Well I’m left with the impression you don’t really understand the system.
- You’ll need many missions per fully crafted item. (If you already have resources, so what? The fact that you have them means you spend tons of time in missions. Ignoring that time is just not an honest way of looking at the system.)
- During those missions if you’re running reasonably high difficulty your Emperor Gifts won’t be bad. At a minimum they’re a critical source of T3+ blessings, and occasionally they’re even just solid items on their own.
- RNG shop is mostly bad nowadays, due to low-caliber blessings. So the main purpose of this shop is 360+ attribute items (greys), and the rate of those high end items is significantly increased since this patch. With the shop-checker app, this takes very little time.
- If you don’t happen to have the item type you want to try, then you just generate 5-15 of them spending Ordos, which takes almost no time.
- With your weapon of acceptable attributes in hand, you walk it over to Hadron and level it up, watching each time to see if you get stuck in some bad roll (which can still happen). This takes almost no time.
- You then reroll the perk, and that’s the only thing that can take way more time than it needs to (due to being unable to just select a perk once the cost gets low enough, and due to the number of rerolls needed to get it to that free cost in the first place; like I think they should just let players outright buy the ability to select a perk of their choice.)
- You then apply the blessings you want, which takes almost no time.
So the vast majority of time is running missions, and second place is perks. And I agree perks should change. But third place is REALLY far away in terms of “total time spent”. We’re talking multiple hours of running missions vs. 2-10 minutes rolling perks vs. maybe 2 minutes (if you count loading Mourningstar) to buy an RNG shop item that looked good?
Obviously the ratios are a bit different if you’re only looking at blue items or easier. If you aren’t talking about rolling a maxed out item, the ratio of missions:crafting will shift in favor of craft time (due to the higher costs of maxing out an item, which often requires several missions to get enough resources). But it’s not an honest way to examine the system if you’re like “I started this patch with 400 plasteel, and so literally 100% of my time was spent looking at UIs to roll a blue Catachan sword”