Yeah. Leveling is going to take so long that many will give up on their plans of leveling an easymode class to 50, farming a bunch of melee gear, and then making their rogue or whatever.
Leveling will take much longer than it did at the launch of p99. There were a few things back then that allowed people to level too fast, such as the fact that SolA was way too good XP. With the current XP rate for old-world content, 1-50 is estimated to take an average of about 7 days /played if you don't waste your time. You can probably double that on a PvP server since you'll waste a lot of time PvPing or getting ganked while leveling, which not only interrupts your grinding but also costs you XP when you die.
So if we estimate 10-15 days /played for most people, and we assume 5 hours a day to be the average amount people put in, those average peeps are gonna take somewhere around two months to reach 50. Then you have to camp items for your melee character, and then you can start leveling a class that takes much longer due to being pretty much incapable of soloing.
If you want to hit the high levels months after everyone else, go right ahead. It'll suck. Casters and guilded melees will be in raid gear by the time you reach level 45 on your melee. You're better off just starting off with your melee class, toughing out the weak early levels, and hitting the high levels just a bit later than the easymode rollers. If you have a guild, leveling a melee probably isn't even much slower the first time around. If you play mostly by yourself, it'll be a bit tougher but not at all impossible.
If they code resists the classic way, 90-100ish MR is fully viable for PvP. Most melee classes can get this with gear you can obtain around level 30, assuming someone is selling wolf's eye jewelry by then. Decent weapons aren't too hard to get, either; buy an exe axe or dark reaver from whoever claims Guk first, or get a BIBS. Rogues can quest for burning rapier. Weapons like dragoon dirk and silvery war axe are also totally fine until you hit the upper levels and can get better stuff. There's not an enormous difference between mid-level and high-level droppable gear that early, with a select few exceptions like froggy crown and such. Most of the resist gear people will wear at 50 is stuff you can get in your 20s, and it'll be a good while before diamond jewelry becomes available to the common player since you won't have rogues running around pickpocketing fear golems and resetting the zone like on VZTZ.
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