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[Aaronock]

Also, how long did you guys take to achieve level 70+ transcendent?, along with your merchant character.

I feel uniquely qualified to answer this question. I made a HWiz (Cecil Vega) last year, and was able to get him leveled in about a month or so to 99 non trans. About another week after that I had him 70+ transcendent.

If you're smart with planning your journey to take advantage of customs, you can get some basic gears and gain experience pretty quickly here. There will be some grind, but there are some repeatable quests now which really ease the grind a lot. People mentioned Puppies and Item of the Day but there is also the 13.2 repeatables, and the monthly acc. based quest, Monster Extermination (custom).

If you want my opinion about the things you asked about in your first post, I'm willing to take the time to add my own side of things to it. :D