Originally posted by Lecherous Lychee 🐸:

I wish gear is less linear in the way we acquire them, and more on how we would like to play our characters.

On the flip side this is a survival game base and not an RPG base, so I can understand why they are careful with balancing upgrades, otherwise you end up with all cosmetic bloat and no actual gameplay anymore. That said; I found reasons to make troll leather work well into the mountains at which point I should have been in silver. Especially using the Rogue class from Legends:
>primarily, it is light with none of the movement penalty of shield and armor, this served me well for multiple quick ore runs to the coast to load up my ship in the swamp and mountains
>stealth bonus really does some work sometimes for exploring, light gathering like wood, or a corpse run for my alt
>can still wear a better helmet to try to counter its poor armor rating

Problem being it was shut down a bit when I hit plains, since I can be one shot there a little more easily than I would care for (1 and 2 star fulings with ranged mainly, with squitos chunking me quickly into one shot range). Even though I can still do things there being careful with stealth and aggressive assassinations.