This is a continuation of my thoughts regarding the level 70 update which was released in early April (for NA) along with my companion progress a few weeks ago. I finally hit level 67 on my main character (ninja) on June 4th. My alt ninja hit level 66 purely via fishing (I still haven’t played that character through the new quests yet). The rest of my level 65 alts are at varying bars below the 50% mark and will remain that way since I only quickly play them for some solo dungeons and Guardian Legions.
As noted, I did not perform tryhard leveling; I did not consistently do every single “green” daily every day either nor did I constantly leave my character AFK fishing (and while I do know about the auto fishing bot scripts that perform dismantling/selling and bait crafting, I have no intentions of using such exploits). And yes, there are more egregious exploits that allow some folks to get from 1-70 in under half-a-day (but why bother even playing the game if you are going to exploit to max level?).
So it took nearly 2 months playing this way to get two levels. Had I religiously performed every single level 65-66 daily, it would’ve taken maybe 3-4 weeks to hit 67. But at what cost? The cost of my sanity. And it will take maybe 3-4 months to get to level 68 playing this way unless I begin grinding hundreds/thousands of level 67+ BAM’s and/or running level 65 dungeons (which as I’ve noted before, is not my idea of fun). But exactly what shiny thing is waiting at the end of this leveling grind when one hits 70? NOTHING except knowing you can now grind for skill experience, scrolls for advancing skills and options, and gold. And it will remain this way until Krafton’s TERA team releases actual relevant level 70 content (we only know the new Mysterious Floating Island zone will be part of that).
Given how Ascent: Infinite Realm’s level 30-45 (soft cap for the Thai version) game play is a lot of open world Pioneer quests (aka open world mob grinding), I can see how highly likely it is that some of the designers currently working on TERA, came from the A:IR team (or are sharing the same grindy design philosophy courtesy of the KRAFTON Game Union). While it is my opinion that all of these folks at Krafton (who agreed to this sort of design) need to be fired, I realistically know that it is what it is from a production point of view (low effort and low cost).
I still believe that without major changes to the XP curve or without additional ways to earn XP, that it will take me until the end of the year to hit level 70 on just this one character. As I’ve noted before, I am fine with this because I at least know that I’m not providing erroneous data by being part of the smaller group of tryhard/hardcore grinders that Krafton’s cracked designers are using to justify these sort of grindy systems.
