This post is directed at long time RC crammers. I'd suggest you stop doing so, or at least think seriously about when you will.

Leveling up in AFK Arena has never been easier. Chasmic Altar has made it easier to push campaign (and get correspondingly more exp). Dismal Lab (and lab sweep) increased our income of resource boxes. Additional stargazing and now temple of time summons return experience and dust as trash loot. While each change has been minor, the combination of them all has slowly increased the speed at which we can level; as an RC crammer doing 2x refresh per day and spending 900 diamonds on dust, I've increased by leveling speed from roughly 5 levels per patch 2 years ago to 7 levels per patch today.

7 levels per patch should be setting off alarm bells, because Lilith has promised to only release one new hero per patch going forward. That means that the maximum RC cap is growing by, at most, 5 levels per patch - and we are all accelerating towards it.

If you are a long time player with most 4F heroes built, you can expect your RC cap to be increasing by roughly 100 levels per year. You are not going to be getting every celepogean and awakened hero built without whaling hard, and those represent an increasing share of new hero releases. Even being optimistic, that corresponds to a RC cap increasing by less than 4 per patch. Meanwhile, even without RC cramming, leveling resources are sufficiently abundant that even without the dust for diamonds, efficient play will deliver north of 6 levels per patch.

If you're a long time player, look at the difference between your current level and your RC cap. Divide that by 2; that's the number of patches before your level caps out, forever. I personally have about 30 patches; a little over a year.

Diamonds spent on dust in the interim only serve to speed you towards that inevitable cap. Rather than provide a real long term advantage, those diamonds are going to end up providing no long term value - hundreds of thousands of diamonds flushed to get to the cap a few months earlier.

If you *haven't* been playing for years, this probably won't apply to you. Accelerating leveling still has real returns, and you don't need to worry about capping out several years down the road when you very well may not be playing anymore. For those of us long time veterans, though, the end is in sight. Unless something radically changes (and I cannot think of any obvious motivation for Lilith to change anything here), all the hardcore players on old servers are going to be roughly the same level in a year or two, irrespective of our investments in leveling.

Make your investment decisions accordingly.