that as a gap/temporary weapon. They could also grab a really good rolled purple weapon for 1mil or less. Since you get 90% of the blessed gems you dump into transcendence back, it’s not that big of a loss. There’s also armor with green stat options which are very cheap, and you can even get ones with two green lines for under 500k.
Once they have that +11 T4-5 350 weapon, they should be able to tackle, at least contribute, to most group content in the game.
Which is pretty baffling why the player retention rate has been so bad even with this patch.
And my claim is that I can be a decent enough DPS with a +16 Viena Mace non-trans on a PD3 and do well and get a ton of kills in Sausys 9 or similar challenge maps.
As well can carry an entire DG300 run, because that’s already enough.
You do not need insane gear for those as long clear =/= solo clear.
500 extra p atk from RNG bonus won’t make you unable to clear a run or not. Just get a Thaum C1 and test if it will greatly impact the team or not, the Swell Left Arm can give similar atk to what you’d get from RNG stats.
Nice theory but on practical experience it wont happen. Making newbies out of the game because of grind you want to impose on them. Grind RNG for what?
They’re not out of the game. They’re out of the end-game, just in like any decent game - you need effort to get to end-game otherwise there’s no point on playing.