Hello Swarth

The character customization is not the best around but it keeps getting better.
Enjoy your stay and feel free to ask any more questions.
Kall

They promised to let us upgrade the supporter packs like a month and a half ago but that is yet to come but it is coming as far as we know.

The game looks great and very promising and if you ever want to get into warhammer books! read the Horus Heresy! they are great for starting with as I did.

Also the most fun combat I have had is crusader melee with either greater axe or the 2h thunder hammer? Really fun and satisfying to just smash enemies into the warp!

Anyways good luck and hope you enjoy the game Swarth! Fight on brother!

Yes, XP is mainly gained from completing a mission, so the optimal strategy is to rush through it as fast as possible.  Hopefully this will change eventually.

It doesn't have the customization you want.  Most classes only have customization through weapons; a weapon dictates your abilities, no customization beyond that.  Only the Psyker has any true customization options, being able to select spells and then customize those spells.  This most likely isn't going to change.

Also, there is a morality system where you make roleplaying decisions between either Puritan or Radical, however the results of those decisions give skills and perks that effect your abilities, so regardless of how you want to RP your character there is a path that best matches your class and build.  Hopefully that changes soon too.

My standard recommendation at this point is to give the game 6 months to a year and then come back and see how it's doing.

so first things first:
This game is completely different from other ARPGs, so this is definitely not like Diablo or Path of Exile, or even Van Helsing.
Being a WH40K fan definitely helps understanding most of these differences, and it most certainly helps with enjoying the story and dialogues, which are typical 40K-stuff, which to me as a fan is brilliant.

As Thaddeus already said, how you play any mission definitely factors into how much XP you get at the end, and quite frankly I don't think you'd even be able to finish any mission type without killing anyone... even when the mission target is to deactivate heavy antiair gun installations, you can only ever interact with those once you have killed every last enemy in the vicinity.

But you also do not have to scour the map to hunt down every last one of them either, but if you don't, you can indeed lose out on a part of the XP reward, that much is true.

And speaking of XP, levelling in this game is deliberately extremely slow... I've just now finished the singleplayer story (which will be continued in future seasons for free) and did a few side missions while doing that, which saw me clock in about 47 hours of play time, and after those 47 hours, I managed to get to Level 30 of 50 -- the next 20 levels will likely take much, much longer though, since story missions were by far the largest XP givers... but like I said, the game will see its story continued in later seasons, and these seasons will be free of charge. So if you are patient enough to not need to max level ASAP, that shouldn't be an issue.

And besides, if you skill your character sensibly and can play in general, you don't need to be anywhere near max level in order to play the currently highest rated missions... for example, I did a Power Rating 1300 mission this morning wih my then PR720 Psyker... so about 500 levels of Power Rating between the suggested level and my actual, yet I still managed to clear it with only dying once, and that was my own stupid fail to boot (standing next to a boss that explodes upon death).

Sensing the obvious confusion now (huh, 500 levels?! I thought you said there are only 50?!), lemme explain:
Martyr handles progression a bit differently; there's your character level (1-50), which unlocks sometimes a new skill, but mostly new passives, i.e. unlocking new weapon types for you to equip, or giving you a new passive perk, plus giving you skill points that themselves only unlock passive bonuses and mods.

The other half of progression is your Power Rating (PR), which is the calculated total of your currently equipped gear... each piece of gear has its own PR, broadly speaking indicating how "good" that item is... all these individual numbers added up form your current Power Rating, and that in turn is used by the game to tell you how difficult any given mission is.

Going back to my previous example, with the almost 500 PR levels difference between my gear and the mission, what this meant was:
I did 78% less damage, i.e. any and all kinds of damage I can do was lowered by 78%.
The damage I received however was raised by over 300%, so basically enemies and other hazards did more than triple their usual damage to me.

What this effectively means is that even on Character Level 5, you could do an endgame mission with a PR of 1400+, but you'd take such insane amounts of damage, and you yourself would have so few passive boni and so few active skills unlocked that you simply couldn't handle that, and you also wouldn't yet be authorized to equip the more powerful weapon types.

