For an MMO, we're being forced into solo missions quite often and I don't see the purpose for it.
My girlfriend and I have been playing together since 5 days early access began, and after level 12 or so, we're always lower level than the quests and the quest rewards that we are doing. Many quests give such small amount of EXP reward, it's like the zones were laid out during a time in which players got more experience for doing stuff than they do now. We'll get a solo only quest, where we get put into an instance and can't see each other and it's frustratingly hard to do alone when the mobs are 3-5 levels above you, combined with all the latency issues with mobs warping around and such. We just finished every quest we found in Deshaan and got the quest to move on to the next zone. We have much of the zone mapped and made it a point to visit the structures and things that looked like towns to pick up the odd random quests here and there. We seem to be done in the zone, killed Vox and did all that and we're just level 20. We still can't use quest rewards from half way through the zone we got when we were level 16 and 17. Many quest EXP rewards don't seem to have much to do with how hard or long they are, with long chains sometimes giving no more than ones that took 4 minutes.
The Mara pledge doesn't seem to be helping much, and doing low level quests doesn't seem to be a feasible way to catch up as the bar often scarcely moves at all.
Why are we being forced to do many of the more difficult quests alone in an MMO?? Why, despite intentionally seeking out random quests about the zone, are we falling behind? In all the many MMOs I've played, I can honestly say I've never encountered this problem before.
Where can we go at level 20ish to catch up? Judging from quest reward level requirements, it seems like you are expected to be level 23-25 when you finish Deshaan.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. -Albert Einstein