The hyper express was likely my biggest boost, just had to buy a handful of fusions to get it on a roll, each stage gave me enough materials to hone up to next. I still have a shitload of everything except fusions, and I prob have enough to go 1490+
This is a free event, not a single dime spent, tons of honing mats, 40 relic stones, 100 relic jewellery, bunch of cards, tons of engravings, big chunk of gold ect ect
The only thing I'm truly lacking aside from skillpoints, is runes. (yeah I'm missing ALOT of stuff, I mean basics) Not sure if I'm missing some catchup quests for runes, but I haven't seen a single one anywhere aside from the 2 greens bought off ships. The handful I have are lower quality from launch when I played deathblade/pally to 50. I'll figure it out here soon, just hasn't been my top priority, and haven't read up on them indepth yet.
I'm having fun, I even did some PVP yesterday after doing Rowen, and I haven't done PVP in a very long time. Course most people just ran away when I start throwing pets and shit at them, not sure why lol, but ran into some real pvpers that completely wiped the floor with me in seconds, and I didn't even mind.
Plenty of themepark stuff to do, I can't see myself getting bored.
Not gonna lie, I've tossed about 100$ at the game, did a boost for summoner, exchanged for blue crystals to expand card slots, and got a 30 day crystal buff, and that is basically a subscription in my mind. All of that I could have done free in a week or 2. I'm an adult with some throwaway money, and I don't have fuck all to do until end of October.
Which is less than what I paid for D4 Ultimate at around 130ish CAD, and I'm not even interested in playing S1 or the game, or any Blizzard game ever again. Fuck I'd sell my account for LA gold before S1 if I had a taker, it's tied to my WoW accounts too(no nothing really of value there), I'd just have to strip/change my personal info/billing.
People buy bunches of tokens for gold from Blizzard all the time without blinking an eye, in fact there were more than a few of us during Legion that did that, I recall the frequent discussions with many guild members when we were gaming the system to get the best return on dollar>gold. Later it was gaming the system to pad our battle.net balances too. I also recall a couple people getting banned at the start of Legion for paying big bucks to get a chinaman to level them through less than a week of content.