You might progress faster now that you're used to it and such. I know in the first game it was kinda similar, act2 was gigantic, but it didn't feel much longer than act1 cause I streamlined combat and looting stuff a lot better so I didn't spend as long clicking on everything, stopped looting food about halfway because I never used it anyway(highly recommend this in this too since it doesn't look like there's any point and you can just reset the food vendors inventories over time if you REALLY need to) and everything went faster, versus act1 where I had to figure out a bunch of stuff like how the spells would interact, how the surface propagated, the order of my skills and just having way less skills for each situations versus having a large range of spells, especially damage ones.
Like if I compare act1 and act2 so far, in act1 my mages had to use their wands/staff of magus abilities because they ran out of spells, and the spells did mediocre magic armor damage, would take like the 2 of them to drop armor on one/two guys, but now my fire mage just pops the armor of 3-4enemies on his own in 1 turn with 2 spells because I have way better options in terms of size and placement, so it goes a lot faster. Similarily my rogue had to adrenaline and pop everything to kill a single target, while now I generally kill one and have one AP free still without even using adrenaline, so I can keep adrenaline and dump it later.
It's a bit like the first game where you had more and more AP from speed/perception so you cleared stuff faster, but instead of having more AP, you just get more AP efficient. Other than boss fights, a lot of fights have been a lot shorter since the end of act1/start of act2. Even one fight where I had to fight 2 mobs that were 3 levels higher along 3 equal level mobs, that went a lot smoother because of the the superior armor shredding and constant CC I have from all my new abilities.
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