You be the dev: XP for Kill Formulae omgthissucks

[DeputyDog]

I think the easier solution would be this:

Redo the CR for mobs.

Place not being visited enough? Bump average CR up.
Place being visited too frequently? Bump average CR down.

Make ithillids worth our time. Make Skara a level 20ish place. Make Efreets a 16ish place.

Make Celestia and Abyss mobs CR 40+. God those things are bosslike in their own respect.

I bumped cr on some low level mobs and it seems to help alot. I didn't touch undead for nc yet so Ill look at those next but the other factions should find 1-5 a bit quicker. Tweaked some 6-10s as well. So yes this is a good fix up to about cr 30.

Im not going to touch illithids or Skara until I run thru them 3-4 times wth different classes. Efreetis I may look at. The planar areas will be a long term project of mine as I play test them. Focusing on the lower end stuff for now as it has been neglected for years.

Thoughts in Giant mountain? What about Haddon Mirk, Amazons and any other non Planar areas?

[DeputyDog]

The grind from 30-40 was never meant to be quick, easy or painless so I dont think much should be done to speed it up. Each of the planar areas is there for the gear and not the grind in my opinion, but I am all for tweaking cr on less used areas or doing playtesting and lowering difficulty on some if they are just overpowered and unused.

I am also fine with players having a graveyard of lvl 35 players as I see no point in rushing to 40 becuase then what. Id rather be 39 for months with at least something to work towards other then a few pieces of gear.

The low levels and 10-25 I would like to put more work into just to keep new players around a little longer and because they need work.

The idea about Sunken has a lot of merit, and I will be tweaking it, as it is long overdo. Most likey I will lower the difficulty and keep cr where it is, but maybe a slight bump.

THe big issue with CR is that we cant raise a mob over the level range threshold with out either changing its gear or messing up the treasure table it drops from.

For instance, a cr 19 mob drops from the 16-19 table and has 16-19 gear. If I bump it to 21 all that gear would need to be changed and it would start dropping higher lvl gear which might change the whole dynamics of that area.

I would like to spread the worn areas out, like Giant mountain and Frostdale, and push those people to some other places. NS City, for instance, should be a nice alternative now but may need furhter tweaks.


Id like to hear some ideas for other areas that could work for that 10-25 range that we could bump up or tweak.

[Bargeld]

South Rd Tower
Yuan Ti
Expand the Crypt outside of Falme (currently a single map)
Ordian Clan Caves
Snake Pit
Mezzoloths

The previous statement about 'the traffic will follow the flow of best xp' will still hold true, to some degree. The areas people go is determined by how long they have to stay and what lvl they are currently at, how many people in group, as well as what classes are playing. There are a lot more dynamics than just xp and cr values. If you come to play for a session with a lvl 14 toon, do you go to gnoll pits or mezzoloths? The answer depends on the answers to the previous questions. It's not about whether the server is done well enough, or balanced well enough, or has enough areas... its more about the population and how many people are playing, because that creates more opportunities for fast xp. You might find that making things a tad easier might backfire when there are 45 players on all the time.

And a note to north about gifting up new toons... when they don't earn it, they don't appreciate it. If he had earned the gear that you gave him, it would have been more difficult to part with because it has more value. So making things easier on people might reflect that scenario as well.

[mining]

Remember, the idea is to tweak the curve and CRs so that you might be levelling faster... but only byt a little if you're going after stuff of similar CR... which by 39 might be quite challenging mobs. I don't know about anybody else - and I'm nowhere near the be all and end all on this - but I die a little on the inside every time I see a group just winding their way through the same maps for several days, or even weeks, or when I see a 39 killing dwarfs and goblins for their last 20k XP for several days. There should always be incentive to challenge yourself on harder areas, and at the moment its not quite there.

Generally concerns brought up are:
Its too fast!

What people seem to like about it so far is that it suggests less grinding by encouraging movement off the beaten path and taking on new challenges.

Taking these into consideration, I tweaked the base calculation for level=CR XP to 0.97 instead of 0.975^level. I also tweaked the multiplier for higher CR than level to 1.2 instead of 1.1

[Tsavong]

I die a little on the inside every time I see a group just winding their way through the same maps for several days, or even weeks, or when I see a 39 killing dwarfs and goblins for their last 20k XP for several days. There should always be incentive to challenge yourself on harder areas, and at the moment its not quite there.

If you are a solo 39 it is not always worth going somewhere more challenging as by yourself that could get you very dead very fast. In a party it is a different matter.

[Bargeld]

Just my opinion, but I don't like the latest curve. The jump for xp for a lvl 1 killing a cr 5 vs 6 mob is immense! 67 xp -> 201 (which is the cap). This follows along the whole curve, capping at lvl 33 for 835 -> 1002 max xp.

Also, looking at the graphed curve and the values for it, you can see that it starts maxing at 31 up to 33, then actually DECREASES from 34 to 40. Intuitively, this tells you that 34+ will be slower xp than previous... I'd like to see a similar curve, but without that big jump in xp for mobs that are 5+ above you and moving the max/optimal xp from lvl 33 to 39 would be nice too. Basically, clean up the endpoints and fix that +5 vs +6 cr bump that is out of line.

After 5 or 10 mins of thought... this will also skew xp in favor of pLeveling vs a solo guy. Players that can pLevel out of the gates will be getting that 200 xp per kill, whereas the solo guy will be at 30 if they are lucky (most solo lvl 1 toons fight vs cr .25 for the first 3 levels).

[mining]

Just my opinion, but I don't like the latest curve. The jump for xp for a lvl 1 killing a cr 5 vs 6 mob is immense! 67 xp -> 201 (which is the cap). This follows along the whole curve, capping at lvl 33 for 835 -> 1002 max xp.

