Character power discussion.

Love the game, however i have to complain it lacks proper information to instruct the player in how to improve yourself.

Once you hit level 100, have all the skills, arclight maxed, 6 starred, equipment maxed, and awakened as best you can, the progression at that point seems to be.

1) relic minmaxing

2) runes

3) further awakening

relic minmaxing.... well i presume the characters highest ranked stat + speed(if not already speed) are base 'wants' on relics. Please clarify this for me. the items that let you lock things and transfer stats... these are not as powerful as i thought are they? at first i thought you could transfer a single ranked stat to a different relic, which would allow you to eventually max S rank relics fully and perfectly...but its just moving the all the ranks to a different relic, correct? that only matters if you find the wrong relic type with perfect stats you want to move to a better one. good, but not the fine-tune knob i thought it was going to be. same with the locked in items..good to use but so rare and only applies to enchants, not ranked stats.

runes ...holy tower i presume, but just like most endgame content, you start hitting a wall kinda early. i saw these in the shop...is this one mostly just for the whales to pay to win?

awakening... hitting a wall early again and it hurts. so many useful items to upgrade a SO and they feel very out of reach.

So is there a progression here? is the game really balanced so that it intends you to take these three steps in staggered order to progress, with baby steps of power increases? or is it just a crapshoot.

Has anyone identified what could be called "THE" PvE party that can manage these walls we keep hitting? The composition of my party works pretty well...until it doesnt.