As for character customization, there isn't a lot to make your characters look truly unique, but that's true for almost all ARPGs mostly... what you can do however is equip different styles for each armor type (3 different armor types per class, with each three visual variations), and you can pay ingame coin to customize their color scheme (works for weapons as well) and their Tier appearance, i.e. wether they look like the basic robes, or the high end Tier 3 high level robes... but those latter differences are mostly pretty minimal, and in turn cost a lot of credits, especially in the beginning... so armour customisation beyond the odd 5k to customize colors, I'd really save that for when you get that relic armor that you want to keep for good, since relics can be "levelled" themselves so you can basically keep the ones you like regardless of your level or PR.

Furthermore, with weapons having skills bound to them, the main benefit actually is that equipping a different type of weapon can feel fundamentally different, can lead to a completely different gameplay style.

So it really does make a major difference in how you experience the game and of course especially combat depending on wether you equip a ranged or a melee weapon, or a ranged and melee combination, and so this way there should really be something truly enjoyable for everyone.

For me and my Psyker, it's definitely the pyrokinetic staff, which is a twohand heavy weapon, and it basically works (and sounds, lol) like a long range shotgun, since the blast it creates with its standard attack actually is an AoE blast that can affect multiple enemies at once, especially when they are close together, and furthermore on enemies without suppression bar or with a bar that's reduced to yellow or even red, this attack can cause knockback, which is especially useful against melee opponents.

The same basic principle is true for all the weapon types... for example, there's the Thunder Hammer that the Crusader can equip, which is also a 2H heavy weapon, but obviously, being a hammer, it's a melee weapon -- on all 2H weapons, you get four skills (or in the case of the Psyker, you get empty skill slots to put your Psyker abilities in), and one of the skills with this hammer is actually a jump attack with 20 meters range, so that even those this is a rather huge and slow melee weapon, you can close the gap to your prey quite quickly with this attack jump that of course also causes AoE damage when you land.

Last but not least, you can not only play any class as either ranged, melee or ranged+melee with two 1H items, you can even combine that into even more possibilities since all classes have two weapon sets that you can switch between on the fly during missions, i.e. that Crusader could have a Heavy Assault Gun in his second weapon set slot, so that he could toggle between that massive Thunder Hammer and the Assault Gun, which in turn make him a force to be reckoned with both in melee and ranged.

One thing I wonder about though: where did you get that $180 price tag from?
You can pick up the game for 44.99 currently, and even regular retail for the base version will be 49.99... or are you planning to go all in and pick up one of the higher tier versions?

Myself, I actually only picked the basic version, since content-wise it got everything, the only thing "missing" would be pets and other such flair.

For now, there are only a few major story moments that allow you to choose how to act; Puritan and Radical aren't necessarily good and evil though, as, let's face iit, even a Puritan Inquisitor will kill you and your entire family if he even thinks you sympathize with rebels.

That said, Puritan does mean sticking slavishly to the rules of the Ordo Malleus, not taking into account the complexity of the situation at hand, but simply applying "If he ever had any contact with Chaos taint, even if not his fault or intention, he must be purged"-logic.

The Radical path rather says "Yeah, I serve the Emperor, and I reckognize the rules of my order, but the good of the Imperium justifies any means".

I have so far only played one character through the story and chose the radical way, but I doubt that outside of one or two dialogues that this would make that much of a difference to the story... could be wrong, of course, but I don't see the story unfolding differently in any major way by going Puritan instead.

What these choices mainly do is affect your character's morality, and the more you choose to go down one route, the more powerful boni will be unlocked... but sadly either that system is bugged too, or it is simply currently impossible to get more than 100 points in Radical, as after finishing the story, that's where I was stuck... outside of the story, there aren't any moral choices to make, there are just the generic missions where you just have to complete straightforward goals.

For any further moral choices, we'll likely have to wait for future seasons to continue the storyline.

But it  also has its limitations, like insanely slow grind and a plethora of bugs still to be fixed...