To preface this, this post will indeed be long. I plan to expound on the pros and cons of the Effective Level system from the perspective of an "average" player, a new one coming up through the system. My main character was in full Delver gear when the Effective Level system was implemented, and of course the following tier system for Heroic missions. My ranger however, Tam al'Thor, was maybe level 15 at most. Tam was profoundly affected by this system, and I wish to share the experience so that the devs might understand what does and does not work with this system. I'll start witha basic explanation of the system for those who aren't aware of the details, then go to the pros, then go to the cons.

EFFECTIVE LEVEL

As explained to us in various threads when the system came out and we both asked and complained, the Effective Level system changes a handful of factors based on the difference in Effective Levels of the opponents. Your Effective Level is essentially calculated as an average of your character's level and the average level of your equipped gear. That is compared to the enemy's level, and from there the buffs or nerfs go into effect. The most notable effects can be seen in the image below, provided by the devs:

http://i.imgur.com/klwIH84.jpg

In short, the higher level combatant gets a damage boost when attacking, and takes less damage when attacked. The higher level combatant also gets an increased critical chance when attacking.

PROS

The main pro of this system is that as you level up during the main campaign missions, you can deal extra damage-- provided that your equipment is high enough level. At one point, it was possible to give equipment a level higher than that of your character (via Level Up Kits from the Blacksmith), capped at 30, the current level cap as of this writing. If this is still possible/intended, it means that you can increase your Effective Level beyond that of your character's actual level until you hit level 30. This can give a much needed power boost in the Desert, where enemy levels will often surpass yours if you don't spend time grinding exp a bit before progressing.

Along with the above pro, the level up chests that we receive every 5 levels now seem to have equipment that has a higher equipment level than the required level. This has been stated by the devs to be intended in order to make the lifespan of that equipment longer. I got this information as a response to a ticket, so I do not know if it had been stated on the forums publicly. This does, however, mean that the level 30 ring that we get in that chest has an equipment level of 32. This makes a player's Effective Level 30.1 after all other slots are filled. It isn't huge, but it is a slight boost.

The third pro that I'm aware of with this system is that it makes soloing the Desert Multiplayer mission easier, or even participating it it at all. Most of the enemies in the Normal difficulty for the Desert MP are level 26. This means that a player will get the Effective Level buffs once their Effective Level surpasses 26, making it easier to take the mission on even if they cannot find help. This does mean a better chance at acquiring rare (blue) gear while slowly grinding up epic (purple) gear from the Hall of Trials. I disregard other potential epic gear sources, as a new level 30 will not be able to realistically grind the Heroic Tiers necessary to gain Epics with any frequency.



CONS

To line up with the first pro, the main problem with leveling up equipment is the lack of resources with which to do so. A five pack of Uncommon Level Up kits costs 5 common scrap and 2 uncommon scrap to craft. At two kits per level, you're looking at 10 kits per 5 levels, or 10 common scrap and 4 uncommon scrap. Not exactly a high cost at a base level. However, When you multiply that by 6 pieces of equipment, 9 if you are at the point where neck and ring items drop, the cost adds up very quickly. This is in addition to the fact that the player is running on Normal difficulty missions, meaning that Uncommon equipment is actually still fairly uncommon. So, while the Effective Level system can be milked to gain more power than one's level may normally have below 30, the resources required to make it happen are prohibitive for an actual up and coming player. So realistically, any potential benefit gained by being /able/ to increase equipment level is largely nullified by the lack of ability to gain the resources fast enough to make it work.

The next con is where I have the largest problem. The penalties for being the lower level combatant in the Effective Level system are too large, and are compounded. As noted by the image linked above, when you are one level below your opponent, you do roughly 82% damage and take something like 108-110% damage. At two levels you do 70% damage, take about 118% damage. At three they are ~60% and 120%, and at four they are ~50% and ~125%. The first four levels are the most drastic, after that the multipliers are largely negligible when compared with what one is already dealing with. What this means for the player is that you lose almost 1/5th of your damage for being 1 level lower than your opponent, and take about 10% more damage. The latter isn't much of a problem; it's the damage that you deal being reduced so heavily that hurts. If you are just two levels below, the gap you will find most often when doing Tier 1 Heroic Missions when you unlock them at Level 30 (currently), you find your damage reduced to 70%, and the damage you take increased to about 120%. To put some actual numbers on the table, as a level 30 character doing 6k damage and taking 1.4k damage when fighting level 30 enemies, you would now do 4.2k and take 1.65k damage against level 32 enemies. While the increase in damage you take isn't significant at those numbers, the fact that you hit for so much less means you don't kill the enemy as fast, and that extra damage adds up as the enemy gets more hits on you. Let's also not forget that the enemy gets an unknown (to me) increase in critical hit chance, meaning even higher average damage dished out to the player. I'll leave this portion for now, as I'll tie it all in when I get to my personal experiences.

The final main con I have with the system currently is that this system basically makes the Multiplayer gear defunct. One used to get any Forest gear that they could at 15, and wear it until 25, where they would transition to Desert gear. This they would keep until they could get the corresponding piece of Delver gear (Hall of Trials epics). I'm fairly sure that such a set of leaps was not the intended system, even if levels do jump pretty fast during those time periods, so I get that this system wouldn't favor that. However, the Effective Level system essentially disregards stats under a certain threshold because so much of one's power comes from the comparative levels of the player and their opponents.



PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

To wrap this up, I'm going to tie the points made above into my personal experience, to show why I feel that the system is currently too heavy-handed. On Tam, I was attempting to use Forest MP gear for awhile as I progressed past level 15, because that's what I had done on Gaidin, my wizard, and it had worked beautifully. What I found, however, was that my rare gear, with notably better stats, was performing more poorly than /COMMMON/ equipment as few as 2 levels higher, because my Effective Level was negatively affected by the level 15 requirement, thus giving me a damage penalty. As such, not only did I have to transition to lower statted equipment for the main stat, but I had to give up anywhere between 1 and 3 secondary stats. For a player that isn't established and loaded up with gems on their equipment, this is a big hit. Losing something like 6 dex, 12 endurance, and 400 HP from various secondaries on a ranger just to get one's Effective Level up hurts. I would gain some damage from the Effective Level increase lowering my penalty, sure, but I would lose other stats on the back end, decreasing any gains that I obtained from increasing my Effective Level.

Essentially, this becomes a lose-lose situation. As a newer character, you're trying to keep the Blacksmith's level somewhere near yours, which eats up your common scrap. Even if you forsake that and just shoot for Level Up kits, chances are you don't have enough uncommon scrap to increase your equipment high enough to matter. This is, of course, assuming you can find each slot of equipment in uncommon, since you can't craft any of useful level due to the aforementioned problem of trying to keep the Blacksmith's Level near your own. In my case, it got to the point where I was just trying to find uncommon equipment as high of level as I could so that I could use Level Up kits on it. Keep in mind that the main reason I could afford this was because I had a good bit of uncommon scrap saved up from before it was usable, and that a new, proper player would have a much harder time of it.

Because of the above mentioned problems, I had a lot of trouble progressing near the end of the Desert. For the first half to 2/3 of the campaign map, my level kept within one or two of the enemy. However, as I went further, their levels increased faster than mine, and their stats jumped up as well. The problem? My stats did NOT jump up. Gold gain at that point in the game isn't enough to effectively enchant equipment to high levels (due to lack of luck runes, which largely come from guild contribution, aka more gold), and enchanting that much is largely pointless anyway when you will be tossing that piece of equipment out for something else you find with 1 or 2 higher level on it. What I ended up having to do is replace common stuff every level, and uncommon stuff every other level or whenever something higher in uncommon dropped. I didn't even bother much trying to get Desert equipment, because getting rare scrap for the level up kits was a painstakingly slow process because I couldn't complete harder missions.

The problem got even worse when I reached level 30 (after tons of grinding Search the Thief Camp), as I unlocked the Brotherhood, and with it Heroic missions. Boy was I in for a surprise when I tried even forest Heroics. Before, levels were just increased, so the stats were boosted accordingly. Now however, that happens, but there is also a mandatory imposed Effective Level discrepancy because the character cannot surpass level 30. At this point in time I was a new level 30, wearing common and uncommon equipment because rare stuff hurt me due to equipment level, and attempting to try any level 30 content. Fairly needless to say, I was crushed. My low grade equipment served as the mortar, and the higher level enemies the pestle.

At this point the game became a grind to try to get Desert equipment that I could level to 30 while I slowly did my daily Hall of Trials grinding day after day. That, by the way, was also less beneficial, because of the way enemy levels increased. Even now, with 4 pieces of Delver equipment on Tam, I cannot get past level 30, because the enemies are level 35. This means that they dispatch of my companions in one hit each, and will continue to do so for quite some time. It also means that they hit me notably harder, I hit them for notably less, and they crit more often than their base crit chance. I was already "supposed" to be doing 11.7k damage with Rapid Reload and was only doing 6-7k on floor 29; the problem only gets worse as I attempt to go up floors. I realize that a level cap increase can fix this particular situation, but it cannot and will not fix the situation with Heroic missions, since those are scaled to the current level cap and thus will always impose a level gap.

Finally, the update containing power fragments came. Awesome, new way to power up while my level is stagnated, maybe I can use this to combat my nerfs for being "only" level 30. Problem-- being only level 30 prevents me from realistically completing many heroic missions in order to obtain power fragments, so I'm back at square one. Fortunately, even though most missions are too hard for me, I can run some of the "path" maps, those ones in there just to burn our stamina before. Now they are actually useful for something, since they contain less enemies, and fewer battles as a whole. As they are generally easier, one can earn power fragments that way.

Unfortunately, that means that I'm still largely blocked from the shiny new content just tossed at me as newly available and something I should check out. This means that once I hit end game, I hit a wall before I can actually /experience/ end game. This has created a frustrating experience for me as a player. Fortunately I already had Gaidin, and can get around most of the artificial power walls because I was already in epic gear, which allowed me to power through the nerfs due to sheer power overflow in comparison to the enemies at a base level. This means that I don't get completely frustrated with the game and go find something else when I get a boot to the head on Tam for trying to play a random desert mission on T1 Heroic because the Brotherhood asks me to.

Honestly, I could elaborate more about the snowball effects that Effective Level has on a new player in terms of blocking them from most game content because they cannot complete base level content, but I hope that I have illustrated the basic idea in the behemoth of a post above. I don't mean this to be some bash piece, but this system worried me from it's inception, and in trying it out with a newer character, I found that it had many of the flaws I had worried about, with few unexpected benefits to counter them. From what I've read, various things in the Jungle update may help with this at an end game level. However, if a player doesn't get to level 45 because they become stuck at lower levels, that won't help them. If I as a player don't feel like I'm making progress, that I'm not getting any stronger despite the numbers on my gear pieces going up because they aren't the right level, I'm going to wonder what the point of going further is. And if I as a player get to that point, why should I keep playing?

In my opinion, most of this comes from the damage output nerf from being a lower level. The challenge of a higher level opponent hitting harder makes sense. But doing half of my normal damage on top of it for just being a few levels lower, well, at that point it's just salt in the wound.