I started the PTR with leveling a new Barbarian from 1 to 60 and then to paragon 140 and overall I’d say it was a pretty good progression curve.
I’ve not tried to be as efficient as possible and I focused on doing things that are actually fun, instead of abusing the campaign for XP for example and walking past monsters for 2h, instead of fighting them (seriously, why is that even the best way to level???). During the leveling phase, I developed my build on the fly and did not follow any build guides.
In the end, this was roughly my timeline:
- 9h to get from lvl1 to 60 - I spent a lot of time doing Helltide, did some dungeons, some strongholds and the new season events. I actually tempered yellow gear from time to time, but blue gear was still irrelevant. Overall I kind of like this phase, because you can use skills that become completely useless in the endgame and you don’t run around like a grizzly on speed (yet).
- 9h to get from T1 to T3 farming - After Pit was available, I started pushing as far as possible and went more or less straight to T2, but went back to T1 because I became pretty squishy and wanted to farm some bosses. After around 9h of gear/runes/mats farming, glyphs leveling and pushing paragon level, I was armor capped, resistance capped and had enough damage to comfortably farm T3, except maybe the uber bosses. At some point I realized that I could take a shortcut by using certain boss powers, that would easily tripple my damage (and more), but decided to use only the ones that moderately buffed my build, assuming that this will be fixed for the release of S8.
- 8h to farm T4 and reach Paragon 140 - After another 8h I was able to progress to T4, had some of my glyphs at lvl 45 and reached paragon 140. Boss farming on T3 became pretty easy now, but was still a major challenge on T4. Helltide and season zone on T4 was easy, but not always trivial.
Obviously this timeline depends completely on your build and your play style. If you are someone who will run Pit for 3h in a row, to level glyphs and get a lot of XP, then you’ll probably be much faster ;-), but thats usually not how I play.
All in all I enjoyed the journey and had a lot of fun with the new/reworked boss fights. The season zone seems a bit lackluster atm, but I think it can be fixed, by adding a few more events to it.
My biggest concern are the new boss powers. They can easily break your progression curve at any time starting with the first power you obtain, that will make your leveling much more comfortable, up to maxing out a power that will take you from Pit 70 to 100 and beyond.