THE FIRST CLEAR IS GLORIOUS!
Yes, it is all-caps worthy. The reduced difficulty on all nodes for first clear is so much fun. I used more different characters in this pve than I have in a long time, if ever. The second clear isn’t bad either. The trivials stay easy throughout and the difficulty level on the hard & essential nodes got challenging but not to an anger-inducing level (I’m pretending that Hood/muscle node never happened). All the 20 point grinding/stacked optimal play complaints are valid, but you can’t dispute this one.
They really nailed the difficulty/scaling part overall for me.
[spoiler]The lowered requirement for the top progression reward was great too.
I hit 7/7 on easy nodes in all three subs and 4+/7 on the others. I did not play all at once when the sub opened, I played when I wanted to. I will finish within top 100 when my sub ends tonight.
For me, the only way this could be better is if it was all progression so I could decide if I want to play more for additional rewards instead of just realizing that t10 or even t50 are out of reach and not even possible.[/spoiler]