tl;dr - Renown still felt awful to complete and took way too long even when side quests and new dungeons were basically my focus levelling up, did not do any ‘levelling strats’, RIP to those who did, I’m sure the renown grind was much much worse. By the time renown was completed for me, it was not a “Oh yay it’s finally done” feeling, it was a “Finally I’m free of this garbage” feeling as I abandoned all the remaining side quests that were no longer needed.
As posted before by others and myself pre-season and now post season, the renown grind still feels very tedious to finish up. I did unique dungeons and side quests and waypoint gathering from level 1 to 45 as well as alternate world events/strongholds in-between, then completed the WT3 capstone and did nightmare dungeons and side quests and helltide till 50. I had around 1700 renown in one area, and around 1300 renown in all the others. Having to farm out 3100 renown at this late stage to complete the renown rewards in the game was, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely soul crushingly tedious.
The game turned into “Do I want to have fun and level and get new gear, or do I want to do tedious unrewarding chores”
Taking a break from renown, I proceeded to complete nightmare dungeons, world events, helltide, and whisper events focusing on dungeons that rewarded whispers that had not already been cleared as to double dip for both rewards and renown (Whisper rewards on normal dungeons felt fantastic by the way, every 2 dungeons done this way was a rewarded cache).
Hit level 63 and had kind of hit a peak of player power. No new gear drops were being found by this point and the levelling process in WT3 was considerably slower at this level since all but nightmare dungeons seemed to give a lot less meaningful xp. Unable to do the capstone dungeon for WT4, decided I needed more player power. There were only two ways of doing this. Either I level up a bunch through repeated nightmare dungeons, or do the renown for 20 paragon points. One area was quick to grind out but the other areas were still around 500-600 renown away.
Still had over 2000 renown to go if I combined each area, focused on only side quests at level 63 and dungeons that were uncompleted/whispers. This was by far the worst part of the season for me up till now, gaining practically no experience or gear from the content I was having to do for meaningful progression. I think I gained maybe a level over the 2000 renown grind because I had completed each nightmare dungeon at least once by this point and since they’re so limited in which dungeons can be nightmare dungeons you cannot use this method as a way to play fun content while farming renown. Side quests give practically nothing, and the closer I got to getting renown done the less often whisper available dungeons would pop up, often being dungeons I had already completed.
I still think side quest renown should carry over once completed and that there should be other avenues to earn renown. If a new dungeon rewards 40 renown, why not let a replayed dungeon reward 5 or 10? Why can’t world events be worth a small amount of renown? Why can’t season events and tunnels give renown? They don’t have to be the new fast track to renown completion, I’m not saying they should be worth the same or more, but even if repeated content or seasonal content gave me a small renown reward each time that means I could play fun, meaningful content more often and not get frustrated by the thought of “I want to play Diablo 4, but I don’t want to grind renown, but it’s really what I need to do to progress”