The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 10: Double XP & 50% Sales

Welcome to a new project, experiment, challenge or whatever you wanna call it. Normally experiencing the content with well-geared toons, I figured it would be quite interesting to approach the game from the perspective of a casual player. How does it feel starting from scratch and build up a character without the help of your mains? How long does it take until you are geared enough for the latest endgame content? Welcome to the Lowbie Diaries, it should be fun!

I thought my girlfriend being out for the weekend and double XP would equal to max level, but it didn’t quite pan out that way. I invested a substantial amount of time, much more I normally would have, but only made it to 65ish. Maybe my expectations were too high to start with. The hard progression cut from pre 60 to post 60 still amazes me. It’s like they wanted to force the game into something it simply isn’t. Forget the stat curves for a second, that’s messy as well, but simply in terms of XP it’s just not well designed.

As I’ve already said you can comfortably enjoy all content from 0-60. Adding group content, Common Cause and maybe XP boosts however you can actually say that there is slightly too much content for the XP you need. Then starting with the Elemental Evil campaign, suddenly there is way, way, WAY too less content for the XP you need. Ok so the “story” essentially is none, because all you need to do is 24 Vigilance Tasks. But to be honest the only real storyline in pre 60 is the Linkletter one. Otherwise you have the go here, kill this, gather that as well. The real hitch is that you don’t get to 70 by following the story line. You need to do extra grind. It would be kind of comical if you rolled into Whispering Caverns at level 30 and then the campaign would send you back to the Blackdagger Ruins to do the whole story all over again. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening post 60.

I think this simply shouldn’t happen. If you don’t have the content, then you don’t have the content. It might be a bit more of that though because it almost feels like the progression was designed to fit the double XP weekend, or in other words the XP boosters (link) that are available on the ZEN market. So should players be forced into buying those? I actually think so.

On the bright side I took full advantage of the 50% sales and got myself two additional months of VIP. It’s actually the first time I fully play the content after they lowered the difficulties a while back and I have to say I don’t feel as squishy as I used to. But have to wait for Spinward Rise for a better comparison. I already own 170 Trade Bars, so at level 70 I’ll be definitely shopping a bit!

Onto the Fiery Pit and read you next week!

The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 5: Events
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 6: Difficulty Changes
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 7: Happy 4th Of Sigh
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 8: Summertime
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 9: Restart

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