Did you really lock regular path points behind the Episode pass?

You can still complete the track without paying anything.  It’ll just take some time.  You need 250k EC to max it.  You will get:

-100.8k from doing the dailies we’ve always done

-88k from doing the new episode quests.  A new one unlocks every day and you need to finish by the end of the month.

-Up to 76.6k from the free GC feats

You won’t be able to do it quickly, and they’ll make sure to put lots of reminders on how much quicker it’d be with the pass.  But if you can usually get red box on craters, maxing out won’t be hard now.  If you struggle with GC feats, you’ll still be able to about 80% of the way through just with daily stuff/episode quests.

It's actually worse than you think, even IF you buy the 20$ pass, you can't even progress unless you spend more money on character shards for the current battle pass marquee character. I'm at 95 shards right now and game says I need 100 shards to collect rewards for the regular battle pass. SO not only did I just waste 20$ because I can't even progress the battle pass, but there is no way to earn marquee shards unless you pay even more for either crystal or $$ marquee packs

+1

Getting all newly released characters to 7 star within 14 days cannot be done f2p. I mean you can do one every now and then, by farming up crystals, but there aren't enough crystals to do all of them, and there are probably better things to spend crystals on.

So 65 shards is what is expected for free.  Anything above that has a price. I have never paid to get shards, and I'm not starting now - so likely I won't have to pay attention to the character quests at all.

That being said, I do think it is too early to completely dismiss their new era/episode design. We will have to see how it is at the end, and perhaps they will take some feedback to change it, if it is horribly disappointing for either f2p or p2w.

Let me know how that works out for you when they are releasing a Marquee every 14 days.

It won't be FTP possible for long.

And so far I see confusing screens & what appears to be a total lock out of getting Omis like we did from GC.

did I say I thought it realistic I'm only asking what level GC calculated into their ftp assumption's I don't know if you have noticed this they seem rather money grubbing to be kind 

It's the Blind leading the sheep. CG's goals have so radically deviated from the player base that I see no resolution. From what I can glean from most of the players in my Guild and in my various discord communities; peeps are gonna wait a bit but they hold little hope for the game to recover. The strategy to release a new marquee every 2 weeks while putting a monetary stranglehold on the obtaining of the rewards required to this 150% increase in characters, seems tone deaf or even incompetent. The majority are resolved not to spend a penny and see if the rest of the player base sends enough of a message thru a lack of spend to cause a course correction. These are truly dark times for a great community that doesn't deserve this kind of abuse. JUST DON'T SPEND ANYMORE GUYS! 🛑FULL STOP! 🛑

Yeah they put all these quests in that you can’t collect unless you use mass crystals to get more shards or buy the awful passes. Taking fun away from the experience is a bad business decision. 

Note that you get more shards daily from the marquee event tier 3 (5 per day) so you should end up at 135 shards if you bought the "battle pass" thingy as level 1, which you do get (as I have it without battle pass)  you will receive 20 shards which opens up the marquee tier 3 fight.