I was thankfully in some decent 5* gear before the sprite update, so I was able to bypass the depressing and almost impossible grind of getting a new character to level 10 5* gear. But....it's still been a problem. I now own a couple dozen 5* weapons, and numerous sets of armor. I'll admit I don't play this game very often anymore, I normally just get the urge to play it and then play the hell out of it for a couple weeks. The thing is, in all the weeks I've spent grinding up I've yet to level most of my gear to anything close to ten. Thankfully there were a few items I made to level ten very early on- possibly before the switch happened, but even now I'm stuck with gear that's all around level 4-7 mostly and I doubt I'll ever play enough vana to level them up. I forget where I had it, but like a year ago I wrote the average number of Radiants I obtained from a Vana run down, which was about 12, then I tried to calculate how many I'd need based on what I knew I'd need to level each weapon up. To keep it short, i'd of had to do nearly a thousand if I recall correctly. Needless to say I stopped playing for a while after that.

Not only is it a bad spot for me, but I tend to entertain myself on here by helping newer players out. Most of them quit by Roarmalous/Jelly king due to the difficulty and grind setting in, but for the few that manage to make it to 5* gear, I always hate to see their dissappointment when I have to tell them "Well...uhh....no, you don't really get to level this gear up. You've gotta just get to the very last stratum, depths 24-28, and hope for the best. If you're lucky after a couple runs, or a couple hours of your life wasted grinding, you'll be able to get all your gear to level 2". Often they'll ask me how I leveled mine up, and I just tell them "Well before there wasn't a lock on your weapon preventing it from heating up like some children's toy, back in my day it just...leveled up. But OOO was trying to push some crap to get people to put more money into the game I think and kind of ruined it for everyone".

In short, please make radiants more prevelent. Hell, I think i'd honestly be happy with seeing a way to craft shining fire crystals into radiants, or just allow all crystals to be up/down crafted. Hell, it'd give me something to do with my 5k glowing and 12k shining fire crystals that I NEVER HAVE ANY USE FOR AND CAN NOT EVEN SELL TO A SHOPKEEPER FOR SOME MONEY.