The current levelling system needs to change, as it punishes merging.

I hope the feedback in this post reaches the team. I have spent a good amount of time playing PvZ3, beaten Lawn Patrol on Medium, played daily for a few hours each day, and spent a lot of time talking to the community to gather their thoughts.

In this post, I want to address the larger problems with scaling and levelling, which currently bottleneck the main progression. (There are other fixes I'd love to see, like handcrafted levels, a much better wave system, and replayable gamemodes, something to do daily, like Pinata Party, or a roguelike gauntlet, anything where you get to fight zombies and have fun, with difficulty options, - but those will need separate posts). It is entirely possible to fix this system without removing levelling as a whole or requiring another soft launch. In fact, adjusting this would majorly improve the quality of life, with plenty of room for players to spend money regardless.

The current state of the game forces players to prioritize levelling the cheapest, most basic Merge Tier 1 (T1) plants. Exploring options or spending money on Tier 3s feels redundant because they are expensive and inefficient to level.

Primarily, this is because plant scaling per level-up is exponential. Plant stats increase by around 20% per level, sometimes jumping up to 44% (like for levels 10 AND 11). On paper, plant stats double within 5 levels. Because zombie levelling scales exponentially as well, you will always need plants within 1-2 levels just to not feel like you're shooting at a brick wall.

The second problem becomes obvious when Tier 2/3 plants require Tier 1 plants to be levelled before you can level them. Tier 2/3 plants are far more expensive to upgrade, and there are many more Tier 2/3 plants than Tier 1s. An easy example to look at is the Repeater vs. Peashooter. Because plant stats double every 3-5 levels, a single Level 13 Peashooter does more damage in a tile than a Level 10 Repeater, which you'd create by merging two Level 13 Peashooters.

If you level a Peashooter to Level 15, imagine bringing yourself to level up every single Tier 2/3 variant of Peashooter to Level 15 as well. You won't even be able to level one of them. The resource grind in this game is intensively slow. Because of the lack of replayable gamemodes, and the fact that replaying levels provides no XP (in fact, there is no XP source from any daily or weekly activity at all), completing the Campaign and all available one-time rewards doesn't even give you enough to level a single Tier 2 plant to the level that you want.

And because of how the difficulty works, like I mentioned before, getting a single Tier 1 plant to a high level is astronomically more useful than levelling any Tier 2 or 3 plants. That is not how I want to play this game. I want merges to be rare, and useful, and I want to use them. I wouldn't mind grinding for seeds to unlock plants slowly over time, if I could actually have those plants be usable when I do unlock them.

If I unlock Sling Pea (Peashooter + Cabbage Pult) when my Peashooter and Cabbage Pult are Level 15, I'm not even going to consider using Sling Pea until I level it up to somewhere near Level 15 too. And I'm not kidding when I say that that could take weeks, if not months.

I feel punished for branching out and trying new plants. Not to mention how few Tier 2/3 merges you are given at the beginning. Why acquire a Tier 2 fusion if you can't afford to level it? Why acquire it if a Tier 1 will outperform it at three times lower the cost?

Looking at other games, one usual way you'd scale levelling is to front-load the strongest upgrades in the first 10-20 levels, while slowly decreasing the stat increases per level. This allows players to feel powerful immediately and try different options cheaply.

That, or using linear power growth instead of exponential.

If levelling stays exponential, I'd only expect a 5-10% increase in power per level, not 20-40%.

Another solution I've seen floated that I very much agree with is to remove Levelling individual Tier 2/3 plants. Merged plants should inherit the level of their Tier 1 variants, whichever number is lowest.

You can make Tier 1 levelling be more expensive that way, maybe increase the level cap to 50, and make each level individually less of a power jump, allowing players to make slow but steady progress over time.

You could still require Shards and Chunks to unlock the Level 5 and 15 abilities for Tier 1s, 2s and 3s.

This would remove the burden of "choosing" between Tier 1 and Tier 3 plants, which really should never be a choice. I'd hope I should never have to consider not merging plants, as it is the main gameplay of the game.

I hope these problems can be addressed to make progression feel rewarding again.