A piccie of my Fire Wizzie on Gaheris ...
It took me around five days played time to get to Champion Level 5, and that wasn't through constant grinding. The Champ weapon's abilities are split into two parts. 99% of the abilities are granted when you are given the weapon initially. The secondary part of the weapon, which is usually an unlimited charge of some sort (for casters it's usually a 50% power heal, usable in combat) is given to you after defeating the Circle of Five.
You firstly need to speak to the King to start the Champion Quests and to actually start gaining XP for your champion levels (you will not automatically qualify otherwise, and no XP gained retrospectivly is taken into account).
The new quests are both fun and heavily story-driven, including a couple of nice surprises on the way. There are a couple of excellent outdoor instances involving small towns, a castle ruin under siege, and a manor-come-training centre (without spoiling too much). Once you complete Chapter 3 (or four, I can't remember) you are granted your unactivated Champion Weapon (see above). The final chapter is defeating 5 hideously formed Daemons (which took a FG of us around 5 hours to complete) ending in an instance dungeon where you take on the final bad guy - and believe me, he is "tough".
Each major Daemon kill gives you a *lot* of ChampXP (something like 50%+ of an individual level - so killing the lot gives you ChampLevel 2.5 instantly meaning you have only 2.5 levels left to get to 5). The main mobs also drop remains which look quite nice hanging from the wall (see
here for more info and piccies).
Each Champion level gives you access to individual types of horse, and you're eligible for the more aesthetic horses at ChampLevel 5 (like the Nightmare, Storm and Undead horse). The horses are 15 plat each, and involve running a quest to actually get the horse on top of that. The quest for the unicorn for example involves you actually finding it, and then making it trust and like you enough before you can click on it and it lands in your inventory). You can have as many horses as you want, but each involves paying 15plat, a short quest, and the sellback loss is 10% (meaning that if you sell the horse back to buy another, you're only given 13.5plat in return).
Champ abilities are gained at one point per level (so at level 5 you have 5 points for example). These can be traded in to train into different minor subclassing from the realm's primary class trainers (like magician etc, rather than specialised trainers like Enchanter or Hero). Spending one point in a subclassing ability opens that "tree" and you are free to spend your points starting from the Level 1 ability upwards. You cannot spend one point and get the level 5 ability, you must work your way up and spend all five points as you progress. At the moment I have a minor heal (about 100 odd heal per cast), a minor concentration AF buff (which is useless as I'm a caster and get a better AF buff anyway, but I needed it to get ...), and a minor str/con and dex buff.
Champ Level 4(?) also gives you the ability to use your realm's basic weaponry (like slash, thrust and crush for Albion), so my wizzie can switch over and use a small shield and rapier (which glows, yay \o/ ) for close quarter combat. I could have trained in minor combat abilities which would have given me access to styles, but hitting for 14 damage a time I didn't think it would be a good spend (I suppose it's good for druids who don't get access to combat styles).
I'll see if I can dig out any screenies I've taken from the Circle of Five dungeon...