OK guys, I am level 20 now, and not every character looks the same for one, you have a lot of variety in the look of your character, dyes, make the armor look different, etc.
There are endless possibilities of characters, 36 possible class mixtures as well as basically subclasses of each profession, e.g. Ranger can be bow skills, beast mastery, traps (wilderness survival), Elementalist can be air, fire, cold, etc.
RARE items do exist, they are hard to find and later in the game, They are yellow/gold in color, here is how the drop system works. Blue means it could be good, generally mid-range damage, with maybe a decent mod. Purple means good mods mid-range damage but usually are salvaged into runes or bowstrings and halts, etc. Now Yellow, yellow is max-damage, random mods, usually 2-3 of them. I got lucky enough to get an incredible bow for my ranger, I have also stumbled across an offhand item for a caster, i think it was a monk, its mods were energy +13 health +40.
The main point of most quests is experience, you are correct there, but I would say my main point of doing sub-quests is for the skills, I have unlocked roughly 70 skills at least and now can do anything with my character, also with skills, Signet of capture is awesome, for those of you who don't know what it is, it's a normal signet but you use it against a BOSS mob only and it steals a skill from him and gives it to you for good, replaces your signet of capture, this is how you get the expert skills.
So before you all jump to conclusions and think the game will get boring, try playing it, The story in PvE gets very indulging and the later zones are incredibly dangerous.
The only thing correct about your post is getting to 20 is fairly simple, I would say it take roughly 50 hours or so to get there. If you get bored, make a new character, change yours around, or try out PvP which is incredibly fun all in itself. But just to forewarn you, a lot of the fun points in the game come AFTER 20, so please quit jumping to conclusions unless you are already there and bored. Near or at 20, you do a final quest, called the Ascension. There is and will be more future content for those "ascended characters". Believe me when I say the fun happens after 20...Leveling is not the point of this game, it's unlocking items/skills. And Praise the gaming gods for this, the game is based on how well you work in a team and play your individual character, not how many hours you played. This is coming from a hardcore gamer, 12 hours a day or so, but I am so happy that my friends who play a couple hours a day can still play and compete with me.
Remember the world map is huge, even though you might run to the end of the story with Primary quests, you skipped a TON of zones that have other quests and possibly something fun and off the wall. So exploring in itself is just as fun as anything else in my opinion, I love discovering something only I and a few other people have been to...
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