Grind to level 100.

Hi, I finished level 99 today.


And I would like to share my feedback/what I think about the level grind in Poe2.

First, my journey to level 99.
I would say that up to level 97 it's "fine", it's not fast, but the XP gained is "ok", I would say. Then (97-98) it starts to slow down, but I still don't have too much of a problem with that. But 98-99 starts to be quite a grind.

First, I'll describe how I grind XP. How I have my points distributed in the atlas, what tablets I use on the towers, and what maps I try to run are shown in the spoiler.


Combining everything shown in the spoiler, my XP for one map (at level 98-99) was between 400k and 600k, depending on whether the map node was covered by multiple towers, whether the map node was corrupted, what affixes the map had, etc., but the average was 500k xp per map.
If I remember correctly, in 98-99 range you needed around 290 million XP (I don't remember the exact number, but it was just under 300 million). That means you needed complete around 580 maps (if you didn't die...).
I play storm mages minion lich build and my clear speed is between 7-10 minutes per map (depending on the map, density, etc.).
This means that in my case, I need about 80 hours of pure gaming time spent purely on map clearing.(unless I die, of course)

And now my XP gain per map in the range of 99-100.
I played a few maps today to see my XP gain and got an idea of my average XP per map, which is between 186k and 350k, so about 268k per map. The required XP from 99 to 100 is 317 millions, which means you need to play almost 1,200 maps. In my case, that's around 200 hours of playing time. (+- of course and unless I die, of course)


This is completely excessive, and I definitely think it needs a radical change. The grind, especially in the last level, is completely out of line.

And why am I writing all this?
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in reaching level 100, but I'm currently trying to do so for two reasons.
First, I currently have quite a lot of time to play (which I don't normally have, due to work and real life stuff...), and second, I wanted to see how much of a grind level 100 is in Poe2.

And why am I interested in how big the level 100 grind is and why am I asking for a change when I write that I'm practically not interested in level 100?
Because PoE1 has challenges every season, and one of them is reaching level 100. I'm something of a "challenge hunter," which is why I'm interested in the level 100 grind in PoE2, because it's likely that when PoE2 is released, it will have challenges like PoE1, and I think one of them will be reaching level 100. Currently, this is practically unrealistic for me, and it's not that I die in the maps, but I just don't have that much time to play, and given that unless there is some major change, I know that level 100 is unrealistic for me to achieve, and therefore the possible future challenge of "reaching level 100" is unrealistic for me, and I don't like that.

Of course, a lot of things may change before the release of Poe 2, and of course we don't know if Poe 2 will have any challenges at all, but if Poe 2 follows in the footsteps of Poe 1, we can expect this challenge (reaching level 100) will be in Poe 2, which is why I am writing my feedback now, and I hope that grinding to level 100 will be more player-friendly, and I hope that the devs don't want to make this game just for "no life" people, but realize that the game is also played by people who go to work and have some kind of "real life."

So thank you and good luck to everyone. :-)