Class design is incredible (but really weird in my opinion) for this game. Traditionally, I always play plate / melee with an emphasis on tankiness however I absolutely can't get into Gunlancer. What aggravates the situation considerably is just how different classes end up playing at max and how absolutely critical personal feel is for whatever you pick. Personally, I dislike both the assassins & mages presently available. I would recommend Berserker for melee, Soulfist for mid ranged play, & Gunslinger for ranged from a purely 'fun to play' standpoint. The low level character progression is also vastly different between some classes (for instance, I find leveling a Scouter to be absolute garbage but at max level they're insanely fun). It's really worth going to Trixon and testing out a bunch to see what ends up working best for you.
Yes, it's been a long time since I had level'd to max without using a boost or catch up. I had remembered to skip all non essential quests up to Arthertine, as the last quest before seeing the queen gives about half a level. This time however, I had about an extra level worth of extra exp (I capped out before the last dungeon turn in) which means I had done wayy too much extra stuff. Apparently, the new 'quickest' method is to only perform the action quests from Tortoyk onwards (+MSQ of course) so might end up giving this a try to see how it feels from a pace of game perspective.
If you hit "O" it'll pull open your account exp, which provides small boosts. A lot of the skill pots you get are also account wide, so when you're leveling up a fresh character the process is easier, especially on KR where I've already collected / level'd up considerably. Based on this, I had incorrectly assumed that the new character experience would be a lot more challenging than it previously was and played sub optimally while leveling (I invested more points into AOE clear at low level instead of movement speed increase on my dashes by virtue of my lazyness of switching builds constantly for instance).
