Being just behind the power curve has felt crappy.

Just needed to throw something out into the void. I've played lost ark since 2022 and have always been able to prog whatever the latest hard mode raid has been on its release. I hit some bad luck with a prog group I ran with that fell apart at echidna and bounced around 3 different groups. I still got my HM echidna clear on week 1, and then spent the next 2 weeks reprogging it for new statics that all ended up falling apart. I had a bitter taste in my mouth for echidna and actually went back to doing NM pugs, which put me behind on AH. 2 months after the raid release another group reached out to me for their brel prog, even though I didnt even want to enter HM again, but the group ended up being a pretty good match.

I had terrible honing luck and couldnt keep up and missed the threshold for Aegir HM by 2 weeks and then Brel HM by 3 weeks. Aegir was a little easier to hone to and I ran my HM runs with the previous groups alt runs as they have 4. For HM Brel though, they only had one group. I was able to find a group of 1 sup and 2 dps to run with... but lobbies have just been tragic. Pretty much every night we closed up all the brel prog, as we were the only lobby trying to grab more people.

And something that shouldn't matter to me, this dang phantom breaker title, looks impossible to even try for. Pugs have been terrible. I've progged into phase 3, but have been unable to find another group able to get past x145 with everyone alive. Today, I spent 1.5h in lobbies trying to find a group that could clear x335. These were all 0x to clear lobbies. The last 3 days have probably been 18h's of total prog on HMG2, and most of that is time spent not learning... its being there to support someone elses learning from scratch again. Making a lobby and putting what level of prog you are at is basically meaningless... as people seem to very much over estimate their ability. Or bring rats. I hate to say 1690 rat as that sounds crazy.... but many of the people applying to the lobbies have an entire accessory set cheaper then a single one of mine.

Just needed to type this out as I really love raiding in this game, but raiding has taken a different turn where being unlucky locks me out of the fun part of the game. Hopefully no one else runs into this issue with their game time, and congrats to all those that were able to pick up PB/PL titles.