Well, progression doesn't matter when you can't achieve anything meaningful in the end anyway. I think I can count the rounds my team has won today on one hand. I've been trying strat battles because Pub servers are, from experience, extremely skewed. During my strat battle today I'm the only one on my team that decided to show...
I'm sorry, but forget all the xp nonsense for a minute, I simply won't play a game that is this skewed. I've got better things to do than watch my team repeatedly get slaughtered over and over. Yeah, I could go play siege, but then we come back to the gold ol' x1 problem.
This game has too much downtime. It's simply not fun.
Make your own achievements. Everyone sucks to start with because they start with very little they can transfer over from other games effectively
If you want to think of things like achieving something, then focus on some areas to start with. Make sure you can manually block effectively. This to me is the main combat skill you want to focus on as it doesn't just teach you how to defend. You will get to know positioning, holding blocks, not to overextend, selecting the right block fast, which block you need against which class the most (and so which attacks are strongest for which class), where abouts the player might likely be for each attack, when to block more than once because of enemy attack speed etc. All this makes you learn about attacks at the same time by seeing how other player's attacks work on you. You can just make really simple attacks while learning this, no need to learn feints or which attack to use (although it helps). Just get good at blocking and most enemies will make a mistake eventually that any simple attack will go through.
People look down on 2 handers but you can learn so much with that class while still having good easy ish attacks. You can even take a xbow to at least feel like you did something in a round if you make mistakes. This is how I started playing, xbow and 2 hander. You want to transition from this asap though so you don't stagnate sitting somewhere left clicking on guys and reloading all round. You won't learn much at all like that and hit a skill ceiling
Manual blocking, staying with team mates and not overextending is a very good starting point into the game. Get those basics and you can add onto that quite easily