There is a levelling curve, it’s just very mild.
And actually, levelling at higher levels can be much faster than at lower levels, because certain content like dungeons become available which you can’t do earlier on. A single dungeon is 0.7 levels guaranteed, often 0.9 from mobs… and it only takes 10-15 minutes to do an easy one.
The heart missions are different for every map, but whether or not you find it boring depends entirely on you. Some people will find it boring, some will find it nice.
Cities give very little exploration xp. Clear normal maps and do every single event you pass by. Often, doing certain events also simultaneously clears a heart – then gives you three sources of xp – one from the mobs, one from the event, and one from the heart.
It takes 8 days, relaxed. The first time, before you understand game mechanics your play will be inefficient, and so everything will take longer. But it shouldn’t take anyone more than a month to get to level 80. After that it becomes a lot faster. I can probably 80-level a character in 5 days now through map exploration alone, which is about 45-48% of the world depending on which maps I do. Full-exploring a map takes anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes, depending, while Lornar’s Pass specifically takes 140 minutes because of how large it is relative to everything else.
To start you off, I’ll give you 3 mechanics.
Cleave – This applies to most melee weapons except daggers on most classes. Necros have no cleave at all. Elementalists can cleave with Lightning autoattacks on their dagger mainhand. Cleave means that you can hit up to 3 targets in your front arc at the same time.
Pierce – This applies to some ranged attacks, and some other attacks can be traited to pierce. It hits up to 3 targets in a row one after another, doing full damage to all 3.
AoE – This applies to pretty much anything that creates some kind of field on the ground. It will hit up to 5 targets per ‘tick’.
Killing enemies one at a time is extremely slow. Draw the attention of several targets then kill them using these three mechanics to up your kill rate by up to 5 times.
Incidentally, a bomb engineer can train faster than an axe warrior in some cases just because the AoE hits 5 targets while Cleave only hits 3, even though they do less damage per attack.
You can learn more later as time goes by.
