First of all, disclaimer, I love leveling up once. ONCE. The rest of the time it’s a chore, I’ve already done this and don’t want to do it again, so I always look for a boost from friends.
That said here’s what I enjoyed and hated while leveling.
The good
The trip from 1 to 50 during the campaign was cool. The campaign experience wasn’t great, but constantly getting boxes with plants, veiled crystals, hides, stones, obols… made the process really enjoyable. I wasn’t getting the best XP, and the plot was super predictable non-engaging up until the part where the drowned attack the girl, after that it kinda ramps up and gets better, and you also grab the horse which is a huge plus.
During this time, it felt natural to pick up side quests and go into dungeons to complete them, also visiting some dungeons on the way was fun… this feeling disappears right as I start WT3 though.
The trip from 70 to 80 was also great, I start WT4 around that point and ancients start dropping. WT4 feels like it’s not correctly balanced and wearing standard sacred gear got me killed too much despite being able to solo the capstone at 68, which I tried for fun.
This is mostly the moment where I get the joy from gathering gear that will actually work for my character and I won’t be discarding, I get to start slotting in the good aspects as I find good rolls… most of this feeling comes, in my opinion, from a lack of crafting skills to ascend sacred items to ancient, which should be in the game. Let ancient drops have new, more desirable stats like movement speed on amulets, or life on rings, but let me upgrade my gear so I’m not force to dump it every time I bump up difficulty.
The bad
It goes without saying that I won’t be playing the campaign again, or if I do it will be for the sake of playing the campaign and getting to revisit it, not because I enjoyed it. The rewards become meaningless on the second character as I already accrued 5000 hides, 3000 veiled crystals, and a plethora of flowers that I never use because elixirs are not something I want to waste my money on, so I learnt not to depend on them.
So the trip from 1 to 50 is now a slog, and during season I will be taking this time to run all dungeons for renown since those rewards are massive.
The trip from 50 to 60 is boring at all times, you hit WT3 on a new character and the difficulty bump added up with this weird monster scaling, and on top of that you have no good items… oof. Once you get at least half the items as sacred, progression straightens up but it’s still not a good feeling.
However, on the 2nd playthrough, this is probably the worst part of the leveling process. XP slows down massively. The only goal at this point is hitting 73 so we can start playing NMDs and gather ancients. No problem on a boosted character since all I have to do is idle at the door, but IMO the game should have an option to let the player boost an alt for, let’s say, 1 million gold. Give that character a set of gear that roughly works at that level and let them play I guess? Have fun your way.
That said, on my first character I learnt that sacred and normal gear are useless, all that matters is ancients, and hopefully I can get some of them close to or above 800. so this is when fun starts.
On both my characters it took about 10 levels worth of grinding to find gear, but I did a lot of normal dungeons on the first one, so that one will have to run even more NMDs to boost glyphs… this really makes me not want to touch that character any more actually.
What I would do
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Boost drops on world bosses. No reason for me to stop what I’m doing, travel up there, and poke at a sponge that only knows 5-6 different attacks to get sacred items. World bosses really should be the #1 priority, and they don’t drop anything useful, other than prisms and stuff like that, which I already have more than I can use.
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Give a little more incentive for legions. It’s the best XP event in the game but it requires moving away from what I’m doing and camping a bonfire for 3 minutes. I’m sure there’s a lot you can do to make this less boring, including reducing the time it takes to gather XP stacks, and letting people keep the XP buff for ~30 minutes after the event is complete instead of cleansing it, as a reward for coming?
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Raise monster density in Nightmare dungeons (NMDs). Back when I played Eridu pre-nerf it was amazing. Elites everywhere, corridors were packed with monsters, I was in combat most of the time… Right now I spend most of my time walking, skipping packs, pulling into trains… some monsters reset because they walk too far away and it’s not even worth going back to grab them. You don’t need to up elites, just have more monsters in the dungeon so we aren’t playing walking simulator. This is on top of the expected XP boosts to NMDs.
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Slow down on helltides. It’s my favorite endgame content, I get to do open world PVE which is the best thing this game has. No other ARPG has good open world PVE, so take your strengths and reinforce them. Right now they are mostly amazing but have 2 problems:
4.1. They demand mega speed to clear the whole place so everyone runs events instead of actually cleaning the place. Upping monster density outside events so these aren’t the only reliable source of cinders would help, and people can choose if they want to do the obols+cinders route, or max out on cinders and target more drops from helltide chests.
4.2. Targeted chests don’t drop enough stuff for the price. A mysterious chest is super expensive at 175 cinders and drops plenty items including legendaries, yellows, elixirs… but a 2-handed weapon chest is 150, and normally doesn’t drop a legendary, just 1 yellow and a couple more crap items. Every other chest follows the same rule, why would you waste your time grinding for a 2-hander if you can get the mystery chest and get ~6 items from it for roughly the same price?
A few last words
I think leveling, as a concept, is an archaic idea that should either me revamped or gone from modern RPGs. These served in tabletop RPG for the DM to create interesting encounters and have the players enjoy a challenge, but nowadays it’s abused to timegate players with absurd mechanics, like this game is lowering your armor and damage just because the enemy is higher level than you.
I would be happy if there were no levels at all and skill points were accrued the same way a Barbarian earns mastery on each weapon: By playing it. So if you want to be a strong fire sorcerer, you would cast firebolts until you get fireball, then cast firebolts and fireballs until you get meteors, and then cast all those 3 spells until you get the snake thing. And along the way, you can get items that improve your attunement to these spells.
Most people don’t like grinding for artificial power numbers, I personally know I don’t, and all I seek from a game is to let me play and have fun my way. I know leveling up the first time can be thrilling, but I don’t see any of that working in a live service unless your target market is speedrunners who want to be the first at doing something.
I will personally try to get carried to WT4 as much as I can on my alts so I can do what I enjoy: Actually gearing up and creating builds, not spending 100 hours to hit level 73 and then dumping all my items because they are no longer worth anything.
Sorry for the long post, but I don’t like just ranting and whining without leaving some constructive criticism, and I wanted to state that there are some times where leveling is enjoyable and doesn’t get in the way of fun, but for the most part I haven’t been able to make it past level 85.