I have one skill selected to increase. All other skills are set to not gain XP. I am in a yellow area... T3. I lose 1,000 xp fighting 2 npc's, and during the fight I hit no skills, just swing my weapon. This is during a double xp bonus. Really?
Just double checked. The only skill I have set to increase is blades at level 71. In a tier 4 area, I solo'd a orange wolf and lost 300+ xp. Now that blade skill is kind of high, so now I will turn it off so it doesn't gain xp. Ok, the blades skill gain alone was causing the loss of xp. Not sure how I am to level it and not run out of xp.
That makes sense - every hit is taking exp from your pool and putting into your blades skill. If you want to pool exp., turn blades to maintain (yellow up arrow).
What doesn't make sense is I can't keep leveling up blades, at a negative xp gain, I am forced to turn it to off or maintain. You're doing too well, time to penalize you lol.
Time to advance to a better area, or stop rasing that and raise others. The best way I found to do thing was take things to 40, and till you have all your key stuff to 40, nothing goes above it, then 60 then 80 and so on.
What adv level are you in? I think you're somewhat similar level as I'm considering your blades skill level.(I'm at lvl 68) I recommend Crag Foothill, Deep Ravenswood for your grind session. I believe sweeping whole area will give you a few amount of xp gain even your skill turned on. and will get loaded of xp if you turn your skills off. Also, we'll have 2x xp events for 2 weeks from now on, so you'll have jolly good time grinding there!
I'm doing as Mac suggests, get my skills to 40. Not sure of my adv level, but in Deep Ravenswood the npcs are red. Currently in South Marsh.
Been awhile since I grinded any exp but it used to be much more effective to turn all skills to maintain or off and just build up your xp pool to a few million. Then turn on the skill or skills you want to level and use them until your pool is drained back down to a million or so. Something about how the bigger your pool the more xp it pumps into a skill with each use. Making it much faster to level with big xp pools. Dunno if it's still like that but if it is maybe that might help you OP
Yellow is only relative to your adventurer level. You could be adventurer level 40 and it might still not give you enough to keep up a skill at 70+. It just keeps getting hungrier and hungrier as it goes up. Going from level 1 to 40 takes about 4,000 xp on "regular" skills. Going from 99 to 100 takes about 100,000 xp. Some skills take a lot more than that.