[New] Breach & Item Uprading System

@Syllphid All good :) I like ideas being critiqued, it's important to have back and forth about what might be wrong about it, so it can be adapted and improved.

I agree with all what you wrote :) I'm not trying to invalidate the idea, quite the opposite! As I mentioned I really think you have a great idea about enriching current progression system. Just trying to point out things that might become an issue as time passes. But I suppose, as the time passes we would have also other/new ways to prevent what I was mentioning below.

@Syllphid, I understand your point, however if people bot it doesn't really matter what the system is to gear/level there could be a bot made for it. I think ore will ultimately be used to upgrade items as that is what it usually is for in mmo. As long as essence is untradable then someone risks their acc getting banned and every piece of progression wiped. To make it less of a 'one kind of essence' I suppose you could add the breach specific materials into the upgrade ingredients, such as the new Broodqueen Obsidian (from the new Ashen Grotto) for the higher tier upgrades. Infernal cores from the Embermaw Caverns for slightly lower tier upgrades etc.. I think essence/bar tier upgrades would only be the start. In terms of BiS, there are plenty of things which could be added, such as weapon enhancements through boss's dropping gems etc.. or even enchanting items. Also, specific endgame BiS swords/wands etc could be limited to certain different content which you would still have to do first.

As a first thing I want to emphasize that I really think it is great idea! It involves multiple mechanics already placed inside of a game and gives a purpose for already existing materials and activities (which with all due respect... they are currently lacking :D). Maybe it's far fetched, however there is one thing that comes to my mind that plagues MMO of all sorts for decades. And this system is (in my opinion) quite vulnerable to and even might encourage - botting. If there is only one kind of essence and only those 2 materials are required to literally grind-out your BiS gear, there is no real requirement to push deeper Breaches. Sure it would be much faster to try your best and get to a level where single run nets you few thousand of this essence, but not everyone is inclined to play fair :) And I suspect there would be individuals that would rather put a simple macro to work for the night running Breach 5, than manually take a challenge and do Breach 60 themselves. Same is applied to gathering resources, especially if they are required to make character stronger.. Static resource nodes locations ALWAYS result in programmed bots doing loops around the map, or just AFK characters standing directly on the spawn location. Of course I'm describing darkest possibilities and further more I don't provide any resolution to this issues, but I just wanted to point out common practices involved when such kind of progression systems are implemented. I think there should be additional "locks" of some kind (in which form I don't know, maybe unique material from each Brach level boss or something alike) that would force players to actually do challenging content to progress. Because after getting the base item (in proposed case even from the trade with other players) what is stopping you from running low Breach 500 times and getting literally god tier BiS piece via upgrading system? I'm just trying to brainstorm there because it seems like restrictions in that case would be only on the grind side, which is not always the best case :/