NKD wrote on Apr 30, 2012, 19:01:
My opinion of the game hasn't changed much after playing again in this beta weekend, as an Elementalist. The leveling process felt a lot like a grind compared to other games. I felt like I was doing the same "dynamic" events over and over again just trying to get the XP and levels needed to move on to the next "heart", and eventually my next story quest.
Listening to the press that have attended every beta weekend thus far, they've said that the XP requirement to level has been tuned differently each weekend, so they're clearly still playing with it. The first weekend, they said they leveled way too fast and hadn't even completed half the hearts in an area before being high enough to move on. The second one, they said was WAY too slow and you had to grind to get to the appropriate level for new content, the most recent one was still too slow, but closer, according to them.
I found myself having to repeat a few events, most notably escorts that seem to repeat too frequently just to get to level to enter the next zone. They definitely need to tune it. For my part, I don't understand their attempt to get you to do every heart/event in a zone before being high enough to move on. The game down-levels you to whatever level content you're working on, so even if I get to level 20 by the time I've finished everything in the level 1-15 zone, I'll still only be level (16) entering the 16-25 zone. If the point of the game is to experience the content, then leveling faster than the pace of content isn't really a detriment to that. It would let people pick and choose what events they want to complete, and who they want to help.
On the other hand, as others have pointed out, there's a TON of content. If you're too low level to continue on in your current area without grinding or repeating stuff, take the Asura gates to either of the other 2 starting zones (or other 4 once Asura and Sylvari are in) and there's a ton of level appropriate stuff to do that you haven't already experienced to get you that level or two, then you can hop back to your home zone afterwards.
Unfortunately for me, I didn't think of that until the beta was pretty much over so I also repeated some stuff unnecessarily.