Mate, you fail to realize my point. Those Hongmoon items are released on Korean servers with a single purpose: Help the beginners so they can level quickly and catch-up 3 years old playerbase. Most MMO's nowadays attract new players like that. The gap between beginner and endgame player decreases over time in any given MMORPG because game helps beginners to catch up endgame players. The companies tries to slowdown playerbase decay because after a while the population starts to drop. Let it be increasing experiences that beginners get, or making "Beginner only" events, or giving away OP weapons like that. Anything.
The weird part is, NCSoft gave those items at the start. Reason? There is nobody to catch up. There is nobody at the endgame because everyone just started few days ago. Leveling process is designed to be average when you play the game self-found, suitable for both hardcore veterans and newbies to MMO genre. When you give everyone free weapons which deal the triple damage compared to others, then you make the leveling process way too easy. Teach players how to combo with questline but never make them to rely on combos to stay alive.
"Hey Cricket, try this combo: Q + M2 + M2." Nice, let's use it on PVE from now on! Q + M2 and monster dies.
Few days ago there was a post on this subreddit about someone having hundreds of health potions and barely using them. In an ideal world, the newbie would struggle, rely on potions, get out of them constantly and visit potion seller occasionally, while a hardcore veteran would barely get hits from monsters (evades, knows his skills, relies on combos and timing) and keep his HP high. As said, you need a balance. Not too easy, not too hard, otherwise you would miss the enjoyability point.
In my case, the only potion I've ever used so far is when I was soloing an 6-man instance boss as Blade Dancer (which is not the top PVE character, by the way). I used like 4 potions during fight and that was it. Over 100 potions currently sits on my inventory.
don't hype so much next time.
I did, I do, and I will. You cannot tell me what I need to hype about. I look forward to new games and wait for them to arrive on EU scene. (e.g Black Desert and Bless are both promising games) You know what? Black Desert isn't even released and they started to destroy the game already with their choices.
If the game isn't your taste
Are we on the same topic? All the replies so far are simple: "If you don't like it you can quit." I'm not talking about not liking it, I'm talking about how flaws like those take away the enjoyability. I'm telling we're having the exact same problems that made half of the community leave in a month on Rift, on Wildstar, on Aion and unless things change, this game will have the same fate.