There are some stupid changes made by people who obviously have never played the game and do not understand (or even care about) progression.
Such as the fact that they reduced server harvesting rates, patched the thrall leveling “tricks”, etc making these things far more tedious…
…but then they make epic Perfected Padding drop like candy from chests and minor bosses. People who typically had like 5-10 Perfected Paddings in their bench now have chests full of stacks of them. WHY was this done? It was a very endgame MAT and was expensive enough to make so that it prevented people from literally spamming epic armor as if it were Darfari Skin. No longer, now you can clear any dungeon and have enough Perfected Padding to outfit an army of thralls.
Same thing goes for when they made it so you could 1-shot a bunch of T1 sorcerers for skulls and turn them in for chests of endgame resources and Obulus which you could use to BUY your choice of OP legendaries (like the M one) for a pittance.
What the F?
No wonder people get to 60 and then a couple weeks later post that “waaah, there’s nothing to do”: because everything has already been given to them on a platter right from level 1.
The only thing left that requires any effort at all to get are certain T4 thralls like the Blademaster, Shieldwright and Bowmaker… and you already have people crying that they’re too hard to get and should be regularly hireable at taverns, FFS.