Anybody else find it weird that you can spend a year and a half of downtime, or roughly a day and a half of adventuring to advance from 16th to 17th level?
It's true -- check out p.57 of the DM Basic Rules, where a handy chart tells you that a 16th level character should gain 20,000 XP per adventuring day, and contrast that with p.10 of the Player's Basic Rules, where a different chart explains that going from 195,000 XP to 225,000 XP gets you from the start of level 16 to the start of level 17, and the difference between those two numbers is 30,000 XP.
I haven't read through many Tier 3 AL adventures -- I don't have any characters in that level range, nor have I been asked to run modules for characters in that level range -- so I'd be curious to know just how much XP your typical Tier 3 mod is awarding, and if it's actually following the advice in the DM Basic Rules or if it's deliberately 'slower' than that.
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Pauper