Tier Tutorial
This tier is meant for people to learn the basic concepts of their class and of the RvR system on a smaller scale before being sent out to the rest of the player base. All players will start the game at level 1. The first 3 levels will be a guided questing experience tailored to the class that you have selected in addition to some common game elements. Currently, these are NOT done but can be an expectation for launch.
This means you will be level 3 before you are able to PvP unlike live where you could start at lvl 1. You will have 5 abilities at this stage with a potential of a 6th via mastery points. Your class will be able to completely function at this level. You will only have access to one hard specialization in this tier. You will be given a full set of gear by level 3. This gear will always be 10-15 item levels below whatever the current season maximum item level gear in the game is. You will have some choices available to you through vendors to somewhat tailor your stats as a precursor to the RNG items you’ll obtain later.
All gear that you drop in this tier will be maximum TT level +1 just like in later tiers. This is to help jumpstart your gear whenever you get to T+. Remember all gear on Interbellum is Bind on Equip, so you can also give gear to friends/alts or buy them off the AH to help jumpstart as well. The maximum level for PvP in TT is 10 (tentative). You will have 8 core free abilities, 4 core free career tactics, and 1 core free Adrenaline skill per slot by this level. You will also have 11 mastery points which can get you up to 2 more abilities, 3 more tactics, 1 A1, and 1 A2. Anyone who becomes PvP flagged while in TT who is above the maximum level will become chickened.
Tier Plus
This tier is meant to be the end game where all players end up. There is no minimum level for this tier. This means you could if you so choose come out to this tier as soon as you are level 3. Experience points earned in this tier are higher than those in TT; also starting at level 11 the experience needed to level increases as well. What this means is that you can skip through the tutorial tier quite quickly if you so choose.
The 20 hours to get to max level that we state is assuming you do NOT skip tier tutorial in the above way. We consider max level to be level 30. This is when you will have all 31 of your mastery points available to you. At Interbellum, your career rank does not affect any combat formula nor do your abilities scale with your level. At level 30, the experience needed per level drastically increases. There are NO combat benefits for going past level 30; these additional levels are reserved for what we call eternal progression since we will be decaying renown points every season. This eternal progression will reward titles and other cosmetic benefits. The questlines that open up the other two hard specializations will appear at levels 15 and 20. (tentative).
Since fresh out of TT players will have at most 15 item levels difference (likely far less) than end game characters, they will be able to fair much better even without the use of bolster, which we do not have. By the time they get to level 30 and have all their mastery points, they definitely should have the same item level as everyone else. There are two self-progression paths at this point.
One, of course, is fashion hammer. Going for and collecting different appearance items and the dyes needed to make your character look the way you want. As these are earned entirely different than combat gear, it will be used to drive players towards content. Two, is the fact that even though you will have the highest item level (unless you are stubborn), you will not have the most optimized gear as it is random. Players will replace pieces of the same item level with other pieces that have more of the stats they are looking for. This means they will incrementally get more tuned to their chosen role as they do this.