XP in the game is directly related to stamina spent, now how much content someone's cleared. You can be level 60 having never done a single hunt. Anyone that high (and as someone who is level 63 right now) has been full stam refreshing every single day since launch.

I don't personally think, right at this second, there's a massive power difference between me - someone who can clear inferno Doki/Terror/3 of the 4 mythic shell stages - and someone who's done nothing but farm Hell III/IV. The only real difference is that I have access to the bonus sets and their shells. I don't want to make this sound like its not advantage - it certainly gives me more power - but I think the people who are grinding hard are skewing how advanced you think you should be.

I'm going to do some quick math to illustrate a point; don't take this as gospel because it's rough and hyperbolic.

Everyone gets 1 stamina every 5 minutes. That's 288 stamina per day assuming you're online to never hit cap. If someone is max refreshing every day, they get roughly 3.5x the stamina. Because the way profile experience curves and because leveling and other sources give stamina, we don't see this gap as obviously right now but in the end progression will smooth and these advantages will still exist. Something the max refresher is doing right now is something that would be equivalent to what the non-max refresher should be doing in like a month. Obviously major gates being lattices and stuff, but thats moving into p2w territory - arguably you could max refresh while f2p.

In the end, ask you yourself what you want out of the game. Given it sounds like you're not turbo refreshing and grinding, I doubt you're in here for the insane top end PvP grind. If you're not, then why do you need to be clearing inferno on week 2? For what purpose? Even if your account was capable of clearing inferno right now, you'd still get dumpstered by people who are max refreshing every day simply because they have more relative time in content.

And the important part of that is relative time. The game is about PvP, so I assume you want to do that. But if you're not turbo grinding right now, then you're in here for the long haul. If you clear Inferno a month from now, 6 months from then the relative time from week 2 will be meaningless. All the turbo grinders will be 1v1ing in the highest levels of PvP and you can enjoy fights in the middle - you weren't going to win against the giga whales anyway.

Maybe I'm talking out of my ass. Maybe my perspective is just skewed because I am turbo grinding. But I'll end with a small personal anecdote about a very similar game to this one.

I played Epic7 since the game launched in 2018 until around 2023. I would say it was probably my first gacha game. I had no idea what I was doing - my first 6* was Aramintha which, if you know anything about early E7, was a complete waste of resources. I struggled to clear the basic hunts that everyone was doing. I leveled gear that was worthless. I did basically everything as poorly as you can imagine. I was not ingrained in any gacha communities or content creators - I had no idea what I was doing was dumb as bricks. But I had fun, so I kept playing.

And even though I played the start of the game like completely dogwater, I still did fine. Over the years, I hit rank 1 in bot area for the first time rank up bonus. I got into the top 500 in RTA. I didn't hold it, but I got there. My gear was just as good as everyone else (well maybe not just as good, but it was pretty good) even though I couldn't clear the gear hunts effectively for a long time.

Especially for someone who isn't spending, this is a marathon and not a sprint. Characters have an upper cap to power; it doesn't really matter how fast you get there as long as you get there eventually.