I'm new, and I'm enjoying the game thus far. I enjoy doing Rank Missions the most, since that's Story Mode basically, and it gives me a sense of progression, completion, and accomplishment.

I've spent a very fair portion of the time I've been in this game grinding the Royal Jelly Palace, however, so that I can build up the star sets needed to progress past the Hall of Heroes missions... It's definitely been fun, and I've been playing with a close friend of mine, but I really would rather not grind.

However, I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the system. I first wanted to aim towards the Gunslinger set, but then I saw the armour that protected against Piercing and Elemental and chose to go with that instead. Upon building that up to 3*, I learned that I made myself completely defenceless against Normal damage, and so focusing on having actual defence (given I was at the point in the game where I could no longer just avoid every single attack), I moved to the Normal/Piercing armours that the game gives you recipes for via rank mission, the Cobalt set. Upon building those up to 4*..... now I see that the Gunslinger set already has exactly that, Normal/Piercing defence, almost exactly the same amount of defence but with handgun bonuses, which is important to be as a gun user.

I'm getting tired of spending all this time doing research to figure out what I want beforehand so I don't waste immense time and effort building up towards the wrong thing. I do it because my experience in TF2, for example, has shown me that research is important when approaching systems that involve value, time, and irreversible process, so that you don't mess up because you're new (e.g. learning how to trade, what items are valuable, and so on, so that you don't end up getting sharked out of $100+ Unusual hats). However, being new to Spiral Knights, I didn't quite have a full grasp of the whole system that is equipment, heat, alchemy, materials, energy, and so on. Thus, for all the research that I did to avoid wasting immense time and effort, I discover that I've wasted immense time and effort building the wrong gear because of a few misunderstandings.

I'm sorry for the rant, I'm just terribly frustrated. I *really* don't want to pay money in a F2P game for content that I can get without paying money, but I'm equally frustrated that all the grinding I did to *avoid* paying money in the first place is useless. Is this salvageable at all? Is it worth grinding and grinding more to get the 1800 energy (126000 crowns, or approximately 15-20 Tier 2 Clockwork RJP runs) to unbind the Mighty Cobalt Helm, pray I can actually sell the blasted thing for more than 126kcr in the first place and maybe a bit more to make up for it all, and then unbind the Mighty Cobalt Armour with that money and selling that too? Who would even pay that much for those items when there's alternatives that are better, the very reason I'm trying to sell it?