With respect to the psyche-lock and muffin-spending, I don't perceive this to be a problem per se, but a deliberate design choice by SE. It's easy to argue to that it's sub-optimal, but I think it gives SE an opportunity to come back to Sortie at a later date and add parallel incentives. (Compare Sortie to original Domain Invasion without the daily points to buy items from Zurim; It's like night and day in terms of replay value). How many people do you know who zerged 15 aeonics in a short time and then quit? I can name like 10...that's not SE's fault, that's players' fault for foaming at the mouth.
I think Sortie is currently like Old Domain Invasion, you go in to earn galli and the ways to spend it are very limited. The drites/mats have a singular use case at the moment (stones for armor and drites for weapons). I think SE will come back and add crafts/recipes, a gil-sink and even perhaps additional bosses of Aminon-tier. (Fun fact: There is a placeholder ID for an Aminon-type Boss Bitzer in each Basement quadrant (E,F,G,H), so it's possible we can see a new sortie boss in F/G/H one day to fight with Fragments #1-4 (and beyond).
However, I'm much more hopeful for Sortie than I am with Limbus currently. Fujito said that Limbus is only 60% done as of November's Freshly Picked live stream. Limbus needs to have parallel incentives to participate. (Sortie has it, albeit very mildly with Empy Armor or Prime Weapons, BUT Domain Invasion has beads for Aeonics/AF1 Reforge, Daily Taily, Mireu, Vorseals, etc). Limbus doesn't have this DEPTH for participation just yet.
I think SE has done an OK job separating Apollyon and Temenos with Artifact and Relic armor upgrades. What we don't see yet is additional incentives like in other Daily content.
The ASUS ROG Limbus Armor may or may not have good augments, but that's not the incentive I want. (We don't know if they're Random Augments like Dark Matter or built with RP like Divergence necks or even Path-A/B/C/D like Nyame).
If SE isn't going to give Limbus clear depth and breadth of stuff to do, then I'm ready for the following content if SE were to choose to implement it:
Dyna-Divergence Glacier/Xarcabard
Existing Dyna-Divergence (choose your item level 140-160)
Upgraded Monster Rearing cheers
Item-level WotG Campaign
More Besieged updates
etc etc.
Fujito did anounce new zones, but I'm trying to keep my expectations low because SE didn't implement the Blue mage / automaton spell sets that they announced on 1/1/2025 ...but I think what we got in Limbus and content in 2025 is much better (at least so far). Who knows, maybe SE will surprise all of us and make something incredible come out of augmented Prime Weapons? The sky is the limit! ..but SE needs to stop taking the short bus.
