To preface, all damage calculations are going to be based off of a weapon with a base damage of 29 (level 30 nevershatter, bound blade, perfect Amber hammer) meaning the actual effectiveness for any other weapon will be less than described here. This should emphasize just how pitiful efficient levelling actually is for increasing combat effectiveness.
So to start with a damage baseline and premise. Increasing your main combat attribute from 50 to 100 will add 8 points of weapon damage at most. So level 30 nevershatter at 50 strength will deal 8 points of damage less than level 30 nevershatter at 100 strength. For reference, a level 5 sigil stone can add 10 points of damage to a weapon. However, even without efficient levelling your main combat attribute is unlikely to be 50 by the time you are level 30.
If I make an orc with the following custom class: combat, sign of the warrior, strength and endurance, block, ha, blunt, armorer, restoration, alteration, athletics that character will start with 60 strength and a blunt skill of 40 meaning I can level up 6 times from blunt alone increasing my strength to 90. From 90 to 100 strength I would increase my base damage output by 1. So is it worth getting 20 levels in blade (which will be vastly inferior damage) to get 1 additional point of damage? Consider that at 90 strength 50 luck 100 blunt 10 blade that a sword will deal 6 damage at max fatigue. The blunt weapon will deal 29 damage at max fatigue. So levelling blade 20 levels will be able to increase your blunt damage by 1 point of damage.
This should also work to emphasize that levelling your skill has a much greater impact on damage output than levelling the attribute (hence efficient skilling is recommended, aka prioritize your main combat skill to improve combat effectiveness)
This is where the discussion of efficient levelling should end but people will still defend it for some unknown reason so here you go.
Typically the recommendation of efficient levelling isn't even to just increase your combat attribute either but to max all attributes. However, this makes no sense. Let's take my orc, what benefit does my orc get from increasing personality? Outside of roleplaying, none (and arguably as an orc there is more roleplaying potential with low personality). So why would I go out of my way to level illusion for the above build just to increase personality? It has no impact on combat at all for this build yet efficient levelers will argue that it is necessary because otherwise combat becomes a drag... But how does not levelling personality reduce combat effectiveness for someone that doesn't use illusion? I've never had any efficient leveler be able to answer this question they instead deflect as if it's a matter of opinion and not a matter of ignorance.
Final nail in the coffin is it simply isn't fun. This is made worse by the fact that it gets recommended to newer players trying the original every time a thread pops up of someone asking for advice when trying the original, and then they try efficient levelling and don't have fun and stop playing.
**Call to action** everytime you see someone recommend efficient levelling, call them out on it. It isn't beneficial, it is sometimes detrimental (like dealing 6-8 damage for 2 levels as you try to increase your damage of your desired playstyle by 1), it isn't fun.... And quite frankly it isn't needed.
My most recent playthrough I started and turned the difficulty up to max and even at level 44 I am 1 hit killing most enemies. Efficient levelling isn't the advice that newer players need to make combat go faster. There is weakness stacking, poisons, teaching them how sneak and power attacks actually work, fatigue exploitations (reduce max fatigue below current fatigue to deal massively increased damage) and most importantly from level 1 to 20 your greatest increase in damage comes from replacing your gear with better gear... Not increasing your attributes which only gives you about 1 damage every 2 levels and only if it's your combat attribute.
On the remaster: it didn't actually solve the issue the efficient levelers actually have with levelling up (being the rate at which enemies scale as you go up the levelled list... Remember only a handful of enemies actually scale infinitely, most just stop spawning and get replaced with a variant with different stats). Arguably this is actually detrimental because now you can accidentally level up when using minor skills resulting in enemies out levelling your skill level. Remember the blunt being 29 damage versus the blade being 6 at the same attributes... While the issue is relatively minor it results in the efficient levelers suggesting the remaster fixed a problem it actually made worse.
Anytime you see someone say efficient levelling is required, immedietly disregard everything they say. They have no idea what they are talking about.
TL;DR mathematically efficient levelling makes no sense, is not fun, and yet it is still recommended to new people which ruins their experience. Stop recommending it.
