
It's pretty expensive to get a character through a new campaign: skills, armor, weapons, and runes will set you back quite a bit. However, NF is a lot more expensive than past campaigns.
The hero system and the the armor insignia system are the two main reasons.
Most pve'rs went for the +energy armors in past campaigns. However, now u need to buy a radiant insignia (5k?) for each piece of armor to get the same effect.
Then, if you want your heroes to be at their best, you have to buy them runes for their armor which gets pricey. Their weapons aren't expensive if you just use collector stuff (wands, offhands, and shields). But warrior and ranger weapons and staves from collectors come w/o mods, so u have to spend a bit on a cheap green or non-max mods.
If you'd like your heroes to have insignias on their armor, that will set you back a good amount as well.
If you put a major vigor rune on each hero and get them runes and insignias as well as good weapons, your looking at spending around 10k per hero. With 15 heroes that works out to 150k. If you want to outfit them really well with max everything, then you're looking at about 20k to 50k per hero.
Only the dedicated farmers can afford to do this. I thought GW was about money not making a difference in performance, only in terms of looks. But the new system makes it so that the uber rich can outift their heroes with sup vigs, radiant or survivor insignias, and max stats weapons. Those extra HP and energy and perfect weapons do make a difference which doesn't seem fair to me.
I'm thinking of outfitting one character's heroes pretty well and leaving it at that. The rest of my characters' heroes won't get much. I just don't think that having large amounts of money should mean better performance in a game like GW. It seems antithetical to their original views on accomodating the casual player (or players that don't like to farm).