according to someone on southperry.net there's a daily repeatable quests where you go and kill a nerfed version of akyrum and it gives you +1 level to your empress buff.

obviously this only happens at 120 for cygnus knights. apparently it was implemented a long time ago and zoomed under my radar... not sure how i missed that one.

combined with the passive 24 levels you get for hitting 120 you get a total of 30 levels into the empress buff, which is a lot better than my current 20.

ugh. i guess i should train my thunderbreaker. -_-