In my opinion Archeage leveling feels way lessgrindythan Wildstar's. In Archeage most quests are about killing five punks or picking up five punk scalps, rape the Punk Master and then you're done punks are dead and you didn't even spend 10 minutes and you can move on. In WS some quests have on the spot followups, making you feel like you're spending years on a zone / quest hub because of the back and forth circus. I played WS closed beta and never bothered going after lvl32 because leveling felt like a chore, especially once you figured the combat gameplay and got all your skills and you only have AMPs to deal with. In Archeage I think there are less quests, they give more XP and you don't feel like you'll need to hand in a goddamn million of quests just to gain another level.
I'm not saying Archeage leveling will be a quick and splendid, riveting experience for everyone, but on both Archeage forums / Reddit you can read about people coming from Wildstar or some other MMOs, they're like "oh God no, not anothergrindyasian MMO" and once they got around lvl 10 they're all happy pandas. Also the word "grind" can vary a lot from one people to another. Some people don't mind being a fantasy postman, spending their time delivering stuff to silly NPCs or becoming the Gengis Khan of boars by farming them 24/7. On the other end of the spectrum, I know a lot of people that got bored to death right after the second quest hub / couple of quests. But I don't think you can say Archeage is hiding a grind behind a quest leveling system, especially when from my experience, during this first CBT most of newcoming, casual people I ran across or know were already beyond lvl20-25 on Saturday morning.