I went ahead and got Lucia and her weapon. The biggest reason was to get rid of the red ! notification. It's not like I have any units that will synchronize well with her so she'll stay at level 1 for now.
Unfortunately, my issue with the ridiculously convoluted menus still remains. I genuinely cannot understand so many of the options that they've added in the last year or so. Still, I'm giving it a proper attempt and I figured I should try and level up Remielle. I had enough mats stocked up to get her and the weapon to 60 so I'm using energy to farm skill upgrades. Immediately ran into the Notorious Hunt timegate where it'll take me weeks to get enough materials to level all those passives. I did notice an option to "continue into the deep" or something like that while I was trying to farm the weekly boss.
Ascheroth is that some kind of option that lets me farm more than 3 of those items a week? I couldn't understand it.
I also realized I've completely forgotten the combat system. My team is currently Anby, Nicole and Jane and I keep tanking hits no matter what. I can't seem to get the dodge working so whenever I get the attack notification I just swap to another character to try and avoid it, but I still tank hits. Will take some practice to get back into the groove.
I played the Sons of Calydon story chapter and I liked it a lot. The story itself was okay, but what really appealed to me was that it was a standalone vignette that took a few hours to complete. I'm actually very happy with playing small games right now and each of these patch stories can count as a 'small game' so to speak. I figured I can do one patch story in 1-3 days and keep moving the whole thing along. I know not all of the patches will have standalone stories but as long as there are logical break points between chapters, it'll feel like I'm tackling the very daunting task of catching up to the story in manageable, bite sized pieces.
Ascheroth one more question for you. Is there any youtuber you'd recommend for a lore catch up video I could watch? I very vaguely remember what happened in the game prior to where I am so a story recap would be quite useful. It doesn't matter if the videos are much longer than I need them to be... I just want to watch a story recap from 1.0 to 1.3.
EDIT - one other tiny thing that bothers me a bit. You launch the game and reach the main menu/home screen. You click once to login and it logs you in. Then you have to click again to 'Play' but all it does is load some resources. When those resources are loaded you have to click again to actually play. Why can't they just load the game when it launches. What other purpose do they think someone started the game for? Why does someone have to click 3 times just to start playing it? Neverness logs you in as soon as you reach the homescreen, but there's still an option to change account or server. If you don't want to do that, as most people won't, one single click gets you into the game.