Returning player here. If I understood correctly, to play content deemed 'challenging' with my friends, I need to complete about a dozen quests with a dozen steps that are just endless running around hacking low level NPCs that offer no challenge whatsoever.
Is there genuinely no way to skip these? Feels like an absolute waste of time. Why don't the NPC levels at least scale up? I'm about halfway through Rising Tide and I've never been so utterly bored in a game as now.