Confirmed, and it's not just "lots of gear takes a while" — the game is loading far more than your gear.

Here's what happens. Each equipped item's sprite set is big (a single coat is 165 separate frames — every walk/jump/attack/prone pose). Equip data is cached in one shared, global registry. By the time you press Start, that registry already holds the entire character-creator wardrobe (tops/bottoms/shoes/weapons, ~20 items) plus the gear of EVERY character on your select screen, because the select screen rendered their portraits. The boot loader then calls preloadEquipmentTextures(scene) with no filter, which queues the full frame set of everything in that registry into the blocking load queue. Three dressed characters plus the wardrobe is several thousand images the game sits and waits on before it will let you in — and each item you equip adds another few hundred, which is exactly the pattern you noticed.

The function already supports a filter (it was added for remote players for the same reason). The fix is to use it: at boot only load the three always-needed innerwear defaults, and let the existing after-boot step — which already knows your actual equipped ids — load your real gear (also filtered) and pop it in a beat later. Your character is never naked in the meantime; the body/skin/face are loaded separately.

That should cut the "Dressing your character" phase from proportional-to-the-whole-registry down to proportional-to-nothing at boot.

Confirmed and fixed. The stall at 64% was the "Dressing your character" step. Every piece of gear the game has loaded goes into one shared list, and the character-select screen fills that list with the gear of EVERY character on your account before you even pick one. Boot was then queueing every animation frame of all of it — a single coat is about 165 frames — and refusing to finish the loading bar until the whole lot had downloaded. So the more you (or your other characters) had equipped, the longer it sat there. Boot no longer queues any of it: your own gear loads right after you appear in the world, in the background, without holding the bar. Worst case a piece of gear pops in a beat after you spawn instead of the bar sitting still for two minutes.