Exactly. The progression feels a bit like D3. I dont want to say it but…weekend season?!
No not that extreme yet but i fear it goes into that direction. I get that they want a high player rentention but giving the player everything and just throwing stuff at us is not the way. Iam not a game designer but a normal player and after 2 days and i stand here with a level 100 barbarian fully equipped.
What now?
Edit: Equipped but not min maxed with all GA gear! ;D
Didn´t play yet, but it looks like it little bit too fast yeah.
I am loosing interest at that very momenet when my build is finished.
Healthy amount for that is something between 1-2 months. But it looks like it will be week max.
Those are edge cases. Streamers who play very optimized. I dont mind leveling fast per se. I mind getting all items very fast.
Getting to level 90+ by the end of day 2 is fine. Having all uniques and aspects for my build by day 2 is too fast. 
Its a fine line and balancing i guess. Everything is new and maybe this will be tuned in the future too.
This cases are very rare.
I suspect the majority of people to level to 100 in … 30-50 hours of played, which is ok…ish! A bit slower is better anyhow 
Somewhere along the line, the devs had the idea that this would be a game where getting to level 100 was the end of your progression path. So they created a campaign that took you to the end of the skill tree, a new world tier that took you about halfway from there to 100, and a 4th tier that went to 100. There was one level 100 boss. The last tier of items unlocked with tier 4, because getting there was really the end of the journey and the rest was just slowly perfecting. They even talked about how your build would congeal as you got to higher levels and the changes would become narrower and narrower.
Unfortunately they also made some decisions that cut against this. There were difficult to find build-defining items that arrived with that last tier, meaning that the congealing process couldn’t start until you’d dug them up. The monsters scaled to your level and the drops scaled to the monsters’ level making it essential to be level 95 to get drops with the highest damage and armor. The paragon glyphs were so powerful that even the last ten levels of paragon points were providing a huge power boost. The overworld content progression system was tied to character power you couldn’t get anywhere else, encouraging players to blitz through it as quickly as possible. Respecs were relatively easy and item drops had absurdly high level requirements.
This all combined to shift players’ incentives towards completing all renown and reaching level 95 as fast as possible, then building the character they wanted, rather than the incentive being to build a good character that could farm WT4 effectively and then perfecting your build and starting an alt. But the time to level and the distribution of content had been built with this latter approach in mind.
To make it a game where people slowly level to 100 and then start an alt, they would need to have mobs that drop the most powerful items in the game available to fight long before you reach 100. They would need to up the difficulty so that reaching WT4 meant you had a solid build and reliably farming those powerful items required a well-honed build, but being higher level had only a marginal effect on your character power and no effect on the content available or the drops you could find.
Or they could embrace the MMO model and make it easy to reach level 100 but give you plenty to do once you got there. It’s easier to do that without players feeling like you’ve nerfed them, so that’s how it went.
So yes, it’s easy to get to 100 now. But the game is far from over when you get there. Hopefully over time they will add more item options post-100 instead of just more power.
The only negative I’ve seen so far is the leveling speed.
I was annoyed that I never found white gear to equip, barely put on a couple blues, and then boom got a legendary weapon from the Iron Wolves by level 8 or so. But then in like 10 minutes I’m hitting like a wet rag because you level soooooo fast that you don’t have any opportunity to re-gear. I would have rather equipped a new blue weapon every level from 8-15 than see no weapons at all. I don’t understand this design choice.
It’s not a design choice so much as a consequence of a bunch of other choices that were higher priority. I agree that early item progression is something I’d like them to focus on now that the other changes are looking good.
That’s literally what players asked for. They wanted Diablo 2 style progression.
Not only did Blizz introduce the problems you have pointed out, but the dungeons and helltides were dull at launch. It strongly incentivized leveling to push high NMD fast for reasonable glyph XP and to farm helltides efficiently for helltide-only mats.
But yeah, the buff to 50% XP and power creep on WT2 is a bit much. I got to level 35 in an evening in helltides. Normally I drop to WT1 for speed somewhere in my 30s but with the extra stats on legendaries I’m not getting bogged down at all, even clearing strongholds.
I haven’t had that issue. It might be leveling at helltide bosses where people are trading rounds of summons. The drops are mostly rare and with some legendaries mixed in. I also got lucky and got a Bloodless Scream from the Iron Wolves which gave me crazy damage while I was still running Reap.
Part of my point was that this season represents a significant shift in the calibration of the game. It used to be that endgame was from WT4 till you hit 100, at which point there was very little power left to gain and no meaningful challenges to find. Now endgame starts at 95 when you no longer care about the item power of drops and you can start running the Pit (though maybe you can start that even a little earlier). At that stage you have the primary abilities that make up your build almost completely fixed in place. There are some potential shifts if you find an Uber and need to juggle the aspect it replaces or if an item with a huge boost in one stat is missing a stat you try to compensate for elsewhere, but mostly you are now just looking for bigger numbers on the gear through GAs and masterworks. There are 200 levels of Pit progression and level 200 bosses left for you to tackle.
So they’ve kind of added a 3rd stage to the game and therefore helped you speed through the first two stages (early leveling, where you are still collecting aspects and settling your active skill bar, then late leveling where you are filling out paragon and optimizing your aspects and actives) so they can get there.
Previously the complaint was that people were finding it too dull to reach 100 because they’d already done everything. Now the problem is that they get to 100 too quickly. Experience level used to be a good indicator of strength, but now it is less useful. Maybe once you hit 100 they should just start showing the highest level of the Pit you’ve beaten instead of your character level (and scale the overworld difficulty according to it).
Yeah overall great patch but leveling really is the only issue I have with it. As quick as it goes by makes the whole process seem trivial.
The leveling speed is fine. This is seasonal. It shouldn’t take weeks to hit 100 in season.
I don’t see the need to be so fast. We have material to collect, world boss to put holes in items, glyphs to increase, pit to receive material etc… Reaching 100 quickly is a little frustrating. I put points. I just end up killing everything and that’s not fun during the climb.
How is that even possible, are people just standing in town for 20-40 hours?
I mean 30-50 was S1.
Yes, I agree 100% with your post and all your points.
I think the goal of the game is to get to master crafting, not level 100, etc. And the time it takes to begin mastercrafting is just fine, imo. Master crafting itself needs to be tweaked though. The gold should be trivial. It should be based on some kind of specific drop you get, or can trade for, you use to mastercraft. But this is a tangent.
The time it would take to get perfect mastercrafted gear is certainly a good chunk.
Now you got beat Pit 200, and realise you are nowhere close.
So you get all your glyphs to 21
Then you find gear with 2x Greater Affixes
Then you masterwork at $5m a pop to realise it didn’t upgrade the stat you want
Then you redo that cycle
Just from a casual here, I tend to solo and think the leveling buff has been a huge improvement, though I can see why some may not prefer it. Having played the campaign and done multiple characters, I think it’s easy to jump into season 4, get to end game, play some alts, and finish the season in a reasonable amount of time - a few weeks to a month and come back when the next season starts. Just my thoughts.
I agree. It’s frustrating to block a 3 GA item. Items with GA should provide their own material when recycling at the blacksmith and we should be able to increase that durability before the first temper. I think that would be fair.
I mentioned in Season 4 The GOOD, The BAD, and the BUGLY! 
- PC General Discussion - Diablo IV Forums (blizzard.com) that leveling speed is too fast as well.