Also, looking at the graphed curve and the values for it, you can see that it starts maxing at 31 up to 33, then actually DECREASES from 34 to 40. Intuitively, this tells you that 34+ will be slower xp than previous... I'd like to see a similar curve, but without that big jump in xp for mobs that are 5+ above you and moving the max/optimal xp from lvl 33 to 39 would be nice too. Basically, clean up the endpoints and fix that +5 vs +6 cr bump that is out of line.

After 5 or 10 mins of thought... this will also skew xp in favor of pLeveling vs a solo guy. Players that can pLevel out of the gates will be getting that 200 xp per kill, whereas the solo guy will be at 30 if they are lucky (most solo lvl 1 toons fight vs cr .25 for the first 3 levels).

The initial jump out of the gates for higher CR is intentional, for

[20:06] <03Lokey> I logged in made a character and killed a mummy, gimme something better than 50

After that, is a side effect of using an exponential model - the last value is a bigger jump than all the ones before it.
The "optimum" case for XP moved down from 39.45 to 32.8, for CR = level.

I'll look at some more tweaks when I have some more feedback.

Also, Re: powerlevellers, it'd be nice if we could do something about them... Like a script where we set the caster level of the buff they cast to 0 if the target were more than 20 levels below them...

[Daral0085]

Like a script where we set the caster level of the buff they cast to 0 if the target were more than 20 levels below them...

I can already imagine the swarms of level 21 clerics. Thousands upon thousands...

[Amoenotep]

easier to kill a lvl 20 cleric

[mining]

Like a script where we set the caster level of the buff they cast to 0 if the target were more than 20 levels below them...

I can already imagine the swarms of level 21 clerics. Thousands upon thousands...

At least they wouldn't be autoquickened

[Elagneros]

everyone of those places you listed that you lvl regularly...is also on a someons pk route because its the easiest place to go

That's so true. I never solo the mountain because I remember all too well how pkers liked to prowl there.

Hell even I've prowled there recently because I was bored, but all I found was Twig.

Keep in mind that people party at the mountain and FD because they're easy to get to, and there's a bind point nearby if you die. It's convenient because you can round up a party in 5-10 minutes instead of getting a party together, then spending the time to travel across the map to get to a more remote leveling spot. It's a bit quicker these days with the ferries and dragons, but the mountain and FD is still easier to get to. That's probably one of the reason people go to Dwarf Home too...hop on a dragon to Angmar Wastes, bind if you want, then walk 3 zones to the rift. Or in my case, I usually log my toons in my guild hall, so I just have to saunter across the lower stronghold and take the fast way up. The RK rift isn't deep in a dungeon somewhere like most of the others, and getting to it is fast.

Even if you tweak the XP formula, I think people will still go for the convenient spots.

Also, I think it's not so much the XP you get per mob that matters, it's how much XP you get over time. If you can kill lower levels mobs faster and get more XP for the time spent than stronger mobs, than it's more worth it, and less risk too. Also keep in mind the type of fights involved. Giants/Efreets/Dwarfs are mostly melee mobs with few special tricks, that makes them easy to kill unless they have a lot of DR and/or hp. Compare that to mobs that have a lot of strong ranged attacks or magic and those tend to be more of a pain to kill.

As for 35-40 being a character graveyard, it might not be a simple matter of grind. People possibly abandon toons at that point not because it takes forever to level, but because there are flaws in the build that become more and more noticable. Maybe the toon looked good on paper or a spreadsheet when you put it together, but in practice it sucks. The AB is crap and you can't hit anything, or your AC is rubbish and you're constantly taking hits. Maybe your selection of skills and feats aren't panning out as planned. So tweaking XP won't help here, even if you get to 40 faster the toon will still suck.

[northstar_08]

I am not trying to encourage someone to come PK me but I have not had a leveling toon PK'd in a very long time.

PK'ing (for me anyways) has been limited to Relic Raiding and Defending.

To be honest, the most frustrating thing for me (when I was new to the server) was having a leveling toon PK'd by a level 40.

I remember killing Rats in the plains close to MA as a level 1 and having a level 40 not only PK me but then stand over my corpse and laugh.

I was not too pleased. Now that I have been on the server a while, i understand that it is all just part of the game and sometimes people kill a level 1 to encourage some PvP fun. You have to understand through that it is It is frustrating for a new player. it would be in good form if a level 40 only PK'd a low level toon if that low level toon was also part of a guild and thus was more likely to understand that it is all just part of the game. In all honestly the random PKing of low level toons has dropped dramatically since a certain guild has all but disappeared from the server

Anyway, back on topic. Mining's alteration to the xp formula sounds really good and I think would need to be tested in game to see how the end result feels

Also, I am one of the most abusing players when it comes to P'leveling new toons. Part of the reason for this is having done the mountain and FD over and over again that I just wanted to get to level 20 ASAP as there was no new experiences in leveling a low toon anymore. I think I would even voluntaily slow down on the P'leveling if/once incentives are put in place to move off the beaten path for xp

[Rufio]

I agree with bargeld that the spike in exp for killing a mob with cr 5 above your level is very extreme for the first 5 levels.

One thing I do notice is that for the last few levels, you can't really go kill things with cr equal to your character level becuase cr's on non-boss mobs don't really go up that high. Specifically, at level 39, there are only 2 cr 39 creatures in all of ns4 (Red Wyrms in DE and Abyssal Fiends in the Abyss). None of the other endgame areas, including celestia, have creatures above cr 38, and there aren't even a lot of cr 38 creatures.

[Amoenotep]

which is why they keep saying that all the cr would have to be tweaked a bit to make the formulas work out correctly

[DeputyDog]

How bad would upping cr on all the planar mobs to 40 mess things up?
Just seems easier to up the high end mobs then to mess with the xp curve.