Hit level 27 on my revenant after way too many hours of running around (when you enjoy exploring as much as I do, the time flies when you keep pushing to find the next thing).
As can be seen from the following screenshot, I’m only at 18% world completion with the majority of my leveling progression coming from my personal story, visiting points of interests, unlocking waypoints, and vistas. While I know that 100% map completion for each region yields extra rewards, I’ve been bypassing most of the area events (I plan to go back and do those later); I have progression on some events (when a mob gets in the way and I need to clear it out for example) but I’m mainly running through the world.
I’ve pretty much cleared through the level 1-25 zones of Kryta so I loaded into Lion’s Arch to gain access to the portals to the other starting areas. There is one downside to all of this; some regions are excessively large. Lion’s Arch for example is huge and spread out just because they could make it that way. Just running on foot to unlock all of the waypoints took over an hour (also took care of all but two vistas in the process).
Because I don’t yet have a max level character (where you can unlock a raptor mount account wide via the first Path of Fire story line), all of this travel has been on foot (with the occasional running boon whenever I hit one of those NPC’s). I guess there is a fine line between being too small and being too large of a game world (it’s tolerable when the area has varied terrain, natural environments, and structures). I rented a roller beetle (from the trial NPC) and the speed of moving around is absolutely a game changer. Likewise, I need to learn how to master gliding so that I can just buy a glider off the cash shop (as that will help with some vistas; some are fun/tricky jumping puzzles and a glider can cut down the time completing some).
Overall, I’m pretty impressed that I’m progressing at this rate without engaging in much PvE combat since I thought it would take awhile to reach even mid-level 20’s this way.
