Just to make sure : if you don't die, you never get hit with decay, right?

I thought I had a good grip on the system, but this whole 1x-2x thing for skills 100+ got me a bit confused. Basically, this just means skills above 100 get hit harder by decay IF YOU DIE, right? No passive decay has been put in? Thanks!

 

Yup its a fake decay. Things u dont use still stay shiny and nice, which should not be the case. Skill you dont use should waste away, skill you use should get better. That make more logical sense to me. Anyway, so many players are whining about skill decay at the moment. Dont think they making it any harsher anytime soon.

 

The on-death decay is a good soft-cap system IMO. Just making sure I understand the wording of the R42 changes.

 

The thing is, its not necessary - the xp curve ramps up so significantly beyond level 100 that the time measured to get skills much higher than that is measured in YEARS assuming 500,000 xp per hour grindable adventure xp. The curve is enough of a cap, many players aren't going to spend 6 months to get 1% more damage. Some will, and those that earn it should be able to keep it. Going backwards is a horribly outdated system that wlil not be sustainable as the average player level rises. Many people don't see a problem now at adventure level 80 or so but what incentive to have to play for another year? For 5 years? For 10? When at that point it will have taken you years to get where you are but one death sets you back months? Its just shortsighted.

 

Welcome to why people quite often say * no i dont wanna do that and risk dieing. *

 

i totaly agree we already got a cap you cant go past 200 skill now is any one ever going to hit that no so why punich and let players go backwards insted

 

Like Blight says players will just grind at scene where they have zero risk of dying.

Death decay is a non event.

 

Not sure where all the doom and gloom is coming from. I'm lvl 90ish, and even a full death penalty is negligible (with about 20-something GMs).

 

Two places, those with lots of XP gained early before certain oversights that allowed for extremely high rates of XP gain were patched and causals that can do math and realize that after a year or so of playing, a single death might revert several days of progress.

 

Im adv lvl 95 and maybe died 5 times since persistence. I largely avoid stuff that could kill me like say grouping or exploring dangerous areas (where I may fall and die). I have a great farming routine that nets me about 400K an hour and 7K+ gold. This has allowed me to get pretty powerful for what I want to do in the end game which is PvP.

Death decay is a non-event for me but it is an issue for people with different play styles.

 

I never farmed a control point, if that's what you're refering to. Plus, it's the other way around. If you've exploited insane XP gains before that you can't make now, death penalties will hit you the hardest.

As it stands at lvl low 90s, I lose maybe 2-300k XP on a death, approx 40-45 mins safely grinding at most. That's a full 24 hrs decay penalty btw. Hardly "days of progress" at that level, which I would guess is much higher than the average casual player level.

 

I think the biggest concern is still have to do with people having to resort to the "save zones" to farm up the XP enough to not losing skill levels from decay.

Ideally, I would like to be able to go to some new zones as I progress organically and less of finding the same strategic spot to fight over and over. My progression moved much smoother back while I was climbing between 2 skull to 4 skull zones.

As of now as a casual player, I'm stuck at the spot where it gives me enough good xp. Anything above that, it's either too hard or take too much time.

 

My post was listing where the doom and gloom was coming from. Those are the two groups most adversely affected by the decay mechanic. I'm somewhere around level 70 and unless I significantly cHanceville my playstyle, even at lvl 90 300k XP would represents at least 2 days of playing, maybe more if I was hunting in a group.

 

In your situation I would look at my skills and hunting spots, as that seems to be much more the issue here than decay.

 

It's mostly that I usually play casually, I don't grind hardcore, I do some hunting, some mining, maybe check out some out of the way vendors and I call it a night after maybe 1-2 hours normally.

 

Playing past releases, I've ignored decay and let myself die without worrying about it... because no matter what, I would always gain much more XP in a single play session than I could have lost. And because I'm not min/maxing my XP gain, this didn't bother me.

I'm not sure about all of the changes in r42 and coming down the pike but my feeling is it will probably be about the same for me at least.

 

I tested the new decay on QA 42 and it can be an issue. I died 3 times which in QA 42 is about a 100% loss like R41. I lost 10 of my 17 GM's doing so.

The worst part of decay is what I found while testing. I purposely set my stone fist to "-" (102 skill) so that if I die, decay would hit it and only it. All of my GM's (100 skill) were set to maintain. Yet, when I died... the code subtracted from over 10 skills without taking into account how I set that skill to be maintained.

 

remember that if you have them set to maintain and do NOT have enough exp to cover the maintenance they will go down.

Need to understand what maintenance says - IT IS VERY CLEAR IN THE DESCRIPTION -

You have to have enough Exp to cover the maintenance

If you have every skill set to noly maintain you will not gain in any skill but if you die there is a cost to maintain them

as in some skills 100 - 101 is millions of exp and 10% of that is ---- 100,000 with then new updates over 100 = more% enjoy all those skills over GM MuhaHAha

 

If you're multiple GMs you should really not die very much. Fair trade IMO. Guess we'll see in R42 what's up.

 

Correct and incorrect and you missed the entire point,

Of course... there is *NO* description nor has one ever been posted as to how when an XP pool is drained how your skills actually take a loss.

I would expect an order to it in some way. Lets just discuss some basic questions

1) does the decay happen completely randomly across every skill?
2) Does the decay happen based on some kind of order, for example the skills in order of max xp in the skill, the actual skill level?
* Consider my first death only hit my stone earth at 102, dropped it to 101
* consider my second death dropped over 15 skills down 1 point (ex 100 to 99)

is this random? Is there an order?

One would think that if I set a skill to "-" that when a decay happened *that* skill would drop first over one set to "maintain" and yet decay almost seems to happen in a completely random way (probably not, would need more testing which is obviously not going to happen on a production character and lucky I have QA access to try it out).



The point being as I approach what I consider my max skill lvl per decay, how do I manage my skills so if I dry my pool up, which skills can I expect to decay.

for example, I dont want an xp pool, I would prefer to lock all skills in the end except for 2 skills that I endlessly raise (bounce between them set to raise and "-") above to that when I take a take a decay loss, it hits those 2 skills which I can accept take a loss from say 110 to 109 since its my "xp pool" where I am ok to take a loss in.